Flashes of Panic

Jeff referred me to a post by Bill, who has a really long weblog title, about “open source fitness.” Here’s the concept:

What I’d like to do, were I tech-savvy with a couple of weeks on my hand, would be to set up a flexible fitness correlary to Wikipedia, a place where we could list the various theories on weight loss or marathon training, for instance, and then tie them back to revelant real-world data. Answer questions like “What works for treating ITB syndrome?”, etc.

I know a little bit about ITBS, and some might say I’m “tech-savvy.” (There has been some dispute on this point in recent months, believe it or not.) But I only have a few minutes on my hand. And I have thought about this sort of thing before.

Here’s the problem: it’s not the tech-savvy that’s stopping anyone from doing this. It’s trivially simple (at least from my point of view) to download MediaWiki or some similar piece of open-source wiki-ware and make a site for this. The 500 people Bill cites for the “RBF” are certainly a broad base of users, which is a plus. Since they’re all already blog-writers, that probably means they’re self-selected from the end of the running population which at least practices descriptive writing on a regular basis.

Because one of the biggest hurdles for a site like that is editorial quality. To put it plainly, if I get a running injury, and Don Kardong gets a running injury, a reader is going to learn about ten times more from Don’s writing about it—and even that might be giving me more credit than I deserve.

Another dinger: on some topics (ITBS,) it’s easy to know what to do. But during the past three years, I saw six or seven different medical professionals about my plantar fasciitis, and not one of them agreed with any of the others. I’ll be damned if I know, to this day, what truly caused the problem; all I know is that I got new orthotics last August, and I haven’t had significant trouble since then. And I think even if you put together the 200 of your 500 running bloggers who’ve suffered with PF, you’re not going to be any closer to knowing what’s going on than if you just talked to me. It’s true that sometimes more data gets you closer to the truth, but not always; if there’s no pattern in the data, it doesn’t matter how much pattern-less data you have, it’s still just noise.

It may be that what I’m really saying is that I’m burned out on running websites, and I have been for quite a while. I’ve been there, done that, and I’ve seen them done well and done poorly. (Beyond that, I’ve seen good sites fail, and lousy ones flourish, so I’m unfortunately cynical about the available rewards for hard work.) I think that the state of the running-site art is still stuck around where it was in 2000, and that there’s a tremendous amount of space for someone to apply new tools and techniques to make something good—the only really new thing I’ve seen is the Google maps pedometer, but that’s really just one tool.

The software is out there. The startup and maintenance costs are pretty low. What it needs is for someone with a clear vision to invest the time, and I have neither.

Now Playing: King Electric from Still Burning by Mike Scott