Flashes of Panic

My aunt, who has become a heavy user of “email this page to a friend” functions in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal since she discovered the internet (one cousin refers to it good-naturedly as “aunt spam,”) today sent an article from the NYT about the disagreement among various exercise physiologists regarding stretching.

I scoffed at it initially. How could anyone say there’s no value to stretching? If I don’t stretch, I can’t run, period; for me, it’s that simple. My iliotibial band will tighten up to the point that flexing at the knees is painful. I also disliked the suggestion, in the title to the article, that there’s no value to warm-up; when I’m in shape, I don’t feel comfortable attempting anything like peak effort (racing or speedwork) until I’ve been going at least two or three miles, preferably three.

My aunt’s comment echoed my own frustration: “Take your choice of expert.” It’s one of the things that’s most frustrating about science in general, and athletic performance science in particular (in the general way I understand it): there are so many topics where nobody can agree on The Right Way to Do It. The rest of us settle in as “Experiments of One” (a George Sheehan phrase,) either as literature reviewers (scouring the running magazines and a few available technical newsletters,) or empiricists like myself.

Back to the second paragraph. I know what works for me. I know I need to stretch, I know I need to warm up, I know that I respond well to relatively high training volumes (70 miles per week, and up,) at most race distances. I also know those aren’t absolutes. Different people respond differently, which is why someone can be the “World’s Best Coach” for one athlete, but give nothing but frustration for another. The number of purely mechanical variables is huge, just to start with: leg length, length ratios of thigh bone to ankle bone, muscle volume, total mass, slight variations in the strength of fascia muscle, ligaments, tendons, bone. Nearly intangible variations like the rate at which the heart pumps blood (I have joked that one of my goals is to so strengthen my heart that my resting heart rate, generally in the low 40s, approaches one single liquid thump per minute,) efficiency of the lungs at transferring oxygen from the air to the blood.

Even that incomplete list is a pretty complex polynomial, almost encryption strength. Sure, we’re insatiably curious about this stuff, but I wonder if we don’t spend too much time trying to find magazine answers that work for everyone, and not enough trying to figure out why something works for some people and why it doesn’t work for others. Then, instead of looking for the magic fitness program, we could figure out how to decrypt our own individual training keys.

By the way: yes, I had to look up “empiricism” to make sure I was using it correctly. I was entertained to see that one of the definitions has synonyms including “quackery.” I make no promises that I’ve spelled it correctly in all cases.