Stuff that didn't quite make it big

In an effort to stall for time while I look for another interesting article, here's a fun side diversion.

I work (sometimes) in an intellectual property law office, so I've skimmed over thousands upon thousands of patents. Every now and then I come across some really, really weird ones. As I run across them, I'll add them here as well. Often these inventions have a foundation in science, for better of for worse.

This is from US Patent 4626247. Here's the problem, (directly quoted):

"Vigorous exercise is known to produce sweat or perspiration from various parts of the body. When the exercise, such as running, is prolonged, a considerable amount of sweat is produced. It is known that prolonged sweating, such as in cross-country or marathon running, results in the depletion of salt and water from the body. It is advisable to take electrolyte replacement solutions to compensate for this depletion."

That IS a conundrum. What is the novel solution to this problem?

"In accordance with the present invention, a headband has been designed which is capable of collecting sweat from a runner's forehead and if desired, also from the runner's face and optionally feeding such sweat down a tube or groove to a mouthpiece through which the collected sweat may be returned to the body. This is particularly suitable for long distance or marathon runners to avoid the weakness which often results from the depletion of salt and water from the body because of sweating for a prolonged period. If so desired, the sweat may be allowed to run off away from the runner's face without being returned to the runner's mouth. The headband advantageously has one or more grooves facing upward and preferably toward the head so that as the sweat is stopped from running down the forehead by the snug fit of the headband against the forehead, the sweat will spill over into and collect in the groove. The groove may lead to a tube or groove slanted downward to a mouthpiece which the runner holds in his mouth. This mouthpiece has an opening through which the collected sweat is fed into the mouth. "

TL:DR? In summary: Sweatband collects sweat, and funnels it back into your mouth.

Aside from being gross, I did a little exploring to see if this has any merit, or if drinking sweat is more or less effective than a sport drink. Thanks to the amazing guys at the science of sport, I think there is a solution. I'll post the source below after I go through the findings.

They state that the average sodium concentration in a fit person is 20mM. Other people may be more concentrated, some may be less. Meanwhile, Gatorade, in their example, has a sodium concentration of only 18mM. So, if you were to drink the same quantity of sweat as gatorade, technically you would in fact get more electrolytes by drinking your sweat than sport drink. In fact, the authors of the blog also discuss one commonly held view, that one should drink the same amount of fluid as is lost (say, drinking 1L of gatorade to each 1L of fluid loss). But, this runs the risk of becoming hyponatraemic (having excessively low sodium levels). Essentially you're drinking so much liquid its diluting the electrolytes in your system.

Thing is, I imagine that the quantity of sweat you could collect from your sweat is too low to be an effective replenisher, since we sweat an awful lot from other places as well. So, while the aforementioned patent might be useful in theory, it seems fairly problematic in execution. And still, also pretty unpleasant.


How does this apply to orienteering?

Thankfully, we're not all going to start wearing sweat funnels. I think that given how we have less opportunity to drink than other sports, though, electrolyte supplementation might still be worth it. Should you take it in a specific sport drink (aside from a pill, for instance) though? Depends if you're a thirsty person. At the conclusion of the blog, the Science of Sports guys discuss a study from well back that determined that ingestion of gatorade contributed to the highest rise in sodium concentration. The higher sodium concentration made the subjects thirstier, because "you never lower your osmolality below the thirst threshold and therefore are thirstier when ingesting a sports drink, whereas with water you maintain the osmolality right around the thirst threshold and drink and abstain as your thirst comes and goes". It seems like the important thing is determining what level of electrolyte replenishment works for you. That, like most nutritional supplements, requires some experimentation. Determining what prevents negative consequences of low electrolytes (like cramping), versus bringing on feelings of excessive thirst (among other things). Ultimately, you have to let your body be your guide.


Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing when in most races the water stations will come. Then you kind of need to plan on the fly, based on where the water stations are, the environment, how you're feeling, and how long you'll take to the next one. You don't want to just chug, but if the next one is probably 20 minutes away, a quick sip is all you need. If you have to traverse the map a couple of times and its +35. A deliberate stop to drink rather than pour it all over yourself is in order. 

When I ski raced more competitively, the coaches were often surprised why if there were more than one feed station on a course, I wanted water in one of them. I felt like it rinsed my mouth out a bit, and satisfied thirst a little bit better than coke or sport drink. Turns out, I was clearly brilliant.

Here is the link to the blog: The Science of Sport . Its good stuff, these guys are very, very good.

Well, that turned out to be pretty dang interesting. Here's something slightly less intellectually stimulating:

Last week's closing video of the Doctor Who theme (admit it, you listened to it and loved it, right?), got me thinking a bit more about music. I like some pre-race tuneage, basically whatever I'm liking at the time. Often some Muse, maybe some White Panda, recently I've gone back and found some music from some classic Rally driving games I used to play that rock. Perhaps there's a way I can enhance my performance with my music, not just from a 'pass the time' standpoint, but from an actual psychosomatic perspective.

So, as I was toodling around on the internet for recent articles, I found this one:

Effects of synchronous music on treadmill running among elite triathletes

Peter C. Terrya, Costas I. Karageorghisb, Alessandra Mecozzi Sahaa, Shaun D’Auriac, Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, Volume 15, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 52–57

I'm sure many of us having listened to music while running. I've also noticed how some songs feel like they have a slower or faster tempo depending on the speed I'm running at. It apparently has been well established that music, has an impact on endurance, perceived exercise, 'exercise-induced feeling states', among other things. The authors of this study felt that one thing was missing was researching the impact on more elite runners, since many of the other studies just used walking.

The subjects in this study ran a progressive test to exhaustion, lasting about 20 minutes. They did it three times, once with "motivational music", once with "neutral music" and no music. Neutral music was identified using some music inventory, which I presume just means music that really doesn't have an effect on a person, positive or negative (its called the Brunel Music Rating Inventory-2, if you really want to know). The other important aspect of the music was that it was synchronous; that the tempo of the track matched up to the subject's stride rate. During the test, the authors measured a variety of physiological data, as well as self-reported mood states from pre- to post- testing.

In the end, the study seemed to find mixed physiological results. Each of the three music conditions occasionally had the optimal effect. Time to exhaustion was significantly higher with music than not, but average VO2 and running economy was higher without music than with, though the difference was not much more than 2% (which, since it kind of contradicts the authors hypothesis, they somewhat brush off!).

Awww yeah, let's get ready to race.

The mood state data, though, is more intriguing. The subjects showed an increase in depression, anger, fatigue, and confusion, and a decrease in tension and vigour, all of which could reasonably be expected. In almost all of these cases, the tests that involved music had a positive effect on these post-test mood states. All of the negative moods states were lessened with music, all of the positive mood states were impacted less by the exercise. In particular, motivational music had the greatest positive effect, often at least twice as much impact as neutral music.

Clearly, with music, and particularly motivational music, athletes during exercise are driven to go a little bit longer and harder, and feel better about themselves and their workout afterwards. The lack of really solid physiological data suggest that the impact of music is more psychological than physical.

So, what could this mean for orienteers?

Clearly, it is entirely impractical to run with headphones. It would likely distract to much of one's attention away from navigating and more to announcing that "you otha brothas can't deny".

This has nothing to do with the topic, but was the first image that came up when I searched "Orienteering headphones"

I had also hoped that the fact that the music was synchronous would have some sort of positive impact on running efficiency. My thinking was that perhaps by listening to some up-tempo music that matched your ideal racing turnover, you could better prepare for the race by accurately simulating your racing form. Unfortunately, that wasn't really discussed in this study. Perhaps an experiment is in order?

I think, though, it does suggest that at least, pre-race, some motivational music might help. And not just while sitting around waiting to start, but, during warm-up, or listening to a quick tune within the last 10 minutes. The impact it had on reducing tension, depression, anger, fatigue, and confusion, while increase vigour was pretty resounding. Yes, the results in the study were found while listening to music throughout the entire test, so the effect may be significantly diminished. But its worth exploring. If you find you're a nervous wreck at the start and it impacts your first or second control, this could be a helpful strategy.

However, I know, for me, that the proximity of the music to my start can often lead to that last particular song being stuck in my head for the entire race. So, it would seem prudent that one should also have some re-focus techniques at the ready to switch from "improve mood state mode" to "race mode", where now the focus is on proper navigation. The triathletes in this study had the advantage of having little to think about aside from putting one foot in front of the other.

Ultimately, in a race situation it comes down to what you think works best. But, this study shows that its worth some experimentation. Perhaps try listening to different types of music at different times before the race. Maybe 2 hours, maybe 5 minutes. Maybe high-tempo motivational music, maybe Leonard Cohen. Maybe something that makes you laugh, or listen to some Canadian comedy... *zing!*

Find some music that is both motivating, and matches your gait cycle. That should be easy enough to figure out, surely the internet likely would tell you the tempo of any song, and a few workouts where you count your steps or use a pedometer would give an idea of what your natural turnover is at different speeds. Heck, this could be interesting. When spring rolls around, I'm going to try it! If someone else does, let me know what your scientifically tested running song is.

"Deadmau5, now tested by science!"

And since I brought it up, here's some rally music. Ah... early 2000's electronic music.

I like sport psychology. Its like secret, legal, performance enhancement. After last week's article about anxiety, I decided I'd delve a bit more into some psych stuff, and after flipping through the most reason edition of the Journal of Sport Psychology, I came across this one:

"Effects of Self-Talk: A Systematic Review" - David Tod, James Hardy, and Emily Oliver, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth; Bangor University, Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 2011, 33, 666-687.

First, it would probably be helpful to clarify what self-talk is. Quite simply, its your inner monologue. What is you brain tell you right now? Perhaps while you're reading this, you've already thought to yourself "I wonder what happened since I last checked facebook 5 minutes ago". Can you deliberately tell yourself something (either in your head or with your voice), and have an impact on your behaviour? The conventional notion is that self-talk has a major impact on all aspects of a person's life, and has a major impact in sport. I re-read through my sport psych notes from university, and one slide says this:

"Positive self-talk can enhance self-esteem, motivation, attentional focus, and performance ... can help you stay in the moment"

"Negative self-talk is a potential internal distraction ... is critical and self-demeaning, and it interferes with a person's goals"

When I took the applied sport psych course, I did my term paper on John McEnroe, and how his extremely negative self-talk (he was a maladaptive perfectionist), was what caused his game to turn terrible and result in his crazy outbursts of anger (youtube him, entertainment gold!). I proposed various strategies of self-talk, like "thought stopping", to manage his negative self-talk to prevent his plummeting performance.

"YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!!"

So, easy. Self-talk = an important part of performance. Easy. But, thanks to science, there's also many, many dimensions, types, strategies, concepts within self-talk. And that's where a nice literature review comes in. Like this one. Has self-talk really been found to massively impact performance? Are there types that have more impact than others?The answer to almost everything is, "well, kinda".

To be brief, the authors found that 75% of their studies showed that positive self-talk had some sort of positive effect on performance levels. The trouble is, there are so many aspects to self-talk, that the authors note that its efficacy is pretty situational. What task are you performing? What type of athlete are you? What type of self-talk are you employing? Is it REALLY the self-talk that having the influence?

One way to organize them was into two types of self-talk. "Instructional self-talk", and "motivational self-talk". They both had differing impact depending on the task. Instructional self-talk had a more common positive effect in precision-based tasks (ones that require technical execution of a physical task). So.... "keep your knees bent to be ready to pass if the serve comes to me". Motivational self-talk was more positive with condition-based tasks (ones that are physical outputs of a task), as in "YOU CAN DO THIS RUN FASTERRRRRR!"

One interesting thing to note, is that of the few studies that looked at the impact of negative self-talk on performance, none of them found it had any impact on performance. This is important, because my John McEnroe case above suggests that's not entirely true. Surely his thoughts of "I'm such a jerk, I can't believe I messed up that shot", contributed to his consistent unraveling. One cannot argue against anecdotal evidence. Scientifically, it sounds like you can call yourself a jerk, and it won't impact your performance. But does that feel like the case? You can decide for yourself on that one.

If you're racing and your facial expression is that, perhaps its time for some positive self-talk?

So, how does this apply to orienteering?

I don't really know what goes on in your head during a race. I can barely remember what goes on in my head during a race. If you ask me what I was thinking when I started going in the wrong direction in the WOC final, I have no idea. But, it seems like it would be useful to have a plan if that happens again. Unfortunately, this study tends to focus more on the execution of a phsyical skill, and orienteering is kind of a mish-mash of everything.

But, let's try and get some orienteering specific conclusions out of this. The authors note that, "the existing evidence base does suggest that self-talk has beneficial effects on cognition (in particular, concentration and focus-related variables), cognitive anxiety, and technical execution of movement skills.... verbal cuses could be used to increase focus as well as direct and redirect performer's attention". I think this is a solid support for the notion of reminding oneself of important tasks during the race. Things like "Focus on my bearings!", "Attack the control", "Simplify simplify simplify", are all reminders of re-focusing your attention on the important tasks instead of un-important ones ("There's a rock in my shoe!").

Another useful point, the authors suggest that skill level has is a big variable in the efficacy of self-talk, where it may be particularly more relevant for beginners. That goes along with the idea of talking oneself through the movements. I wonder if self-talk's useful-ness might also increase in times of extreme lost-ed-ness for all orienteers. Times when you need to back-up, goes WAY back to basics, and talk yourself through the mess you've gotten into.

One last thing, remember last entry's discussion on anxiety. Well, its back! "The beneficial effect of self-talk on cognitive anxiety is consistent with theoretical assertions that self-talk lies at the core of anxiety and findings that reducing negative or anxious self-talk results in less anxious states". Perhaps we have found some ways to decrease our anxiety. Self-talk --> Lowered anxiety --> Higher running economy --> Better navigation? Hm....

In closing, I'll admit this didn't provide any specific self-talk things you could do while orienteering. Its an overview of the efficacy of self-talk, and perhaps something you might want to explore. So, here's something I like to do, whenever I made a mistake and had a bad leg, I'd punch the control, tell myself to "Brush that off, and move on", and literally physically brush off my shoulder. I do it enough times that now just the action of brushing off my should associates it with the thought, and I can effectively put it behind me and move on.

And if that wasn't helpful, here's the 11th Doctor's Theme, it always gets me jacked up:

Welcome to my new blog! Some time ago, I decided I should try to make an effort to learn more things. Its started off by reading a random Wikipedia article every day. I rapidly tired of reading about '80s bands no one had ever heard of. Then I started reading journal articles I found. I have a Bachelor's degree in Physical Education, I'd prefer it to not go to waste. Then I thought, how can I apply this in a practical way to my sport?

And thus, this blog.

This may shock you, very few scholarly journal articles are about orienteering. I think, though, with a little creativity, we can all learn something from these poorly compensated phD students' hard work. So, let's give it a shot, and see how it goes!

Oh, also, proof-reading is not really my style. Just so you know.

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"Effects of anxiety on running with and without an aiming task" by Nicky Nibbeling, Hein A. M. Daanen, Rens M. Gerritsma, Rianne M. Hofland & Raôul R. D. Oudejans, Journal of Sports Sciences, Volume 30, Issue 1, January 2012 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02640414.2011.617386

Ever tried to do any physical activity on the edge of a cliff? Find your heart rate to be just a tad elevated? What else did you notice? This study of anxiety while running looked at variety of different physiological parameters while in a low and a high anxiety condition. In this case, the high anxiety was created by having participants run a treadmill elevated 4.2 metres off the ground, with no guard rails.

Oh yeah, also, they were throwing darts.

Obviously, it was found that most of the parameters measured adjusted in a negative way, performance wise, during the high anxiety state. These included: "Rating Scale of Perceived Mental Effort", Oxygen update, heart rate, stride frequency, stride length and contact time (time between heel contact and toe-off). Their body worked a little harder, and they took more, shorter steps, with increased contact time. In short, they became less efficient runners. The dart throwing? Naturally, as the anxiety rose, the became less accurate with the darts. Big shocker there, but relevant to the overall discussion, I think.

In addition, they also surveyed the participants on statements of attentional focus during running in both the conditions. In the high anxiety statement, they tended to focus more on movement execution, 'worries and distracting thoughts', and less on task-relevant & irrelevant external stimuli, and positive monitoring.

What sort of anxiety is being experienced here? (photo by Adrian Zissos)

What can orienteers learn from this?

Actually, lots of things come to mind, and they're all somewhat interrelated.

Firstly, I think we can clearly conclude that confidence in one's forest running is very important. The authors note "anxiety may have pushed runners out of their preferred mode into less efficient running. In this process, movements may have become more rigid". When you're bombing down a hill in the rain, what is going through your mind? "Man I really don't want to crack open my skull"? Or, "Just stay loose and roll through the terrain". I think in our sport's case, not only will carrying a lot of anxiety slow you down, you're more likely to hurt yourself, since you're not ready to adapt to the terrain. It'll make you tired faster (due to lowered efficiency), and will probably make you MORE susceptible to injury. It sounds like a slippery slope to me. The authors say it best, that "the changes we found in running economy were related to the changes in attention, from the task-relevant external matters to threat-related internal worries."

Second, though dart-throwing is not the same type of intellectual task of navigation, I can see similarities in the precision nature of the task to something like... a compass bearing! The authors conclude their paper by saying that "when tasks that rely on the aerobic system and aiming tasks are combined an accumulated effect occurs, implying that running, aiming, and anxiety all compete for attention." I wonder, would there also be reduced accuracy if you were trying to run on a bearing, and doing nothing but worrying about whether you were still on that bearing? If, at some point, all you can do is go on a bearing, is it better to perpetually make small adjustments to your bearing, or stick closer to your original bearing, while picking out occasional features (the task-relevant external matter) to confirm your direction? Could excessive directional worying fatigue you faster?

Third, one thing I thought was interesting, was that external task-irrelevant focus actually went down with higher anxiety. The irrelevant stimuli included things like "noises in the background". I suppose I could take this to suggest that are certain amount of anxiety is useful. Let's called it "vigilance". I've always found that one of most common times I make a mistake is when I think "This is going really well!" A certain amount of anxiety, at least in orienteering, means that you never are letting yourself change your attention to something unimportant, because that's when we can easily miss something really important!

Take home message (the useful part if you didn't feel like reading the whole thing)
Clearly anxiety impacts a person's running ability and task ability. Running is not as automatic as we might think, and you will make yourself slower by being anxious about things.

In the future, perhaps our training should not just include improving the good things, but having means of dealing with the bad. What causes your anxiety? What can you do about it?

Me, I could be a better descender, lighter on my feet. So doing some overspeed training, working on my leg stability, and just blasting some downhill should raise my confidence and reduce the fear of smashing my face. And I like my face. It has some of my most.... functional... features.

Can you relate to this in some way? Do you notice a decrease in running economy when anxious about your navigation?