Who remembers their high school science class where you would all do an experiment and would pretty much all have the same outcome? You mix the two chemicals and the solution turns pink or starts to bubble. Occasionally one lab group would have a different outcome which in most cases probably involved fire or at least smoke. When the teacher got the fire out and started asking questions, it turned out that the group added the wrong chemical or did the experiment in the wrong order. While they didn’t get the same result everyone else did, you all learned an important lesson about what NOT to do.
Moving onto college, you may have been involved in or read about some type of research in which you had a large sample size and you did the same thing (let’s call it the “intervention”) to each person and gathered information about the outcomes. After some statistical analysis, you were (hopefully) able to come to some sort of conclusion about how the intervention would affect most people or whatever you were testing the intervention on. This is also true in “the real world” where you may try one farming technique, one type of weld, a certain way of stacking groceries in a bag and find what works most of the time and what doesn’t.
While I love science and believe strongly in the research process, when it comes to humans, we must always remember that we are so complex, so uniquely different not only in personalities but in genetics and life experiences that sometimes the results of trying something aren’t always so black and white.
Back several years ago when I had only been running a few years, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out my nutrition. I read about carb loading, fat adaptation, keto, and all the things. For a while, I was thinking that fat adaption was probably where I should go because some of the elite runners were eating that way. What was hard was understanding how, given what I knew about how the body works and nutrition, it didn’t seem like it would be 100% fool-proof. Likewise, I could see how carb loading was maybe not as great as we had thought it was in the early days of running and racing. What I did know was that when I really tried cutting back on grains and starchier foods that I didn’t feel very well. Reading the fat adapted and keto articles, I was told to expect this and they called it the “keto flu” where your body is adapting to not having as much sugar and you go through a withdrawal period. Maybe I just wasn’t willing to feel that crappy to get to the point of being fat adapted. Maybe my knowledge of glycogen utilization was wanting the spotlight. But for whatever reason, I found that I ran best when I did have grains and kept to a more balanced way of eating instead of cutting out food groups. I didn’t feel light-headed. I didn’t get as many stomach aches. I didn’t get as sore.
Example #2: I had followed the minimalist shoe trend and while I never went 100% zero drop or Vibram sole, I did find that I liked a low drop with cushioning. When the shoe trend started going back to 8-12mm drops, I stayed with the 4mm because that was what was working for me. And I tell you–it’s getting harder and harder to find that drop in a shoe now that the pendulum is swinging back the other way. A year and a half ago I went to a local shoe store and told them I usually ran in a certain shoe (the Saucony Kinvara’s since they were the closest to the Brooks PureFlow’s that had been discontinued) but was willing to try something different since the Kinvara’s weren’t as great as the Brooks. The associate did a gait analysis, probably wondered how I could even run with the ridiculous form I have, and suggested a shoe that was a 10mm drop with “guide rails” to help correct all of my ridiculousness. Great. I took the shoes home, tried to run, and looked like a baby giraffe. I seriously could barely run. My legs didn’t want to work right. My feet hurt. I had Relay Iowa in a week. This was not going to work. I took the shoes back, got the Kinvara’s, and all was well in my running world.
What I am getting at is that what I was told would work for everyone wasn’t necessarily what worked for me. Once after a particularly hard race, I expressed how I was frustrated with something in a Facebook group I was a part of and with what I was constantly being told I should be doing (sometimes by people in that group) because it wasn’t working for me and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. One person made a comment on my post that really changed how I thought about many things. They said to remember that we are all an experiment of one and that we all need to figure out what works for us and ignore the people who want to keep telling us we are doing things wrong. Shortly after that, I began training to become a wellness coach, and I can really say that my whole outlook changed with the principles that I learned which included that while I may be an expert in behavior change and know a lot about a health lifestyle, I am not the expert in other people’s lives. And no one but me is an expert in mine.
What I know now is that science has provided us with great knowledge, insight, and answers. This should be our starting point for figuring out whatever questions we have. We know how protein and glucose work in our bodies. We know how an excessively elevated heart rate during a run can cause us to be more prone to injury and have a harder time recovering from the run. Once we know the scientific information, we can start applying that to our own situation and tweak our process from there. Our bodies and minds are complex and unique. We all have multiple factors to consider when making choices. What works for one person, or even several people, may not work for you. This is not to say that you should outright reject everything everyone says and all that science has learned about something in favor of some self-derived conclusion that really has no basis in anything. Try the tried and true methods and really give them a shot. If you find that something is just not working the way you want, it’s ok to acknowledge that and try something else. My guess is that there is shred of something that you can still use from that original plan while making adaptations to it.
This theory can be applied to almost everything—parenting, weight loss, study methods, cooking, lawn mowing—almost anything. When it comes to trying something new and finding that after giving it a real, honest try for a significant amount of time that it just isn’t working they way you thought it would, stop. Think about what part isn’t working for you. Adjust that part. Keep trying until you find what provides you with the outcomes you want. Baking that cake for 30 minutes is too much and it burns? Try 25 minutes. Maybe it’s because your oven runs hot. Drinking 80 ounces of water a day seems like about 20 ounces too many, you are constantly overly-full, and all you do is run to the bathroom? Try 70 ounces and see if you feel better.
Finally, if the plan doesn’t work out, you did not fail. You learned. There are very few actual failures in life. Just experiments that didn’t work out. Try again.
Peace from The Edge,
Julia
