Reason

Yes—for the armchair philosophers among you—it's a tongue-in-cheek title. Immanual Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was his counterpoint to David Hume. In countering Kant one might state the cynical view: that one unfortunate alternative to pure reason, or pure reasoning, is poor reasoning. Or a lack of the utilization of any reasoning.

I'm not writing about the essence of what sets our species apart from the rest of the animal world, or anything so grandiose. I am writing about what sets us—you and me in particular—apart from the rest of our society. It's our narrow ability to swim, bike and run faster than ninety-nine percent of the population can do any of those three sports individually. And we want to go faster yet. How do we do that?

When I work with very talented and ambitious athletes, and they consider the few who're at or above their historical capacity for performance, I might state that, "Of the seven people who're entered in this race who, on paper, ought to beat you, only three have a chance to. The other four—and I don't know which four—will find a way to beat themselves. Either they'll have a mechanical breakdown on the bike, or they'll misread the race, or their own bodies, and pace themselves incorrectly. Or they've already made the mistake in training, or in the technologies and theories to which they've ascribed."

In other words, by manufacturing a way to diminish or negate their own God-given talents through making stupid choices, they'll snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

I am writing about technique. Not any specific technique, but technique in general. And not just technique, really, but about everything that surrounds and impacts your performance in your chosen sport.

I'm writing about decision making. You've got a lot of choices to make. How do I train? What races do I enter? How do I nail the nutrition in an Ironman? What ought my taper to be like? And my recovery? Should I buy a tri bike or a road bike? A one-piece or two-piece wetsuit? Should I run a half-Ironman in racing or training flats?

These are good questions, and you're not going to be able to discern the right answer to them all. In some cases you can only find the answer through trial and error, and that method presupposes the inevitability of error—you're going to occasionally spend $175 to enter a half-Ironman and you're going to have a bad race because you chose poorly in one category or another. That's part of the learning process. That's experience. But "experience" is often that thing you get when you don't get what you want (like a podium finish) and wouldn't it be nice to get less experience and more podium finishes?

My interest is in the mechanics of choosing. I am struck by the new and novel ways people find to sabotage their performances, by choosing one technology, or training method, or race tactic, or technique, that makes no sense. They make choices for poor reasons. In my mind the problem isn't the choice they've made—one can forgive an occasional poor choice—rather the faulty process of decision making. This is a big problem, because it guarantees the continuation of poor decisions, just as a flawed computer processor will keep giving you bad answers to your queries.

So as to reduce my thesis to a manageable size, I'm going to focus solely on the issue of technique. What makes people perform their sports in the manner they do? Let's investigate.

THE GRAND WAGER

All over the world, there are coaches teaching sports technique to children. Soccer moms watch little Johnny and Jane dribbling the ball in the way instructed. Same with little league baseball, Pop Warner football, basketball camps, archery and bowling and, yes, swimming. Children are taught "the basics." And what constitutes the basics? Who decides?

In all sports it's the same. All coaches everywhere employ the Grand Wager, and they all place their wager on the same horse. Are you going to wager that the great majority of expert practitioners of a sport are all wrong? Or inefficient? Or using outmoded and obsolete technique? Or are you going to wager that they are, in the main, using a technique that represents the acme in performance?

Universally coaches have decided that Ted Williams, Rod Carew, Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn swung the bat in a way that ought to be passed on to the next generation, and the next. The likelihood is remote that any particular little league coach has come upon his own private methodology that supercedes and makes obsolete the technique employed by most hitters since Ty Cobb.

THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULE

For some reason, however, there is a fascination with the exceptions. Nicholas Cage, in David Lynch's Wild at Heard: "I wear this jacket as a sign of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom." Children and adults alike choose to emulate those athletes who've found a way to excel using an oddball techique. When I was a child one of the best free throw shooters was the Warrior's Rick Barry, who'd shoot them underhand. My recollection, however, was that his style was emulated by only one other player of the day, Wilt Chamberlain, who'd still hold the NBA career scoring record today if he could've actually made an acceptable number of free throws.

In other words, the style worked for Barry, and it set him apart, but it wasn't the sort of technique you'd want to pass on to others if you bore the responsibility of a coach. Still, we ten-year-olds were honing our underhanded free throwing skills in great disproportion to its actual utility. Just as little leaguers were no-doubt honing their use of the Dave Winfield hitch.

Now, at 46-years-old, I notice how much the children inside us don't change, and my contemporaries with which I compete seem unreasonably wedded to the idea of focusing on the exception to the rule when selecting a technique to emulate. I chalk it up to one's desire to establish individuality and a belief in personal freedom.

CHANGES IN PARADIGMS

This doesn't mean that technique is static. There are wholesale changes in how a sport is performed. No, the Rick Barry free throw method didn't gain traction throughout the league. But right about the same time (1968) an Olympic Gold Medal was earned by Dick Fosbury in the high jump, using a technique that revolutionized the sport. In fact, not so long afterward I remember that the Soviet Union's Valery Brumel was the only world class jumper not performing the Fosbury Flop.

I was a nordic ski racer in the late '70s, and American Bill Koch shocked the nordic world by employing a technique throughout the entire race—ski skating—that was previously used only sporadically. Now, skating is universally excepted as the fastest way to ski, and a diagonal stride is only seen in those "classic" races that forbid skating.

Nordic skiing is not the only event in which a technique used only in a small part of an event was discovered to be faster than the dominent technique. More recently the backstroke became primarily an underwater race in which the arms—the backstroke itself—were of no importance. For decades, backstrokers would push off the wall and dolphin kick underwater for several meters before surfacing, at which point a flutter kick was used in concert with the backstroker's arm motion. Some bright fellow figured out the the dolphin kick—underwater and sans arms—was actually the fastest part of the event. So the backstroke quickly became a contest in who could hold his breath the longest. "Want to go watch the submarine races?" actually became more than a pick-up line.

This will continue. There are certainly sports today in which a secondary technique will become dominant. Using our sport as an example, maybe some enterprising cyclist will realize that climbing out of the saddle can be done for an entire mountain, if one is so-trained, and this will force everyone to adopt this technique.

Imagine, though, that in the great majority of cases this will result in a failed experiment. What will be the cost in lost time if your new and novel technique doesn't work out? Perhaps not much. However, it has been my observation that people who are apt to try novel and unproven techniques don't do so once. It's a way of life for them, and the aim—though they won't acknowledge this—is not to be faster. It's to be unique. People of this sort tend to employ faulty reasoning, or rather a lack of reasoning. It's not that they don't have the capacity to reason. They just choose not to recruit that capacity, because some other pathology is dominant. These are the people that frustrate you as an onlooker or coach, because it's often those with immense talent that are so stricken with this emotional albatross around their necks, preordaining them to a lifetime of underachievement and mediocre performances.

NOT KEEPING UP WITH THE TIMES

Then there is the opposite. We were taught the high jump in junior high school, but it was some weird style that I couldn't identify. I remember thinking that this must be some drill that I was being asked to perform—that while this was not the current and recognized way to jump, this drill would in the end prove its utility.

It was only years later when, as a track athlete, I became interested in the history of my sport, I learned that we were being taught the "western roll" in junior high. To give some context, Dick Fosbury and his famous flop were just appearing during my junior high years. This replaced the straddle, which was in common use for a decade or two. So we were being taught a high jump technique that was not only obsolute, but was two generations obsolete.

Yes, there are people for whom new and novel techniques are the only ones they'll consider. Then there are people who are so resistant to change that they'll never consider new techniques, regardless of the evidence proving their utility. Of course this is nowhere more prevalent than in cycling. I've seen cyclists fight, kicking and screaming, against hard shell helmets, clipless pedals, carbon bike frames, aero wheels, click-shifting, higher cadences, aero bars, and the geometry to best use them. Just about all those technologies and techniques are in universal usage nowadays. But in each of those instances they were pooh-poohed by the bicycle racing world well after their efficacies had been demonstrated.

This process has spawned one of the most ignorant and nonsensical phrases in the history of sport: "It's the rider, not the bike." Of course that's true on the face of it. But what it really means, when analyzed, is, "A strong rider with outmoded technique or technology will generally beat a weak rider using current technique or technology." Point taken, and I hear that from American cyclists. Paradoxically, it's American cycling at its highest levels that has blown that argument. Lance Armstrong and the Posties have turned the cycling world on its ear by using modern thought in place of tradition when it comes to training, technology, technique, and choice of race schedule. In other words, the Posties have asked of themselves the necessary questions, were honest about their own shortfalls, and they've employed rational problem solving techniques. They replaced tradition with critical thinking. They've won four consecutive Tours de France, and various other grand tours and classics, as a result.

CHANGES IN TECHNOLOGY

One must also realize that a change in technique often follows a change in technology. Steep seat angles, which you'll read about a lot on Slowtwitch, are not a geometric oddity that developed in a vacuum. It was a response to the Scott handlebar, which changed the way a rider displaces his weight on his bike. STI shifting changed the way a bike racer rode his bike on ascents, by placing the shifting so that the rider could shift while out of the saddle. Throughout the last century compound and sighted archery bows, oversized tennis rackets, rear-cleated high jump shoes, and a hundred other technologies have driven the generation of new techniques in sport. It's only the obtuse and stubborn who fail to take advantage of the novel paradigms in technique that new technologies provide.

BOBS AND WEAVES AND THINGS THAT DON'T MATTER

In business I introduced to the concept of "over-lawyering." Specifically, it was in the context of acquisitions. The legal costs and contract specificities required for the purchase a $5 million company might reach $50,000 or $75,000, but what if you were purchasing a company with gross sales of $400,000? Is it reasonable to require due diligence, a three-inch thick contract, schedules, and legal and investment banking costs of that same magnitude?

Sometimes you can strangle the life out of something worthwhile by smothering it with care. On the one hand, there is a body of evidence, and a school of thought, that says runners should have no instruction in technique (just leave them alone and they'll develop their own personal style). I don't believe in this. But just as bad, maybe worse, is too much instruction, especially if its in the form of "majoring in the minors."

The insightful eye can recognize, during an open water swim, just who is whom, by virtue of tell-tale technical nuances. This is the case even though heads are buried underwater, and in spite of the fact that stroke individualities are driven out of young swimmers from an early age. Swim strokes, and running gaits, remain highly individualistic. Yet the most important mechanical elements are held in common by virtually all high-achieving athletes. Yes, over years an athlete will discover and incorporate the important mechanical elements, but why not teach them, thus accelerating their adoption? The trick is in the ability to discern what is important and needful of change, versus what is superfluous and ought to be left alone.

Paula Radcliffe is the probably the most accomplished female long distance runner of all time, when considering the range of distances from 3000 meters to the marathon. She famously bobs her head while running. The question is, at what cost? If the cost is minor, which it undoubtedly is, then consider the cost of getting her to stop her head-bobbing. What other, more important, elements of her technique and training require her concentration? What will she not achieve while she's concentrating on her innocuous head-bobbing?

AND MY POINT IS?

Back to those seven athletes in your category who, on paper, ought to beat you in your next race. If I was coaching you, I'd pick you third. Not because of anything special you did, but because of the reasonable things you did. I'll choose you third because of the mistakes you won't make, mistakes that four of your competitors will make. You'll be third because you won't sabotage your race and four other people—due to some sporting-related pathology, or oversight, or spate of mental laziness, or misfortunate of relying on the advice of an unwise choice of experts—will sabotage their own races.

I have had the good fortune of standing on the podium a lot during my thirty years of athletic life, and that's in spite of my lack of work ethic, and my very average genetic talent—unless you consider my (genetic?) ability to look at a basic set of facts and choose a path that appears most reasonable. Is that so rare a trait? I can't imagine it is. But it never fails to astound me how many people would prefer to do otherwise and, athletically speaking, thank goodness for me that they do.