I suggest: “Training pointers that all have a grain of truth buried in them, but as written are not particularly useful.”
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Good point. But how deep does one have to dig and why work so hard? I think you may be going easy on these training pointers. What if I said, using PowerCranks will take 2 minutes off your marathon pace?
I’m starting to think there’s “free speed” to be found simply by being able to identify and avoid hokum.
The behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon “at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behavior”. He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they continued to perform the same actions:
Skinner suggested that the pigeons believed that they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their “rituals” and that the experiment also shed light on human behavior:
The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking.