Trust Your Gut, Data, or Both?
A couple weeks back on a cool Saturday morning I was on my rollers at the base of Lookout Mountain in Golden Colorado getting ready for the Lookout Mountain Hillclimb race. This race requires a short but intense amount of energy especially at the start. During the warm-up I had a gut feel to get off the rollers and do some actual climbs up some of the smaller hills near the start to shake out my upper body. I ignored my gut and stayed on the trainer. Big mistake. A few minutes into the surge my upper body became almost useless with fatigue and lactic acid. This adversely impacted my performance and lead me to a slower than desired time.
After the race as I was looking back on what I could have done better I realized that I should have trusted my gut. We all have experiences, sometimes more than once in a day, where in hindsight we realized that we ignored our gut feel. On the flip side we sometimes also act too quickly on gut feel alone when the facts may have had us take a different action.
In my simple scenario above I should have done a better job with my pre-race checklist to have the step of getting off my rollers for an upper body shake out. This would have balanced out my gut feel (and subsequent ability to ignore it) with some data on my personal race warm-up experience.
On the drive home I remembered an old blog I wrote for Sports Data Hub on this very subject. See the post at http://ww2.sportsdatahub.com/index.php/2007/11/18/trust-your-gut-data-or-both/.
The long and the short of it is that we need both our gut and data (which can sometimes be robust analytics or a simple checklist) to make the best decisions.
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