The Pentathlon Papers: It’s a Laserworld

Back to the world of Modern Pentathlon and obscure scientific papers on this most peripheral of research topics. I have a google scholar alert for anything new that gets published on Modern Pentathlon and I am very happy indeed if there is anything at all that gets published every few months. This time, it was not Korean or Chinese but Belarusian/Polish and asked the obvious question:

• If the overall results – as I have also previously written about – are so dominated by the Laser-Run contributing to 55% for the overall results as calculated by the authors, why do we not spend more time in training on it?

Indeed, the authors design a program for female top athletes to spend more time in the pre-competition phase on the Laser-Run in training and to no surprise, it actually paid off with better results:

I leave you with two questions, one for the National Federations and one for those concerned with practical questions concerning coaching development athletes:

Dear National Federations,

• How come we know exactly how endurance athletes, sprinters, biathletes, rowers and all kinds of other athletes spend their time but we have (at least to my knowledge) no quantitative, published data on how Modern Pentathletes train – this seems to be very low hanging fruit for any sports scientist who wants to just get going on establishing a track record to be the world leading authority on this (still) Olympic discipline and I am sure that many a National Federation would be happy with granting access. In my view, this would be an absolute prerequisite for critically assessing training resource allocation questions

Dear Development Coaches,

• The Laser-Run only is introduced starting for U17 competitions but selection into Modern Pentathlon programs starts earlier and is often based on swimming performance. Unfortunately, many swimmers do not like to run and after some early success get increasingly frustrated as the Laser-Run starts to dominate. Should we put a stronger focus on cross-over athletes from track instead?