TCR show

I had a few hours spare today and I spent them at the annual TCR (Triathlon, Cycling, Running) show at Sandown park, which is fortunately only a 10 minute drive from my house. This is a big triathlon exhibition, with lots of trade stands and also various things going on: a 10k race, swim analysis in some endless pools and seminars upstairs. To be honest, I found the trade stands depressing. There seemed to be an endless number of people all producing one of about three different products (nutrition, wetsuits, compression tights) and all making more and more ridiculous claims to differentiate themselves from the competition. The worst of these come from the sports nutrition companies. Sports nutrition is not, really, a complicated business for most people, so because these firms all produce essentially the same products they all use as much "sciencey" jargon as possible to make their products sound better than they are. Gu carbohydrate gels, for example, contain amino acids for faster recovery and an immune system boost. Really? Ingesting a small amount of protein during an event helps the immune system? I must admit, I'm not aware of any science that would demonstrate that... and part of my research is on effects of diet on immune responses.

There were also lots of companies trying to extract money from people by providing services of questionable value. I can understand why swim coaching is big business, but run technique coaching? Most people would benefit much more from a decent structured training schedule that they can get easily from a book or from a club coach (again, it's not complicated) than from someone poncing around with their technique. The world of triathlon seems to be full of people looking to exchange money for speed without doing any hard work, which is not really something that I have a lot of time for. I'd rather get free speed without spending any money or doing any hard work, and the only way I can think of for that is to go back in time and select my parents a little bit better (not that there's anything wrong with my current set of genes but a little tweaking wouldn't hurt).

On the bright side, I went to two seminars which were both excellent. Paul Newsome from Swimsmooth gave a really good talk about swimming (unsurprisingly) and made some really good points: the best stroke for open water swimming is not necessarily the same as the best stroke for pool swimming, and different strokes work for different folks. This was all illustrated with a great series of videos of different swimmers above and below water - the contrast between, for example, Rebecca Adlington, middle distance pool supremo and multiple Olympic gold medallist and Jodie Swallow, one of the best open water swimmers in triathlon was a real eye-opener. That there isn't a single perfect stroke is really refreshing to hear and I got the impression that the Swimsmooth guys know their stuff and do a lot of very good thinking about it as well.

Chrissie Wellington was someone that I was sort of looking forward to and sort of not - my impression of her up until now was that she only spoke in MBA approved aspirational phrases, so while I'm the first to acknowledge that she is a mind-blowing athlete and undoubtedly as hard as nails I was a bit concerned that the talk would be a bit too much hyperbole and not enough detail or insight. I'm pleased to say that I couldn't have been more wrong. I was seriously impressed: she's honest, self-effacing, fair and obviously very intelligent. Yes, there's a lot of phrases like "never give up", "self-empowerment", "mind training" and so on but it quickly becomes clear ***when you hear the whole story and not just the soundbites*** that in her case these are not just empty words. She means it and what's more in her case they're correct. I guess I've been driven to cynicism by overexposure to university management who are possibly the Chrissie W anti-particle: the bullshiton to her honeston. It's possible that by bringing them together we could produce enough clean energy to power the world for decades, but given that she's spent time in the civil service I expect that similar experiments have already been tried. The story of how badly injured she was before the IM World Champs in Hawaii last year and how she raced through the pain and won has to be one of the great stories of our sport. Great answers to all the questions: I asked the only dumb one which was why she never wears an aero helmet - there's always some idiot sounding off on Slowtwitch or Tritalk about how she must be a bit of a thicky because she wears a road helmet so I thought I'd get the answer straight from the World Champion's mouth. I got the impression she's been asked this before but really, just a simple "my head gets too hot" would have been fine.