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It’s well established in the medical research, particularly around pain, that placebos can exert some biological influence; indeed, around one-third of patients receiving a placebo report improvements in pain, which is essentially the same number of subjects who report that morphine does not reduce their pain. The mechanisms underpinning this relationship are both complex and, often, quite poorly understood, but as a lay summary placebos can work through a number of ways, including expectancy (you think something will help, so it does), and regression to the mean (the person would get better anyway, but providing a placebo makes them feel like they are doing something positive about it). Given the complex biopsychosocial nature of pain, in which stress and anxiety can exacerbate feelings of pain and disability, reducing this stress and anxiety in and of itself can reduce the pain; and this can be achieved readily through placebo. Fortunately, whilst we were in Florida, my mum managed to track down some anti-anxiety medicine (don’t ask me how) that I could use on the plane; whenever I felt a bit scared, I could put a lozenge in my mouth an allow it to slowly dissolve, easing my anxiety.

The main finding was that caffeine was ergogenic for subjects with the AA version of the gene, likely neutral for people with the AC version, and potentially ergolytic (i.e. harmful to performance) for those with the CC version of this gene in the 4mg/kg caffeine trial (and neutral in the 2mg/kg trial). There was a significant effect of CYP1A2 genotype on the ergogenic effects of caffeine, with AA genotypes (fast metabolisers; 4.9% improvement) seeing a significantly greater performance improvement than C allele carriers (slow metabolisers; 1.8% improvement). The same group published a paper hampered by a lack of CC genotypes, putting 38 recreational cyclists through four 3km time trials under different experimental conditions; placebo mouth rinse + placebo ingestion, placebo mouth rinse + caffeine ingestion, caffeine mouth rinse + placebo ingestion, and caffeine mouth rinse + caffeine ingestion [40]. The results of this study got considerably less fanfare than Guest’s results, and I’m not sure why, but suffice to say we now have a decent idea that caffeine appears to not be ergogenic for CYP1A2 C allele carriers when it comes to both resistance and endurance training.

The best book I read this year was The Sting, closely followed by Columbine. The New New Thing was probably the book of his I enjoyed the least, but I still read 200 pages of it in one go on a plane, so it can’t have been that bad. Speaking of book recommendations, via Tools of Titans I picked up House of Leaves (recommended by Amelia Boon), which I think is the worst book I’ve ever tried to read, and Tripping Over the Truth (recommended by Dom D’Agostino), which looks at the hypothesis that cancer is a metabolic disease; this was interesting, if a little left-field. Guests of the Ayatollah (the story of the US Embassy crisis in Iran), The Operator (the autobiography of the SEAL “who shot” Bin Laden), The Crash Detectives (an exploration of air crashes, just what a frequent flyer needs), The Nowhere Men (the story of football scouts), and Lethal Force (the autobiography of a Police Marksman) all deserve honorable mentions and were enjoyable reads.

The sub-2 hour project is taking marathon running mainstream, which you can see from the amount of attention given to it in the papers, magazines, and online message boards. The only other time I’ve been excited like this is when, for the first and only time in my life, I watched someone parachute to Earth. The only disappointing thing for me about the Stratos project is that there wasn’t a whole lot of insight into the training and planning that went into the mission. – it would be full of people who hadn’t liked the band, MY band, for as long as me; they didn’t appreciate them like I did.