Unearned Certainty

I’m about to start a research journey in Sport & Exercise Science, two years MRes into hopefully what will become a further four years PhD.

The research itself is quite narrow. I’m interested in how accumulated non-training load (stuff that happens in life) affects physiological adaptation during a structured endurance training block. There are things we can measure, things we can test and hopefully something useful we can add.

But the question that interests me more is much broader than that.

Why does exactly the same training land so differently on two athletes? What happens when physiology and mechanics meet work, family, confidence, motivation, previous experience, competitive pressure and everything else somebody brings to training? At what point does the theoretically correct answer stop being the right answer for the person standing in front of you?

Those questions have become more interesting to me the longer I’ve coached.

I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time at the competitive end of endurance sport myself, then years coaching through the club system and now independently with sub-elite and ambitious amateur athletes. I’ve done the qualifications, accumulated the experience and I’m now choosing to go back into academia.

Strangely, none of that has made me feel more certain about the stuff I know, in truth it’s made me feel a lot less certain.

The research and qualifications aren’t an attempt to collect more badges that allow me to speak with greater authority. It’s primarily an attempt to become better equipped to investigate the things I don’t know.

And perhaps that’s why I increasingly struggle with some of what passes for expertise in coaching on social media.

There’s an awful lot of certainty out there…

This is the correct way to train threshold.

This is the correct mileage.

This is why your coach is wrong.

This is the session you need.

This is what elite athletes do, therefore you should do it too.

Sometimes the evidence supports a reasonably confident answer. But more often it doesn’t; every individual athlete presents us with unknowns.

Good physiology matters. I’m about to spend a considerable amount of time studying it. But physiology is one part of coaching, and increasingly an accessible one. Knowing what happens to lactate, VO₂, economy or adaptation doesn’t automatically tell you what to do with the athlete sitting opposite you on Tuesday evening.

Experience doesn’t give you that right either. Having raced at a decent level gives some useful context, having coached for years gives more. But neither of those things turns prescription, or the judgement behind it, into fact.

Perhaps expertise is partly becoming better at recognising where your knowledge ends.

The more equipped I become to investigate the things I don’t know, the less impressed I am by people who appear not to know what they don’t know, yet speak with absolute certainty anyway.

I don’t think I’ll ever have all the answers.