Month: November 2020

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Thinking about terrible days

I’ve been having a terrible day… which got me thinking about what that actually means, while I pounded out a single lonesome mile on the running machine.

At least I made it onto the running machine (after missing my intended run last week) so it’s not all bad, and I can clearly still run (and think clearly enough to write about it) so I’ve already got quite a bit to be thankful about.

It’s been a miserable grey day outside (and now it’s dark), but I’ve not been outside to be really affected by it, and the sun did break through when I was in a zoom-meeting earlier, making me seem momentarily a little brighter than the others… that made me smile to myself.

There’s also the more holistic litmus test… how would my current malaise seem to someone in, for example, the third world, or in a hospital bed… or someone in a hospital bed in the third world? No, I suspect that I’ve not yet experienced days that they would consider to be terrible… one day I might, but not today.

Part of my malaise today came from realising that I couldn’t deliver a particular discreet writing project to a level of completeness that I had hoped… and that every further hour that banged my head against it’s metaphorical wall, would probably require more of someone else’s patience to unpick. Better to admit defeat, and feel foolish, than to make the overall task more difficult than it need be.

In the midst of this internal discourse, my amazing Mother emailed with an uplifting synopsis of her day… she regularly makes me feel very thankful for life in general.

And, of course, as someone with blood type B Positive, it’s difficult to stay in a fugg for long.

So maybe when we think we’re having a terrible day, sometimes it’s just our mind being lazy in the choice of adjective… maybe quiet or slow or frustrating would be more appropriate (I’m much happier when I’m busy trying to solve problems for people… and being successful at it).

So I had a quieter and more frustrating day than I would have liked, but life is pretty amazing overall… and I’ve not yet hung up my running shoes 🙂

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On the blink

After a morning spent in meetings on Zoom and MS Teams (and thanks to a helpful reminder from my Mother) I just managed to jump on the running machine for ten minutes.

There’s nothing here to really write home about (one mile in 10 mins, 20 seconds), but it hopefully builds on my run last week.

It is worth reflecting on the side effects from the run last week. For sure, I knew that I’d been for a run, physically… that feeling lasted several days despite the tiny distance covered… but I’ve been cognitively more alert this week. I think that it’s too easy to end up breathing in a more shallow way when we’re just kicking around the house. We really need some hard physical exercise to inflate the alveoli in the lungs and get proper oxygen into the bloodstream. Which in turn helps us to think more clearly.

I’ve often thought that I get more lethargic when I don’t exercise, but of course a sleepy brain isn’t going to allocate much cognitive bandwidth to solving the problem… a physical intervention is required, such as being metaphorically dragged, kicking & screaming, to the running machine.

Of tangential interest today was that each time I took a photo, the display seemed to blink before my eyes, with the camera catching only a partial image. In the years of taking photos of this display, I’ve not before noticed this quirk… maybe someone can offer a plausible explanation?

Either way, I hope to show may face again here next week 🙂

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A step in the right direction

Do you ever have those moments where you start to write something simple, but where this inadvertently provokes a thorny philosophical deliberation that causes all forward textual progress to cease?

I’ve been writing and speaking a lot recently about noticing and solving complex problems. So whilst I was just about to write in simple terms about the steps that I have taken towards restarting my running (again), I feel obliged to set this in the correct context.

Russell Ackoff said that ‘reality does not consist of sets of independent problems, but a system of interacting problems’, with overall performance depending more on how the parts fit together than how they perform separately. My own Curious Cloud methodology suggests that before I start acting to solve one node of the problem (in this case, getting running again), I should first try to understand the holistic context and at least attempt to state the problem that I’m trying to solve.

So the holistic problem relates to health (body & mind) and its impact on longevity… I’d quite like to live well into my old age and be physically and cognitively active throughout. But I seem to age a little every day and these days have been clubbing together recently into months and years… if I’m going to act to stay healthy, I really need to be doing it today.

One of the nodes of this relates to maintaining a healthy microbiome (healthy, varied diet, getting hands dirty in the garden etc); another to a good range of cognitive input (new learning, challenging problems to solve etc); yet another to emotional support (nurturing relationships, in both directions, with family & friends). In amongst the nodes is the one that I initially started to write about… keeping fit.

Back in 2007, life seemed to be simpler… in order to ensure that I gained both cognitive sustenance & regular exercise I simply decided that I would ‘run to write’, which allowed me to run hundreds of miles a year and maintain a healthy flow of blog posts. I consider myself to be a better running partner than drinking companion, so a fair proportion of this time was spent running with friends & maintaining social ties.

Regular readers of this blog will realise that the flow of runs has dwindled to an intermittent trickle over the last few years, with my fitness suffering along the way. It’s difficult to run out with friends if they can rock up to complete a marathon at a moments notice (more likely an ultra marathon), whilst I puff out after a few miles.

There’s no cognitive benefit to berating myself for running less (not to mention eschewing exercise, beyond energetic gardening, since the start of the lockdown) so I thought that I would just start again (again).

And, coming back to where I started this blog post, the first step in this turned out to be simply moving my indoor runners from the shoe-pile near the front door, to the floor adjacent to the running machine. Oh yes, dear readers, we have a running machine, and I really do have no excuses for not running more frequently!

So with the runners more tactically placed, a sudden urge to run resulted in both one mile covered and some more words written. The running was easier than I expected, but the writing turned out to be, er, somewhat more complex… thank you for sticking with me (if you’re still there at all 🙂

If not then we’ll end to the sound of just one hand clapping 🙂