I woke up just before 6am and went for a short run. It was around 28 degrees outside with pretty high humidity, and that made my run, ummmm, interesting. The streets were practically empty, and the few people that were out looked at me like I was absolutely insane, which is probably justified. The heat and humidity seriously sucked the air out of my lungs and visibility was terrible because of the smog. The pollution there is pretty bad. One of my classmates went to Beijing after the conference and reported that the air quality is much better in Beijing compared to Guangzhou. But I digress, back to the conference :)
The brand new conference centre is a pretty amazing building that stands out in the city, just like the Olympic venues do in Beijing. It is made out of 5 buildings, with 2 corridors (1st and 2nd floors) connecting them to each other. The corridors are around 300m long. Buildings 1 and 5 are the hotels (10 stories each), while buildings 2,3 & 4 are 3 stories each and are full of conference rooms and halls.
OK, back to the actual conference... presentations stated at 10:30am and I had some tough choices to make right off the bat... should I go to the biomechanics session or the expert performance symposium? I ended up at the 'Practice, instruction and expert performance' symposium, which was a great choice. There were 3 presenters that covered human adaptation to practice and instruction, implicit motor learning and expertise and developing movement skills in children. It was super interesting and a couple of days later I had lengthy discussions with all 3 of them that resulted in an invitation to do my masters degree in the University of Hong Kong (something I am actually considering..). Later in the week I ended up meeting 3 of the biomechanics presenters and talked to them about their work (which is similar to mine) in a more social environment so things worked out perfectly.
After lunch and the opening ceremony, I headed to the exercise and sports nutrition session and learned first hand something that I have suspected for a while - not all scientific research is of equal quality and there is a need to critically evaluate every piece of research you read, even though it is published in a scientific, peer reviwed journal or presented in a major international conference... one of the presentations was good, the other two were pretty bad.
The evening's welcome dinner was good, but not too eventful. Met a couple of Kiwis from Christchurch that knew some of the people I used to train with. That's about it...
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