Progress

Last week was an “easy” week of training and a busy week at work. I went back to my clinical practice in Winston-Salem and put in a solid week. Not much training occurred. After 3 days of call, 20 surgical cases, 2 days of clinic and the usual handful of meetings/dinners, I was a bit weary and wondering how I ever trained in the past while working full time.

I ended the week with MAP test on the track. This was a welcome indicator that my fitness is continuing to progress and the plan is working…thanks, G-man! Here are the results since starting the plan in November.

MAP Test
Date // Avg Mile // Splits
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11/20/06 // 8:40 // 8:38/8:43/8:39
12/23/06 // 7:32 // 7:31/7:31/7:34
01/28/07 // 7:45 // 7:46/7:47/7:43
02/23/07 // 7:23 // 7:25/7:21/7:2
07/13/07 // 6:57 // 7:01/6:56/6:56

When talking about progress, I often think of that made by the residents in my program. This is a group of unbelievably intelligent and hardworking individuals. I’m commonly humbled by their natural ability and feel fortunate to have the opportunity to observe them progress through 5 years of residency. It’s funny that I’m the “teacher”…these people possess more talent than I ever dreamed of having.

I place a lot of responsibility on the residents at an early stage of their career as I think this engages them in the surgical cases. Otherwise, I often find they become “innocent bystanders” and their learning suffers.

One of my residents, Beck, and I were re-capping the prior days cases. He asked me for a critique of his performance the day after our cases. During the discussion, I brought up that we do pre-op conference in order for me to evaluate what he knew and how comfortable I was with him helping during the case. My philosophy is that when the residents are placed in a position to begin cases, it forces them to really think through the process of positioning, organizing the necessary equipment, and other necessary requirements to initiate the case. He commented how much preparation it took for him to get ready for a case and how much that differed from his father, a practicing neurosurgeon, who had told him that much of his decision making was done “during the moment”.

I couldn’t agree more. As I reflect on my progress as a surgeon, I recall the inordinate amount of preparation it took for me to feel that I was going to do an adequate job. As time passed, I found that intuition slowly took over and I was less reliant upon the roadmap provided by textbooks and what others had to say. In fact, I like his father, found that preparation and adherence to convention often restrained me. Today, I find that my best results occur when I allow myself the opportunity to improvise. This approach allows exceptional results which are not constrained by preconceived ideas.

I see triathlon in much the same way. I think we often feel the need to drill ourselves senseless to feel comfortable that we trained adequately. This is likely our inexperience driving us to over-compensate this feeling. I’ve now had the opportunity to now see the far end of the learning curve in triathlon where more intelligent training achieves even greater success in sport. I’m confident that our training group leader, the G-man, and many of us benefit from this experience.

Just a little note to the intern…much of what I’ve seen in my residents I’ve seen in you. Keep the faith; I’m learning as much from you as you are from us. You, too, will be a “Professor” some day.

J