okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Self experimentation
Training is really just one long experiment on yourself. You think of some way to train, you try it, and you decide if it worked. If you're lucky, you figure out a way to prepare that works for you. If you're unlucky, maybe you get injured or you stagnate.
I've been thinking about self experimentation for two reasons. First, I'm in the middle of a couple of specific experiments. Second, I've been reading a book called The American Plague; a book that features some impressive self experimentation.
The book describes the history of a Yellow Fever outbreak in Memphis and the research that ultimately showed that mosquitoes spread the virus. The impressive self experimentation was done by medical researchers who believed that mosquitoes spread the disease. To test their idea, they exposed mosquitoes to people suffering from Yellow Fever, then let the mosquitoes bite them. As you might expect, a number of the researched got Yellow Fever and some of them died.
I'm pretty sure my orienteering training experiments won't have such dramatic consequences.
