The first BALLISTIC interview

Yes, we can prevent sports injuries

We just published the first of many podcast interviews about my new book Ballistic, on the TrueHoop Podcast.

I've been covering sports since just after college. Over that time, what I've learned is that almost every elite athlete gets hurt. And when they do, it's always the same story: nobody's fault, couldn't have seen it coming, or my favorite--it was an act of God.

Which is what they used to say about heart attacks, until they learned how the heart actually works. Now we prevent them by the million! So I wrote a book called Ballistic, coming out in May from W.W. Norton & Co., about the people, and the data, who say we could do better.

The story begins when Marcus Elliott tore his ACL at football practice on his 17th birthday. It changed the course of his life. He resolved to study the human body incredibly hard. So hard that he might one day learn to prevent the injuries that ruin sports.

His journey took him Harvard Medical School, the New England Patriots, the Seattle Mariners, and for the last 20 years or so, the lab he founded in Santa Barbara called the Peak Performance Project, or P3. After exploring fields from biochemistry to physiology, Marcus and his team have landed on an incredibly useful dataset: biomechanical movement data. By assessing the physics of how each of us moves, they can see injury risk before the crisis—just as echocardiograms show issues with bloodflow in the heart long before a heart attack.

This is the story of a journey to prevent heart attacks, the most interesting dataset in sports, and increased odds that this new approach will mean all of us can move with joy into old age.