Sudden Onset Pre-Race Anxiety (SOPRA)

Today marks 3 weeks until my first marathon distance race. I am entered in the Blackmores Sydney Running Festival Marathon. A coworker encouraged me to enter this event just after I had run my first half marathon and she had run half the North Face 100 as part of a teams event. So there were endorphin highs all-round, I felt I could conquer anything. There was nothing logical about entering back then.

Fast forward to today, with only a couple of runs over 20 km, feeling absolutely terrible on others and getting in nowhere near as many km's as I would like suddenly everything is not looking so rosy. 

Actually it is, all rosy red and painful. This is not usually a problem, as an endurance athlete* you would understand that pain is addictive and I am addicted to it. It is the mental aspect that is hard to deal with, not just getting through the race but dealing with the disappointments along the way.
* Endurance athlete only loosely applies to me.

Everyone has some sort of goal, in a race this usually manifests itself as a time. A magical number that will justify all the work that you have put into this preparation. Not meeting this goal is disappointing to say the least, suddenly you have to question everything. Did I prepare well enough? Was I hydrated? Did I have enough energy? Did I pace correctly? Did I follow my plan? Sure these are important but you really have to ask, was this goal achievable?

This is my problem, currently I have no idea if I can even run 42 km. Will I make the distance, or will I collapse in a quivering heap, for me there is no middle ground I will finish the race. That is just me, I have to finish what I start. Hiking the Coast Track one time I spent most of a night in hospital before going back and finishing the next day, but that is a story for another day.

I had already established that however nice, a sub 3 hour marathon although not beyond the realms of possibility is beyond the realms of probability especially in 3 weeks time. The cause of my SOPRA is now starting to doubt that I will be able to run a 3:30 marathon. Looking on the bright side this a bit of a kick up the backside to get me working harder.

So sub 3:30 marathon in 3 weeks...Bring it on!

Google Pagerank

As of 17:45 on the 26th Aug 2012 I have had 1 view of my first post. In an attempt to remedy this fact I am going to exploit Google's PageRank algorithm.

PageRank was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were at Stamford University. They then went and set up a web search engine, Google, using this algorithm. It assigns a probability of an imaginary web surfer landing on a page by randomly clicking links on other pages. There is also a random element, a probability that the web surfer will enter an address of a web page. 

Currently PageRank is only one of many tools that Google uses to order pages in it's search results, however this link to my first post about USADA's case against Lance Armstrong has approximately doubled it's PageRank.

Proof by hand waving (read at your own risk)

The probability of landing on my first post is simply the random factor divided by the number of pages on the web. Having a second post doubles the chances of landing on my blog. Now we also have a link to my first post on the second post, and random factor is small, we can assume that the probability of moving from the page of the second post to the first is approximately 1. So we add the two probabilities together to get double the initial probability.

If that made no sense I did warn you to read at your own risk. Equations would be nice but that is not one of my main concerns. This blog thing is new to me and I still have to work out/on prettifying it. 

USADA and Lance Armstrong

You probably have your own opinion whether Lance was doping or not, we are probably never going to find out. But what I think is more important to take from this is that USADA's case against Lance.

As a professional athlete Lance will have kept his anti doping agency informed of all his movements, in this case USADA. The same applies to athletes from any other country. This allows the governing body to perform random out of competition tests at any point. There are severe consequences for not adhering to this. Skipping a test carries the same penalties as testing positive as Zoltan Kovago, the Hungarian Discus thrower found out at the olympics.

So USADA was convinced Lance was doping (if they are now I'm sure they were back then), and they had the opportunity and resources to test him at any time, yet he has passed every test. So what does this say about USADA's testing regime.

Tests have been developed to detect most drugs: EPO, HGH, steroids, corticosteroids, stimulants, even designer drugs like CERA. These are looking at minute quantities, down to nanogram per millilitre quantities ( or parts per billion). Problem is being a drug it will be metabolised and excreted from the body, so they only stick around for so long. This is where a good testing program can make all the difference. If you are testing athletes when they are likely to be taking the drugs, months before a large competition then athletes that are doping have a higher chance of being caught. 

So lets assume that Lance was doping for the 7 years that he won the tour. USADA had 7 years and hundreds of opportunities for their testing to coincide with his doing regime. 

With USADA casting away the hundreds of negative samples in favour of the word of a collection of confirmed dopers they are throwing away the credibility of their testing process and with it the confidence that sport really is drug free. 

So who's next, Michael Phelps?