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Comment by The_Amp_Walrus | Hacker News Reader

So, the coaches of an athletics program underfed an athlete to the point where she "lost her period for three years and broke five bones". Sounds terrible. The article claims:

> A big part of this problem is that women and girls are being forced to meet athletic standards that are based on how men and boys develop. If you try to make a girl fit a boy’s development timeline, her body is at risk of breaking down. That is what happened to Cain.

I wish they would expand on this a little more - are the coaches broadly incompetent or do they have a specific misconception about how to train women? What do they belive that is causing them to underfeed their athletes?

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Thinner is faster, up to a point, but as noted in the article if you take it too far it leads to injury. I suspect a lot of the grey area stuff NOP was infamous for, i.e. abuse of prescription drugs and therapeutic use exemptions, allowed Salazar to be more successful with this approach with other athletes. For most runners, the short term speed gains of losing weight ultimately do not outweigh the lost training from injury, but if you can get a shady doctor to help with the negative side effects then the calculus changes.

Also, I wouldn't say Salazar is incompetent, but he was supposed to be this distance running genius and it seems more and more like he was no better than the dozens of crappy DI college coaches out there who get a lot of talented athletes, grind them up, and see who survives, leaving a trail of injury and burnout in their wake. Salazar just had access to better talent and drugs.

Interesting, thanks!

"Female Athlete Triad"[1] is the explanation of what's happening to these young women. I have a hard time believing Nike coaches don't know about it, though, because I'm a slightly overweight male software developer, and I know about it. Maybe they don't believe it's real? I, too, have nothing but questions.

1: https://draxe.com/health/female-athlete-triad/

It could also be a problem of misaligned incentives. When athletes get injured, it is the athletes who get fired, not the coaches.

The incentives might not event be misaligned. It could be a lottery where some peoples bodies will survive the training and other people's bodies will fail but it might still make sense to roll the dice because the payoff is so large. It could also not make sense and the coaches are just exploiting it. But I think it is a lot of effort to get the data to work out whether it makes sense or not. It is kind of shitty if the coaches know this and don't inform the athlete. But maybe there is a psychological aspect to it and if they inform the athlete then they basically sabotage the chance they have of winning the lottery.

This seems much more likely to me, the first point, not necessarily the explanation at the end.

So much of climbing the ladder in athletic competition is about surviving each rung of physical and mental hardship. Talent gets you on the ladder but the work too keep climbing gets more and more grueling with each step. At the upper echelon of athletics are people who are basically clinically obsessed and had the good luck to make it through critical development years relatively healthy.

I think that's the truth of high level athletics and most of the time people who are involved in them are so convinced they're the lottery winner no amount of warning can stop them and when, in most cases, they come up short, the previous warnings hit them like a truck.

Now, if this woman in the article is correct, a new approach to female athletics must lead to an increase in performance and she'll revolutionize women's sports. Otherwise, she's just another person warning young athletes that they probably won't make it and the torture they're going through probably isn't worth it.

They don't have a misconception, I think, as much as they are willing to risk the athletes' health. Gymnastics programs have been known to keep girls on short rations to delay puberty and the weight it brings.

> are the coaches broadly incompetent

I think it might be that they're competent with respect to achieving specific athletic goals but incompetent with respect to recognizing (ab)normal development in young women. I'm not an expert by any means, but I get the rather strong impression that elite athletic coaches for young women overwhelmingly either are male or are former elite female athletes themselves. Add that to selection bias for their clients and they might very well have little to no experience working with a normally developing female body.

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