Showing Your Work: The Power of Numbers

by Mimi Winsberg, M.D.

I grew up as the black sheep in a family of math and science geeks. In 1977, I was the only one who would show up at the dinner table without the newly released pocket Texas Instruments programmable calculator.

Somewhere between the appetizer and the main course the math questions would start flying, and the calculators’ red LED displays would start blinking in a frenzy of problem solving. Coming up with the right answer was not enough -- you had to “show your work.” Some fun, eh? No wonder I started having dinner at friends’ houses.

Showing your work was routine in high school and college math classes, and usually necessary for full credit. It always seemed like an extra requirement. In the real world isn’t getting the right answer all that matters?

Well…maybe not. In medical training, much like other professional training, once again it was not enough to come up with the right assessment and plan. Pattern recognition is a great for those of us blessed with intuitive minds, but showing your reasoning process reduces the risk of jumping to conclusions.

If you think you have graduated from the days of showing your work then think again. Welcome to triathlon training: the world of workout logs, power files, training stress scores, intensity factors, calories consumed and kilojoules burned.

Good athletes are in touch with their bodies and should be able to intuitively train on feel, right? Maybe so, but there is a tremendous amount to be learned from regular review of power files and other “work” you may generate along your journey.

Logging workouts makes training patterns pretty clear and can uncover underlying sources of fatigue. Reviewing ride files, training data and “showing your work” to a coach or to peers allows for a really objective look at your training and racing. This can expose false assumptions about strengths and weaknesses, and reveal the steps that are necessary to improve.

Showing my work is teaching me to:

Understand my power and pace efforts over the course of a workout or a race. How did my steady effort at the start of the ride compare with my steady effort at the end? Did my HR stay coupled with my power numbers? What was the variability of my riding? My power meter also loves to tell me exactly how many minutes I stopped at the bakery to socialize and re-fuel.
Understand the steps I got wrong. Was that 15 minutes mod-hard effort really mod-hard or was I pushing through my training zones to keep up with my friends? Did I realize that my cadence dropped later in the ride?
Flag areas for improvement. Many areas. So many that I sometimes feel like the kid at the dinner table without the programmable calculator, or the appetite for numbers.

Yes, it can be intimidating to solicit feedback by showing your work. There is always that small (or big) fear of getting it wrong. It’s tempting to be content with having an answer that’s in the right ballpark (or to just go have dinner at a friend’s house).

But, if the goal is to learn and improve, just like in math class, there is no single better way than to show your work. It’s worth all the hassles and fears. Otherwise it’s just a guessing game.