And I do not necessarily mean a full fledged scientist by profession – although I think that this is a great idea as well. No – I mean become your own little scientist in your training. Conduct your own experiments. Be curious. Explore!
Now the two latter expressions also perfectly fit the whole outdoor sports-thingy and thus trail running – the sport that more or less restarted my academic journey and my life journey. It must’ve been like 2020 when I was exposed – woefully unprepared – to the documentary “Where dreams go to die” that follows Gary Robbins on his elegant dance with the Barkley Marathons. A race that was born from the mind of an old geezer (his words, not mine) and a race that could be described with so many interesting phrases all while one word already suffices: torture. Back then at least a private part of my soul had been in a dark place for a long time and my mind saw this torture and thought:
Hey, we could inflect this upon ourselves!
I’m not going to go on a whole tangeant here (or at least not any further) but this is the origin of my journey as a runner and what inevitably set me up on my current endeavor to become a Bachelor of Arts in the field of Sports and Applied Exercise Sciences. Hear ye, hear ye! The privileged scholar. When I started running I had no idea of training theory or exercise science. Only vague and honestly tenuous ideas of the human physiology. And I was skeptical of what the Internet had to say about how much volume a fresh runners legs can stomach. After all: Why should I not be the special one that just starts off with 50k per week and builds from there. My goal was clear: Become an ultrarunner and torment the body and mind in an act of what must have been the hope for redemption and remission.
There’s got to be a better way
Whelp, turns out I’m not the chosen one. I would up my mileage and be struck down by shin splints. Rinse and repeat. At one point I was fairly certain that a stress fracture was imminent. To this day I’m still curious what imaging of my left tibia would and could tell me about this part of my past. Anyways. I came to terms with the fact that maybe – only maybe – the gathered knowledge created by thousands of runners that came before me might be helpful to inch closer to my goal to run an ultra disctance. I started off with “Training for the Uphill Athlete” and from there on a spiral started leading towards my current studies.
Now in the field of sports and exercise science the predominant way of generating knowledge is a quantitative approach. In my own words I would say this means we assume we can measure our reality mostly in numbers and by statistical methods can learn about patterns and mechanisms inside of us, between us and the world around us.
Many years ago I already found myself sitting in the lecture hall, although not taking notes about respiratory exchange ratios but rather about things like cultural anthropology. I had been a student of the social sciences. A field of study that without doubt heavily relies on the quantitative approach as well, but also one that has a strong faible for the qualitative approach. Again in my own words I would say this means that we assume measuring things in numbers is such a reduction in complexity of our manifold reality that we could never reach the truth (Mind you: In my own words). Thus we must conduct detailed and open – explorative even – interviews with cultural agents (people living in the reality we want to observe).
The beauty of the process
I remember sitting in a lecture about social psychology and thinking: Aw shucks, guess I’m born too late. All these interesting concepts of social dynamics have already been discovered. I’m born too late. We know everything. I’m sure you must think: What a naive and juvenile thought blitzed together in the brain of this youngster. And let me get this striaght, your french has already been pardoned, just scream it from the rooftop: Such an idiot! And it turns out that plenty of years later when I started my current degree (this one I will finish! Pinky promise.) I hadn’t gotten any wiser in this respect.
My failed attempt at being my own experimenter, throwing too much volume at my brittle bones, had made me fallen prey to the “established knowledge”. This paired with a frickle sprouting understanding of the statistical methods used not only in sports and exercise sciences but in the field of human physiology and medicine in general and their limitations had led me on a path of overestimating the power of single studies or even reviews.
In retrospective I could now tell my younger self sitting in the lecture halls of the Ruhr Uni Bochum: You just wait for all the new dynamics, shackles, demons and wonders that will emerge in and from society that you can study and examine. You just wait for Instagram and TikTok, for Covid19. War setting foot again in Europe. Late stage consumerism. Fast Fashion.
Fair enough the study subject “social” is much more subject to change than the human physiology. But nevertheless it’s still knowledge that is constantly evolving and refining and the research done to this day is certainly not free from flaws.
Where was i going with this?
I will reread what I’ve written until here and will critically inspect if anything of this makes even the slightest sense to someone that is fortunately unable to read my mind. I will let you know here, if I mainly kept what I wrote or if i had to go over it lawnmover-style: I kept it – but more out of laziness than the conviction that my gibberish is intelligible.
Now what I wanted to say: The collective process of SCIENCE is – I think – a beautiful one. You can and should have a look at what your fellow human beings have gathered as information and that can be a great starting point for solving your own questions, for tackling challenges in your life. However, I want to encourage you: Become your own Scientist. “We observed a mean increase in XY when observing 96 participants (all of them MALE) in the intervention condition” can be a great starting point. It is quite likely to work for you. But if you were to look at the individual data points you are also very likely to find someone with no response or even an adverse effect. Evaluate for yourself. Don’t lose that part of you that asks “Maybe for me it’s different.” (not with regard to vaccines though.)
Fast On Paper 