futurehead

Triathlons: or, nobody knows nothin'

I've been doing triathlons for two years now, and in that time I've done a lot of reading about the best way to do things. What is the best workout strategy to build up your ability, to get faster, to go longer?  What are the best things to eat and drink?  How much rest should you take to be maximally ready for a race?  I've taken a crash course in sports medicine. 

My conclusion: nobody knows nothin'. Everyone's got a theory, most of them stated with utter confidence as God's truth, but few of them backed up with anything close to rigid science.  Even where there is a study behind a recommendation, it's usually only one, and that's just not enough.  Even in physics -- in theory the most "mathematical" of the sciences -- finding's aren't accepted until they are repeated many times.  When it comes to anything involving human beings, where there will always be a zillion variables (from the length of your femur to what you had for breakfast 2 days earlier) and an inability to treat people enough like lab rats to eliminate them all, there's just no way that you can be sure that anyone's theory about how to approach sports is right for you.

To take just one example, everyone who does triathlons and other endurance sports hears about how lactic acid buildup is what makes your muscles burn and get tired, and that you have to do workouts based on your "lactic threshold" and so on.  But then I open up my New York Times one day to read that that's all wrong.

My advice is to:

1. Read up on all the theories (for every theory there's usually an equal and opposite theory), and file them away. If you come across any studies, great, weigh those more but not too much.
2. Pay a lot of attention to anecdotal reports of what real human beings tell you has worked for them.  But these are only data points -- people's own conclusions about what works for them can themselves be way off because -- again -- there are always too many variables, and people tend to lock in on certain perceived patterns way prematurely, with way too small a sample size of their own experiences.  (This is why science is based on studies, not anecdotes.)
3. Don't take all the science too seriously, generally you won't find useful answers there.  That's not to say it can't be useful, of course. For example, to get back to the "lactic threshold," even if that theory is completely wrong in describing what goes on in your muscles, that might not matter a bit if the workouts you design based on that wrong theory are ones that work.  Philosophers of science debate the merits of what are called the "Realist" and "Anti-Realist" positions, with the former claiming that (say) electrons are real entities, while the anti-realists say we have no idea if they're real, but it doesn't matter what's really going on in there as long as our concept produces useful descriptions and predictions of our observations.  To take another examples, Chinese acupuncturists talk about manipulating the Qi or Chi, some invisible "life force" supposedly flows through our bodies.  I'm sure there is no such thing, but if it serves as a heuristic device that accurately guides the relief of pain, then who cares?
   
4. Above all, try to figure out what works for you.

It is possible, that if I were to really study academic sports medicine, I would realize that that I'm being a know-nothing, there is a lot more certain knowledge than I realize, and that my impression is due to the fact that I've done most of my research on the Internet.  I'm open to that but it sure doesn't look that way from here.  (I guess I'm kinda applying my theory to itself here -- my theory about not trusting theories should itself not be trusted. Go snack on that one :)

In general, it consistently amazes me how bursting with confidence people are when they proclaim theories they should be a lot more circumspect about.  That applies not just in sports but in all areas of life to everyone from doctors and other experts to taxi drivers.  But I guess that's an observation as old as Plato...

DC area hills

In preparation for a certain 100-mile bike ride I and some of my friends have signed up for called the Blue Ridge Extreme (BRE), I made the following chart of some DC-area hills that we like to ride on:

                                                                      Vertical     Horiz     Avg
Hill                                                                Climb (ft) dist (mi)  grade
Great Falls, bottom to MacArthur Blvd                   201        1.2         3.2%
Conn Ave to Wisconsin on Newark St.                   157        0.8         3.8%
Rock creek “mountain,” outbound                        160        0.8         3.8%
Lee Hwy, N. Oak to top of little Veitch hill             161        0.7         4.5%
Military Rd, 1st hill southbound + 2nd northbd       105        0.4         4.6%
Military, 2nd hill southbound                                  83        0.3         5.4%
Fort Myer, gate to top just before pool                 112        0.4         5.4%
Tilden, Rock Creek to where it levels off               162        0.4         8.3%
BRE, big hill #1                                                 1,584        3.2         9.4% (map)
Chain bridge                                                        150        0.2       15.8%

Download dc_hill_data.xls

These calculations were made using Google map sites; I did my best but I can't say how precise they are.

I must say, I'm really wondering what the hell I've gotten myself into on this one.  I'm no good at doing hills, and it was pointed out after I signed up that this race is in August in Virginia.  Oh well, I've always wanted to ride along the Blue Ridge; this may cure me of it.

(this chart has been updated since I first posted it)

Musical ghosts brought back to life

I heard about an exciting new development the other day that pushes the digital music revolution in a whole new direction.

According to this story on NPR, a company has now figured out how to re-record old recordings by digitally capturing the original performance on a digital piano.  I don't mean they're cleaning up the old recordings by eliminating hiss and so forth, they're actually re-recording the performances, fresh, on a live piano, with the full acoustic advantages of listening to a live instrument.  Only instead of Glenn Gould playing the piano -- he's dead -- it's played by a computer, which recreates his exact performance, based on a digital breakdown of the old recording:  "It tracks exactly when each note was hit, how loudly, with what kind of attack, and when and how it was released." 

I have no idea how good these recordings are but I think this is really cool.  Some have compared this process to the "colorization" of black and white films, but I think that analogy is a poor one.  This is not a tacky alteration of the original work, but a restoration of the original brilliance and clarity that someone sitting in the room with Glenn Gould would have heard.  How exciting to have a shot at hearing that!  I think a better analogy would be the restoration of the original bright colors on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  The restoration might not be 100% exact, but it opens up the possibility of taking great additional pleasure in what is pretty close to the original art.

In addition to buying a CD recording of one of these "re-performances," I imagine that anyone with a properly equipped piano might soon be able to have a live performance right in their living room.  You could hear a live piano playing the works not only of great pianists like Glenn Gould and Dinu LIpatti, but even of some composers playing their own works: Rachmaninoff, Satie, Prokofiev and many others (sorry, no Bach or Mozart). 

Thinking abstractly to think ethically

People are generally decent to those around them. At the least, they have a clear understanding more or less of right & wrong. But when it comes to setting *policy*, then you have to shift your thinking to a mass scale. Then theory and abstractness enter the equation and many people's understanding breaks down, their intuitions fail them.  Face-to-face means of making judgments no longer suffice. Good people accept bad *theories* (at one level or another - but more abstract than the implicit theories behind face to face interactions) and cruelty and needless suffering result. This is why anecdotal stories play such a disproportionate role in policy-making -- they connect the two realms, if not particularly reliably.

The vast majority of people the vast majority of time are good people more or less to those who are in their community with them. But when you go beyond that community, whether through how to treat the poor in America, or how to deal with the tribe across the river, that breaks down. Perhaps the mistake people make is of viewing other groups & communities as single persons, trying to evaluate their intent, mindset, objectives, etc., as a unitary thing.  That works with another individual, more or less, but fails with these larger groups because unlike (or at least less so than) individuals, they are not coherent consciousnesses but ever-shifting, faction-filled groups with all human impulses from the generous to the selfish, the humble to the aggressive, represented in a shifting degree -- and in degree that responds dynamically to how they are treated.

So it’s a problem with democracy.  But it’s still the worst form of government, except for all the others.

Manly, naive & gullible

One of the amazing things that’s happened in the past few years is the way that the conservatives, having (more or less) lost the racial and communist cards as a way of separating fools from their votes, have succeeded in exploiting gender issues.  The GOP has successfully convinced large swatchs of America that it’s not quite manly to vote Democratic.

That is why I’ve always said that the critical moment, the turning point of the Bush Administration was during Katrina, when Bush flew over the disaster, looking down lamely from his airplane window, while his adminsitration impotently failed to rise to the occasion of dealing with the crisis. 

Bush and his handlers had succeeded in cultivating a carefully crafted illusion that he was genuinely manly – a take-charge, straight-talking, effective, no-holds-barred guy.  But the Administration’s reaction to Katrina (which resembled the flighty lady in distress more than her strong cowboy rescuer) and the Window Tour in particular, shattered that image.  A gestault switch took place among a certain significant chunk of macho (but naïve and gullible) Americans, and it’s been all downhill for the Bushies ever since. 

Some political scientist, if they haven’t already, oughta test these speculations about the primacy of gender consciousness in GOP voting against the GSS (General Social Survey, a huge biennial survey of Americans on a wide variety of subjects). 

Music of the week #3: Opus 8 fugue

Here's a litle piece I made many, many years ago on an original McIntosh computer.  When I wrote it I optimized it for the computer tones that the Mac emitted, and I've tried a bunch of instruments but can't quite seem to get the orchestration right to recapture the original clarity of the voices I remember.  So, throwing in the towel, here it is with a very tinny, primitive synthesizer sound that harkens back at least a little to that original sound.

When I wrote this I was (as I still am) primarily fascinated by polyphony and Bach and I was playing around with fugues and multiple voices.

 Download jay_stanley_opus8fugue.mp3 (1.3 megs, 45 seconds, 256 kbits)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Multiple personalities: we all have 'em

I once had a friend who I liked a lot.  He was a great guy.  Then another person very close to me, went to work with him – and couldn’t stand him. Really came to hate his guts.  That led me to a theory that everyone has 3 personalities:

1. how they deal with superiors
2. how they deal with peers
3. how they deal with employees

Some people have three almost schizophrenically varying personalities, while for others they are barely distinguishable – they treat the CEO much the same as the janitor. The vast majority of us, I suspect, are in the middle somewhere, partly depending on such factors as how attuned we are to social gradations, how much we are impervious or vulnerable to the particular authorities above us in a hierarchy, etc.

People are least themselves in the first role, more so in the second, and in some ways their true nature really emerges in the third role. (That is the problem with relationships that start in hierarchies; the lower-level person is likely to have a fairly clear sense of what the boss is really like in all his or her roles   – or at least in the truest – but the boss only sees the superior-dealing personality of the inferior.)

It seems pretty clear that many people are not truly “themselves” when dealing with their superiors, because they are keen to present an idealized view of themselves, and so are constantly monitoring and trimming themselves and their natural impulses and behavior.  Likewise, many people may be somewhat self-conscious among their peers, whom they remain anxious to impress, while in the presence of their inferiors, they are more or less at liberty to let their hair down

Another argument could be made that people are most truly “themselves” in the second role, of dealing with their peers. That might be especially true when they are with people who are their true peers – people they are entirely comfortable with.  Of course, nominal peers that one does not know well or with whom one is not comfortable could be said to not truly be peers – they are merely people whose (social) hierarchical position is ambiguous and yet to be firmly established. 

But I would argue that position #2 is the healthiest, the most prone to produce happiness, because it prodcues the right balance of a) self-awareness and self-discipline – so that one’s inner spoiled child is not set free to torment others as tends to happen when a person posesses too much power – and b) freedom to express yourself with minimal self-limiting and -monitoring. 

In the end, of course, there is no “true self” that lies underneath these relationships.  We are defined by the situations we find ourselves in.  That is why it is important to have a democratic, egalitarian, middle class society, including democratic workplaces, where role #2 holds true most of the time, and roles #1 and #3 are always provisional and temporary and situationally bounded.

Maybe this is an overly hierarchical way of looking at the world, but hierarchy does seem to be central to other primates, and I suspect that, although we are far more complicated, hierarchy is a one layer or facet of our reality much of the time.  Sometimes it might be obvious, as in the military or a corporation, while other times it might be a subtle phenomenon of status or social hierarchy, as among the members of the local club.