Dr Lindsey Sinclair
As I write this, we are in the middle of a summer of sport: Wimbledon, the World Cup and of course a myriad of other sporting events. I know absolutely nothing about football, other than that heading the ball is a bad idea and the offside rule is difficult to explain. I do however, know quite a lot about some other sports and I’m actually a qualified coach for one.
If you had told teenage me that I would love sport one day, choose to do it regularly and even train as a coach, I would have laughed in your face. I absolutely loathed school sport, I suspect like many of you. Freezing cold hockey practice, the trauma of gymnastics…. Ugh. What did it for me was finding a sport that, first and foremost, was really social, helped me establish a friendship group at university, and then I got more and more involved. Oh, and not a ball in sight. Lovely!
Last weekend I went to watch the sporting event that is the pinnacle of my chosen sport and got thinking about what being involved in it had done for me, apart from giving me callouses and a dodgy shoulder. This was partly influenced by hearing about someone at the event who berated a coach for their child “wasting a whole year of their life” because they hadn’t won their event. Is time invested in something really time wasted if you don’t win? How do we measure success, and what do we value?
Personally I think that there is much to learn from sport that is translatable into scientific careers.
Race Against Dementia is a prominent example of bringing a sports mentality into science, with their focus on teamwork, resilience, attention to detail, innovation and resilience. There is much to gain from applying a sporting mentality, I believe from any sport, to science, starting, of course, with teamwork. The “marginal gains” now prominent in sport, were popularised by a well-known Tour de France cycling team who paid attention to seemingly bizarre things like re-cleaning athletes’ hotel rooms and providing their own yellow jerseys. This concept is now somewhat tarnished by subsequent scandals (Golden aura around marginal gains is beginning to look a little tarnished | Cycling | The Guardian). One could gain a willingness to persist and persevere, or an understanding that it takes time to reach goals. Perhaps being used to following training programmes, usually written backwards from the chosen target event, feeds into an instinctive understanding of GANTT charts. A familiarity with goal setting could also be useful.
Speaking personally, I think that the translatable things that I gained from sport were; what is now known as a growth mindset (The Power Five: Growth Mindset – Premier Sport Psychology); many hours of teamwork experience; an ability to set SMART goals, plus the knowledge of how to work towards those goals; time management and how to set tight work/life boundaries. The latter two were really important when I was training for a national-level event whilst working full-time as a resident doctor. I didn’t win, but I absolutely loved being part of it.
Another way of looking at what sport has to offer science is to move away from the RAD pillars and to think about scientific projects using a race analogy. In my favourite sport, rowing, this is a 2000m head-to-head grudge match but feel free to insert your own sporting analogy of choice here.
Even before the start of the race, crew selection has to have taken place, as well as many hours of gruelling training. Then the rowers have to get themselves and their equipment to the right place at the right time, usually involving heavy persuasion to someone to drive the trailer. Likewise, before the start of a scientific project, there is the long grant writing process. If successful, there is a lot of setting up to do: ethics, recruitment sites, model selection, other regulatory permissions and you need the right people for the project with the right skills, or at least with a training plan of how to acquire those skills.
Setting off from the landing stage to go up to the start the rowers will be feeling a heady mix of excitement and fear. Actually sitting on the start line however, these thoughts have to fade and be replaced by focus on getting the job done. At the start of a project, there will be a similar excitement about finally getting going started with work that could have been in the making for many months if not years.
When the umpire drops their flag the rowers start their start sequence. This well-choreographed series of short strokes then lengthens into longer strokes before entering “the wind (up)”. At the end of the wind the rowers will be going flat out, possibly rating as high as 50 strokes a minute. Similarly, there is a flurry of activity at the start of the project: meetings, paperwork, project sites, recruitment and generally getting ducks in a row…
At the end of the wind the rowers then do a single stroke change called the stride. In one single stroke there is a dramatic rhythm shift from the frenetic pace of the wind to a pace that the rowers can sustain for the rest of the race. This is equally true of scientific projects where the flurry of activity at the beginning is simply not sustainable, and you have to find a way of working that works for the whole team and gets the project done. This is where well written GANTT charts and teamwork really come into their own. Hopefully at this stage of the race, your crew is ahead.
During the race, the rowers may need to do “pushes” if the opposition start trying to come back at them, or worse overtake. A famous scientific example of this is the discovery of the structure of DNA, as described in the book The Double Helix. Don’t get me started about the recognition of women in science at that time though….
Then, with about 200m to go, the rowers start thinking about the end of the race and going all out to push for the finish. This is, I think, probably more common in scientific projects than we would care to admit. Who amongst us has not a tricky bit of analysis that they really have to push to finish, or a last few participants to recruit? This last push can make all the difference to a project. Scientists don’t usually push themselves to the point of vomiting into a river at the end of a project though, which is probably a good thing!
Finally there is a lovely tradition in rowing that the losers cheer the winners just after the finish.
Being able to fail, or lose gracefully is, in my view, just as important as winning.
We will all have had grants that we really believed in that didn’t get funded, or trials that just didn’t give the results that we hoped for. In sport, as in science, being able to celebrate other people’s successes whilst inwardly processing the devastation, then picking up the pieces and getting ready to go again, is an important skill. Of course, all sports people reach a point where they decide to retire and focus on other endeavours and all scientists do too. When you love what you do, deciding when to stop can be very hard, but that’s a whole different story.
Dr Lindsey Sinclair
Dr Lindsey Sinclair is an Associate Professor and Clinical Academic in Old Age Psychiatry at the University of Southampton. Her research explores the relationship between depression and dementia, combining lab work with epidemiology and genetics. Clinically, she works with older adults experiencing a wide range of mental health problems. Outside of work, she’s a keen baker and runner, and has a particular talent for creating ambitious birthday cakes.