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Sledding athletes are taking their lives

nytimes.com

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Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#171

Post by Invictus0 »

VLM wrote: post #155
Invictus0 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this comment; what is physically bad about running? I'll accept that you may have a higher rate of injuries but surely we can agree that pulling a muscle and giving yourself Parkinson's are not remotely in the same ballpark of injuries.

Knee implants, significant negative hormonal changes for men over 50 miles/wk. Repetitive stress injuries are no joke. OP is probably not aware that the Olympics does not have ultra-marathon type events which are generally very unhealthy for participants, only a 10K and a marathon (and shorter sprints of course)

WRT knee damage, I found a Harvard report saying that running helps protect your knees against arthritis [0]. You'll have to source your own hormonal claim because it was too vague for me to find much, but what I did find did not seem negative [1][2].

[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/will-continuing-to...

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19046725/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18208421/

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#172

Post by roel_v »

stareatgoats wrote: post #144
roel_v wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"people put their life and health at risk for the merriment of the couch potatoes" This is not true. People would do it anyway, it's just that the couch potatoes now provide a way for the people doing it to actually get paid. You cannot be an athlete with your only motivation being 'it'll amuse others'. You need some sort of intrinsic motivation to get at least somewhat good at something. People would fight for fun b…

> This is not true Of course it is not true in an absolute sense, but take away the entertainment business from these risky sports and you'd be left with a mere trickle of people who do it merely for the kicks. I'm obviously a lone voice in the desert, but I'm fed up with the show of "what a tragedy" and "thoughts and prayers" every time yet another young life gets squashed because a substantial segment of the popula…

I disagree. What sports are we talking about here? The sledding in the OP? Who goes into sledding thinking "whelp I can choose between flipping burgers and sledding, guess I'll go sledding"? I expect exactly 0. This sort of niche sports is all people who are into it a bit or a lot, find out they have a talent for it, and then work their asses off (usually against the odds) to become a professional. These are people who will feel mistreated if their chance of doing what they love and get paid for it is taken away from them, exactly 0 of them will say "thanks for saving my brain there". Someone like that wouldn't get into these sports in the first place.

I know nothing about sledding, but I do know about fighting. I can tell you that the people who fight for a living would do it for free or cost reimbursement too, because that's what they've been doing for years before you got paid real money to fight. When I started training there were a few world class fighters who could live off their fighting career, and there were 10x as many who tried and didn't make it and fought anyway; and then there were 100x as many still who knew from the start they didn't make any chance of being a pro fighter and still trained multiple times a week and fought competition a few times a year, for 'prize money' that didn't even cover the cost of the gloves they were wearing.

Any 'needs' of the audience you're talking about is completely orthogonal to the motivation of people doing risky things.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#173

Post by owenmarshall »

nabla9 wrote: post #98

TBI seem to have huge consequences that are not connected to the TBI. In the US 2% of the general population is arrested annually. Of those who have had TBI roughly third. A similar one-third rate was found in a community sample of children and adolescents with TBI. In death row inmates it's even more common to have received TBI in childhood. https://www.brainline.org/article/traumatic-brain-injury-pri... https://www…

Wow. I wonder if we look back at this in 50 years the same way that we look at the impact of leaded gasoline on behavior.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#174

Post by ryanwaggoner »

Invictus0 wrote: post #171
VLM wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knee implants, significant negative hormonal changes for men over 50 miles/wk. Repetitive stress injuries are no joke. OP is probably not aware that the Olympics does not have ultra-marathon type events which are generally very unhealthy for participants, only a 10K and a marathon (and shorter sprints of course)

WRT knee damage, I found a Harvard report saying that running helps protect your knees against arthritis [0]. You'll have to source your own hormonal claim because it was too vague for me to find much, but what I did find did not seem negative [1][2]. [0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/will-continuing-to... [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19046725/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18208421/

You're talking about regular running, not trying to literally be the best runner in the world. Completely different.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#175

Post by Balgair »

secondcoming wrote: post #138
usgroup wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Olympics is just generally physically bad for the athletes. Runners, weightlifters, wrestlers, boxers, rowers, etc all these folks end up working so close o the edge of sustainable human tolerance and capacity that’s it’s unlikely they are not constantly going over it.

Isn't that the whole point of the Olympics though? To push humans to the limit.

Nit: To have humans push themselves to the limit.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#176

Post by skizm »

Invictus0 wrote: post #171
VLM wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knee implants, significant negative hormonal changes for men over 50 miles/wk. Repetitive stress injuries are no joke. OP is probably not aware that the Olympics does not have ultra-marathon type events which are generally very unhealthy for participants, only a 10K and a marathon (and shorter sprints of course)

WRT knee damage, I found a Harvard report saying that running helps protect your knees against arthritis [0]. You'll have to source your own hormonal claim because it was too vague for me to find much, but what I did find did not seem negative [1][2]. [0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/will-continuing-to... [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19046725/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18208421/

That first link is just a Q/A. There is no study or report linked.

Almost all studies use untrained vs trained athletes. They rarely qualified what "trained" means and could be anything from a lifetime athlete to someone who self-reported following a 6 week plan prior to the study and now we consider this person "trained". Most athletic studies are used to compare a sedentary person to someone who workouts casually (less than about 10 hours per week). Once you pass this point, you're in diminishing returns territory and you've got to actively sacrifice some parts of your overall health to make gains in a single activity (sprinting, jumping, etc.).

So will running a few times a week help fight mild arthritis? Probably. Will training like an Olympic athlete? No. Same thing applies to the OP article. Will sledding down a hill give you brain damage? No. Will constantly sledding at Olympic athlete speeds and g-forces? Seems like it.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#177

Post by TheRealSteel »

stefs wrote: post #124
libraryatnight wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend the YouTube rabbit hole of Alex Honnold interviews, whenever he talks about risk it's interesting.

honnold may be a special case. his capabilities of dealing with risk and fear are exceptional.

I'd say it's partly that, but more a case of survivorship bias; we don't hear from other solo free climbers because most of them are dead.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#178

Post by GhostVII »

usgroup wrote: post #101
gnramires wrote: post #19

This seems totally unacceptable. We should stop having this sport in the Olympics (implicitly supporting this madness) -- of course athletes are free to do as they chose, but we cannot encourage such pointless self-destruction and misery. An alternative to save the sport is completely redesign it to limit maximum accelerations. Usually injuries follow power laws so I doubt even that much reduction would be necessary…

I think the Olympics is just generally physically bad for the athletes. Runners, weightlifters, wrestlers, boxers, rowers, etc all these folks end up working so close o the edge of sustainable human tolerance and capacity that’s it’s unlikely they are not constantly going over it.

With things like running, rowing, and weightlifting you aren't at a significant risk of brain injury though. I would much rather have damaged joints than a damaged brain. And for these sledding athletes, it sounds like this damage is constant and inevitable even if you do everything perfectly, rather than a result of accidents like with sports like snowboarding and skiing.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#179

Post by lhoff »

mhb wrote: post #164
lhoff wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but nevertheless it shows that it can be done. Formula 1 and motor racing in general is a prime example for that as well. Formula 1 has a strict set of rules that makes sure the speed and cornering speeds aren't going through the roof because of deadly accidents in the past. The same could be done for sledding. Reduce speed by limiting what is technically allowed and improve protection of the athletes. From rea…

Instead of or in addition to all that, wouldn't you just make the course less steep?

Sure that would work as well. But i imagine that to be much more expensive then adding some requirements to the sledge that increases drag or increases the sliding friction

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#180

Post by Balgair »

VLM wrote: post #158
Godel_unicode wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Usually injuries follow power laws That's a pretty outstanding claim, do you have any evidence for this?

I'd bet a case of beer that OP did operations analysis in his MBA course... The term to google for is "Duane Power Law" or similar. Duane was the first statistical process improvement researcher in the 60s to graph MTBF stats and discover breakdowns follow a power law. There's a lot to see if you google for that. Of course humans aren't machines... or are we? Pretty weird how wildly different factory floor industrial…

> would be surprised if humans did NOT follow some kind of power law of injuries based on total cumulative energy dissipation in tissue over time or something like that.

Only if the injury is related to velocity. If it's related to mass, you'd expect linear scaling.

KE = 0.5(M(V^2))

Kinetic Energy is linearly related to Mass and is geometrically related to Velocity.

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