Month: August 2023

Coaching!

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

I’m about half way through the three month coaching period now and I can say it’s definitely improved my form. Has it improved my performance? Well I don’t really know, because I’d normally measure it by my Parkrun times, but we’ve been doing an interval workout on Thursday evenings, so by Saturday morning I’m not recovered enough for a 5k race effort (which I learnt the hard way – several times, just to make sure). I have a reasonably flat 10k on Sunday which I’m going to treat as a race effort, so as long as I can get the pacing right (big if) then the result will be informative.

My form has improved in the sense that I’m getting my weight and my hips more forward and I have better awareness of where my weight is while I’m running, my stride length has increased quite a lot because I’m spending more time in flight (though whether I can keep the stride at high cadence is another matter – I think this will require more endurance), and my left-right balance is steadily improving. The balance of ‘bad’ runs are now at the level that my good runs were to begin with, though there is still room for improvement.

Up until now the 1 to 1 sessions have been focused purely on weights to try to even up my strength, but we are going to shift to me-specific drills from now on. I’m not sure exactly what those are yet.

We do a lot of various drill routines before the interval session and also in the strength class. I do think they have a noticeable effect just before running because you are getting the motion into your legs and muscle memory which you then draw on when you start moving. A lot of it is focused on getting your knees high. You see it and think “isn’t that just wasted energy?” but actually it starts to make your stride feel very cyclical, with your leg kicking out behind you then swinging forward towards the high knee position and suddenly your stride is far longer than it was before.

But it’s only recently I feel like I’ve really got the movements working smoothly enough for it to help. Drills look so easy and fluid when you see someone on YouTube do them, but you have to practice the drill a lot before you can do it to a level that it’s actually beneficial. You don’t see the hours of them starting off and lifting their left leg and then thinking “err, my right arm should be coming up, not my left”.

I’ve enjoyed the weights though and she wants me to continue with them twice a week myself. I have a 50kg barbell/dumbell set from years ago and I’ve bought an extra 2x10kg plates for the deadlifts. This morning I deadlifted 40kg which is the most I’ve ever done, and it didn’t feel that heavy! I don’t think lifting any more than that is really going to help with running, but I would quite like to get it up to bodyweight.

Lucy Letby

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

As I have jury service coming up in a few months I find myself being more interested by news stories about court proceedings than I would otherwise have been. As such, I’ve been following the Lucy Letby case. She is a neonatal nurse who last week was convicted of murdering 7 babies. Overall I think it is very odd because none of the evidence seems particularly strong and I don’t think I would have reached the same conclusion that the jury did. Much was made of a supposedly confessional note that she had written, but having read it I think it’s a bit of a leap to consider it a confession instead of a mental outlet of someone under an incredible amount of stress. Some people are very willing to mentally entertain the idea that they have done something wrong when accused, even if they haven’t. I think the strongest evidence is the statistics, but I’m not convinced you can find someone guilty of multiple individual murders by statistical aggregation, and statistics is fraught with caveats anyway. You can prove a lot of nonsense with data if you are selective about what data you publish, and it can be difficult for an observer, especially one not well versed in statistics, to tell what data is not there.

I have tried to do more reading on this. It’s a very frustrating experience. The first thing is that news articles post-verdict are absolutely ghoulish. It’s just peering into someone’s rather banal private life. Even the BBC put out an article saying “what I learnt about Lucy Letby…” (spoiler alert: the author learnt that she had a crush on someone, she cries in high stress scenarios , she has a pink fluffy dressing gown, and other equally fascinating facts). The focus on her text messages is silly. They are only sinister if you assume she is a serial killer referring cryptically to her serial killing. Otherwise they’re just the exact same type of boring everyday messages that are on everyone’s phone.

News articles are quick to point out that deaths stopped after she was moved off the unit, but (following on from the concept of proving nonsense with statistics,) they never say if the unit is still treating the same number of patients, and other sources say that the unit was “downgraded” and no longer treats more serious cases.

I think you could find her guilty on the balance of probabilities, but not beyond reasonable doubt.