I’ve been wanting to write this for a long time, and this is probably just the summary version, but I really believe that no one knows what the f*** they are talking about. Sure, there is the mathemetician that can explain algebra or whatever, but for most people, including (and especially) so-called “experts”, knowledge is so far removed from understanding it’s laughable.
This idea that no one really knows anything came to me again while I was watching the local news. In a story (I’d link to it but local news sucks) about a girl in Burnet who is battling cancer, they mentioned that the first doctor she went to said she was just depressed and gave her a referral to a psychiatrist. After the problem persisted she went to another doctor and they found, lo and behold, a golf ball sized tumor in her brain.
Of course, doctors aren’t going to be looking for tumors every time someone comes into their office, but that story jibes pretty well with my experience with doctors. I’ve been to an MD 3 times in the last 3 years, all sports related. The first time I couldn’t move my arm, I was sent for an MRI and was diagnosed with a tear. On seeing another doctor he said, “no way it’s a tear, let’s take some X-rays” and said I had bone spurs that was causing the problem. I never went back and the shoulder recovered.
Last year I broke my finger, they took x-rays and said I needed to go to rehab. The doctor pantomimed this itsy-bitsy spider routine and said that’s what I needed to do. “If you don’t, it could heal wrong and blah blah blah….” I never went back.
This year was the leg. We know how that turned out. So forgive me for not wholly trusting the medicinal black arts.
But My favorite example of cluelessness is from last year’s Super Bowl. At 4:04 p.m. on the day of the Super Bowl, Peter King of Sports Illustrated ran the following story:
“Soggy field could make return man Hester non-factor”.
He wrote, “the player a slow track will hurt the most is Chicago kick- and punt-returner Devin Hester.”
About an hour and a half after Mr. King posted his “insight”, this happened on the opening kickoff:
Peter King has been an NFL “insider” for 30+ years and he still just talks out of his ass. But don’t be too hard on him, everyone else is just as clueless.
In fact, I’m reading a book now called The Black Swan, and that’s kind of the premise, that no one (especially experts) knows anything, and this uncertainty is the real driver of history, but is mostly ignored by people trying to sell something: newspapers, widgets, politics, themselves, etc.
All of which is a really long-winded way of saying that in the future, I’m not going to base my training off of random letsrun.com forum posts.
What, you came here looking for personal running anecdotes? Well, I don’t want to … you know, but yeah, I’ve been running.
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