Me Myself and I

It's a selfie today.....although Marshall took it. I had been asked to do an article for a magazine yesterday and had worked late to complete it. No hardship involved as I love such jobs! I also love delivering ahead of deadline to journo's simply because they don't expect it.

A very quick reply came back asking "can we have a photo?". Gah........my best one has an old sponsor plastered over it and my Facebook images aren't high enough res! Fortunately, Marshall who is a photographer in his other job was in the office so I grabbed him! After a slight discussion on correct exposure, we got it right 2nd time!

I try to avoid talking about work too much on Blip but the boss was meeting Prof. Dave Collins the sports psychologist today and I asked for an introduction. Dave lectured at my undergraduate university just before I started and he was a legend in the eyes of my year head. He also published a paper on imagery which, if I had read it earlier, may well have changed my career path. When I started at Uni' my aim was to follow a psychology pathway but the stuff we were introduced to in 1st year was so bloody dull and overly simplistic that I ended up a physiologist. I've gone full circle now and love exploring human behaviour.

"Science is about objective measurement so it's understandable that it has an innate bias for things that can be measured" said Scott Jurek!

When I was working as an applied sports physiologist, we were obsessed with things that could be easily measured....blood lactate, oxygen uptake and so on. It was rare for us to look at central factors, let alone neurophysiology......simply because we didn't have the knowledge or resource to do so. Therefore, our understanding of how the body worked during exercise was limited and innately bias!

Prof. Collins and Paul Holmes' paper was the 1st I read that considered neurophysiology and behaviour concurrently and whilst quite complex, it seemed to make sense. It took many years to 'get it' though.

Far too regularly science is used with bias to justify or to say that something is fact. Da Vinci was a great scientist because he wasn't constrained by convention. Scientific convention had not yet been invented when he was about! Convention supports the status-quo and often prevents us from finding the best solutions. That's my justification for being an awkward bugger anyway!

Goodness, if you've got this far, it's a miracle and chapeau to you! What else has happened today? Well, I did my fastest ever run from Guide Bridge to work this morning! I got great guidance on nutritional stuff for Rosemary's big adventure race later in the year and I filled in a bit of finger print with superglue! I thought about the difference between being critical and looking for error..... reaching the conclusion that the former is positive and the latter negative. I went swimming. I struggled! I need my bed!