okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Predicting illness
I regularly read the training logs of a dozen or so orienteers. A couple of times in the last few months, I've been reading a log and thought, "I bet they'll get sick in the next week or so."
Once, I was right. The person was sick within about a week.
Once, I was wrong. The person didn't get sick (though they missed some training in the next week or so with an injury).
I can't remember exactly what I was seeing that made me expect the people to get sick. I think a few things came in to play. First, an unusually high training volume (compared to what the person was typically doing). Second, some indication of stress. Third, some travel or other disruption going on. There might have been something else, too.
At the time, I thought it'd be interesting to see if I could predict illness. I could keep track of when I expected someone to get sick and then see how I did. I have lots of flaky ideas like this. Sometimes I follow up on my flaky ideas. This time I didn't.
posted by Michael |
8:46 PM
