Hacker News Reader

Comment by xcskier56 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is due to a lower rate of coaching. I don’t have a ton of first hand knowledge but most other endurance sports the athletes usually come up through well organized teams. Maybe the lack of organization (which is great for other reasons) leads to less coaching and therefore missing someone to tell you to rest and recover before you go over the edge.

View on HN

The article addresses this:

> That’s not to say that athletes in other sports aren’t working hard. They are. But they typically do so within a team environment or under the direction of a professional coach, providing them with well-established frameworks for success. Even though ultrarunning has grown, there’s still little infrastructure to support its competitors. Sponsorships mean full-time careers, but that rarely includes coaching.

If you want to try your hand at powerlifting as an amateur, there's plenty of programs and templates with different styles of periodization that will have you doing micro- and meso-cycles of effort running up to a competition (or just testing your maxes in the gym).

I'd figure similar programs exist for traditional athletics. I guess much of the issue is the boundary between amateur and pro; most casual lifters in the gym have no hopes or business trying to compete in bodybuilding, powerlifting or strongman.

Most pro athletes have coaches. The real problem is that nobody understands chronic fatigue. In the best case, after the high season, the athlete takes "holidays" with a couple of months of lower-load training, hoping that it will be enough to cope with years of high-load training.

For instance, nobody knows how each body adapts to a high-carb/high-tech diet over a decade of training. They just hope for the best.

For sure, amateurs shouldn't be doing the same.

> For instance, nobody knows how each body adapts to a high-carb/high-tech diet over a decade of training. They just hope for the best.

I think this is where Nutritional Genetics could help tremendously. I went under anesthesia for a colonoscopy and my blood sugar dropped so low they had to give me a glucose infusion. That is how they discovered I have a partial CPT1A Deficiency. Apparently anesthesia inhibits fatty acid oxidation which led them to get me tested for the disorder. Knowing I had this changed my diet completely and has helped me in my recovery.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com