Author: FosterRuns

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Rinse and return

For clarity, I’m not talking about my running kit, which simply got dried, aired and returned to the kit draw unwashed after my New Year run 🙂 but rather that I simply ran the same circuit again.

I’ve had a really creative week as, aside from working on an interesting commercial cognitive challenge, I’ve returned to the amazing Lucas Cook for another round of guitar lessons.

I first met Lucas 11 years ago, at the start of January 2010, having decided that I would work to improve my guitar playing after 35 years of playing badly. Our collaboration started as an experiment, based on the writing of Julia Cameron, and aside from the development of a treasured friendship, has proved to be a very good investment in time! More recently Lucas has developed an online tuition model, which has opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities.

This week we had three short Zoom sessions where he essentially worked as a producer to help me develop a new piece of music. This time last week it didn’t exist in any form, but this morning I was comfortably playing a composition that I had not only developed, but is really ear-catching… the kind of music that never dared dream that I would be able to play, let alone compose.

So it was with this tune running around in my head that I set out into a one degree Celsius world outside.

I’ve definitely felt more cognitively and physically alive this last week and I attribute a good proportion of this to my New Year’s run, so my aim was simply to run the circuit again to start to rebuild muscle tone. I used to occasionally run a mile or two in my work shoes if I really wanted to catch a train, so there’s nothing to write home about the distance, but it’s a dramatic improvement given my declining mileage and physical form over the last few years.

Last week the circuit was 1.99 miles, but at one point today I decided to divert rather than wait for a covid-19 standoff to resolve itself between a lady with a dog and a man with a toddler. The lady had pinned herself up against one side of the path, the man had the territory on the other side and the toddler, oblivious of current social-distancing etiquette, happily occupied the centre of the path in his toy car… it looked like they might be there for a while!

The diversion took my mileage to 2.04 miles and at a very slightly faster pace than last week, but we’ll call it 2 miles in 20 minutes for ease. I’ve since dried & aired my running kit and once again returned it unwashed to the kit draw… in the hope that I will get it back out again at some point next week.

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New Year’s cobweb clearing

Happy New Year 🙂

Getting back to running outside has been a while in the coming… and the New Year seemed too good an opportunity to miss to make it happen. I had done some yoga and then played guitar whilst supping my quadspresso and saw my slim chance to run before we got into breakfast.

It was a deliberately short pavement run and somewhat uneventful as a result. However, it was interesting that people were greeting me with ‘Good Morning’ rather than ‘Happy New Year’, which possibly hints at a general mood of resigned normality… it’s just another day in this locked-down world.

The weather was flat grey with no wind and a temperature hanging around zero, and though I ran just 2 miles in 20 minutes (pretty much the same as my last run on the machine) I had an ice-cream-head by the time I got back. After a lukewarm shower (with freezing cold water on my legs at the end) and some breakfast, I was starting to feel like myself again.

First run of the year, tick. Outside, tick. Cobwebs cleared, tick. Good start Foster 🙂

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Head-start in a vicarious run with friends

It was the message that I’ve been looking forward to for months… a sociable run with friends on the Downs. However, the decision was more complex.

The plus sides were obvious: running outside on the Downs, with a bunch of people who I like more than most. However, the furthest I’ve run in an age is one mile on the machine, which took around 10 minutes, and Andy was proposing a 75-90 minute run.

If I were to keep up with them across this time, then I would not be able to walk on Christmas Day, for sure, and probably not for several days afterwards. If I were to favour my legs, then I would have to bail out after a couple of miles & run back on my own.

On top of this, the forecast was for heavy rain and (of course) there are always concerns about catching bugs (you know what I mean) when you are desperately gasping for breath in a group of people.

Sadly my risk averseness carried the day.

But it was too good of a call-to-action to ignore, so I felt that I had to at least climb on the machine and show willing. I gave myself a slight head-start on the group and ran for two miles, during which time they would have started and probably caught up with me.

At their allotted start time the sun broke through the clouds to shine on the righteous and the day brightened up… so much for the forecast and I hope that it was the same where they were too!

At the point that they were probably finishing their run, an hour or so later, I was still walking around sweating from my brief run… it would have been a sofa afternoon if I’d joined them!

So 2 miles run in 20 minutes 30 seconds… nothing momentous, but yet another step in the right direction 🙂

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Leaden head

I was up & about, having done my short yoga routine and played my guitar. In fact, I was feeling pretty normal (well, as normal as it’s possible for me to feel :-)) and I thought I would squeeze in a quick run on the machine before breakfast.

There’s a difference running in the morning vs the afternoon, in terms of how warmed up the body is, but I had clearly forgotten this. The run was okay, but it left me feeling leaden legged and then leaden headed.

In fact, my brain has been working on treacle-speed ever since, evidenced by the fact that it’s almost midday and I’m not yet in work mode… in fact I’ve only just finished my first cup of (cold) tea, which is pretty-much unheard-of!

One upside however… my office has felt freezin’ most of the week, even wearing several layers and with the heater on under my desk. But right now there’s no heater on because I’m still feeling centrally heated from my run 🙂

One mile in ten and a half minutes is no news really, but all these little leaden-headed steps are building in a good direction… towards a run outside at some point.

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Zoom-zoom day

I am a passionate advocate of Zoom.

Two years ago I delivered a significant strategic project in Asia (designing a 2,100 sqm regional office, project managing the build-out, overseeing the growth of a team from 11 to 211+ and managing sentiment for the project in the existing, geographically-spread workforce) from a desk in London… using Zoom.

This year almost everyone seems to be working in a similar way and it’s common to have meetings via all the main platforms in any given week… Teams, Skype, Slack, Whatsapp, FaceTime, Google Hangouts and of course, Zoom.

In the first half of the year I was forced to use Teams when teaching or facilitating large groups, but Zoom is my clear preference from a capability perspective as well as clarity, usability etc… not to mention that they acted quickly to extend time limits & make it easy for people to stay in touch with each other using their free option during the lockdown.

However… spending time teaching, facilitating or attending meetings online is really cognitively taxing and today I ran a 2.5 hour Zoom workshop and then went straight into a 90 minute Zoom meeting, with no break between… a total of 4 hours staring at my computer screen. Ugh!

On the plus side, although the rain was literally tipping down outside, I didn’t get soaked through, had no challenges regarding travel, and managed to escape for periodic cups of tea (and a corresponding pee) with ease.

I may not have had to run for a train when I finally turned Zoom off, but I did feel the need for a run… to clear my crowded head and especially to warm up from my chilly office 🙂

One mile on the machine, in just over ten minutes, left me glowing with body heat and with the satisfaction that the running seems to be getting easier.

Not that I don’t have a way to go… Mini-me Mark ran around the short and spectacularly bland Shoreham Basin road for a total of 60 miles last week! Zoom-zooming mad as I am, I’m still not that crazy! 🙂

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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 🙂

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Occasional running during an occasional run

So, to get my excuses in early, it was 24 degrees when I got up at 5.30am this morning, with maybe 70% humidity making it feel yet warmer still. It also had taken me around two weeks to be able to even walk properly after our last run a month ago and the recent, er… warm weather has not inclined me to starting a serious exercise regime. Let’s face it, I’ve been fitter!

But it was a beautiful morning and it felt at least slightly cooler than the last few days, so 7.00am saw Daren & I setting off along the bottom of the Downs from Clayton rec (aka downstairs) for the bottom of the Tank Tracks.

The running was slow & easy along the lane with a good flow of conversation to distract us from the heat or the effort. Daren was super-kind to my state of general unfitness and we walked up the Tank Tracks… I always feel guilty when we do this ’cause I know that he would happily have run the whole way.

Then we turned left rather than right and ran along to the Beacon and on along to the top of the next rise. By this point my legs were already starting to flag whilst my head, under a mop of unresolved lockdown hair, felt almost superheated!

The return along the top to Jack & Jill involved a fair amount of walking on the uphill sections and one or two pauses. The final hill down to the cars is a steep one that I used to feel comfortable careering down (the record on Strava for the ‘Clayton Hill Descent’ currently sits with Jonny Crickmore at 1:53) but even here I slowed to walking pace several times to favour my legs & knees and only managed a rather sedate 6:19 🙁

Overall our run was 6.46 miles in 1 hour 21 minutes moving time (90 minutes in real money).

According to Strava, Nick (the Bok) was also running this morning & put in a somewhat less pedestrian 7.22 miles in 60 minutes (‘gentle’ for him), despite facing the same heat & humidity! Maybe we need to start comparing stats on the profundity of the conversation, where I feel that ours would have scored highly 🙂

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Starting over

The last 7 years has seen me increasing the amount of part-time teaching that I’ve been doing within University of Brighton, Business School, whilst my ‘day job’ as an independent consultant has taken a back seat. That’s about to change. I’ve been performing a fascinating but complex role as Interim Course Leader for the MBAs since the end of last year, but once I’ve handed over to my replacement at the end of July, I will be leaving HE to focus full time on the consulting (oh, and given my ‘senior lecturer’ teaching skillset, probably running some commercial workshops).

I say full time… One of my role models is Charles Handy whose year broke down as follows: 50 paid days; 25 days spent doing the same kind of work but working for free for good causes; 100 days marketing, 100 days researching, to stay at the bleeding edge of his field; 90 days of weekends and holidays. If you are observant, then you may think that 90 non-work days is a little mean, given that normal employees work around 225 days a year and have in the order of 140 non-work days. However the Handy’s took every Sunday off and had four ten-day holidays each year, which suddenly makes a lot more sense!

After a few years of rather occasional running, my aim is also to increase the frequency of my runs & get back out to see what has happened in some of my old running haunts.

This regime has yet to start properly, but Daren happened to suggest a run this week so I already have one run under my belt. More of that in a moment, but first I want to ‘fess up to how unfit I am, having sat at a desk working (virtually) since the start of lockdown and having not engaged in the government’s suggested daily walks. I have been gardening at the weekends, which has often been energetic, but it’s clearly not enough exercise.

On Wednesday, with two days to our planned run, I did five minutes of exercise, comprising a very mild HIT (high intensity training) session. 20 deep breaths running gently on the spot; 10 breaths of faster running, though still pretty gentle (first phase); 10 breaths of gentle recovery running; 10 breaths of faster running (second phase); 10 breaths recovery; 10 breaths of faster running, but still not exactly hard work (third phase); 20 breaths of gentle running to recover and stop. It was clearly more effective than I expected given that I could hardly walk the next day, my calves were so tight!

So this morning, as Daren and I ran down the lane from Clayton rec., I already had tight calves and we still had more than 5 miles to cover! It was a stunningly beautiful morning though and we had lots of conversational catching up to do so the discomfort was easy to ignore. We had already agreed that we would walk up the hills this time, so the Tank Tracks was not it’s usual cognitive challenge… and the views behind us were amazing.

From the top of Home Hill we ran all the way down to Pyecombe and then walked and occasionally jogged up to the top of Wolstenbury Hill. From there it was pretty much all downhill back to the cars, making for a very relaxed end to the run.

5.82 miles covered in 1 hour 14 minutes (moving time, though I’m not sure how we managed to rack up a further 15 minutes of non-moving time)… it’s not a great time, but it was a great run to get the endorphins flowing again after all these months.

Of course, I can now hardly walk again (even after a cold shower, the use of an ice pack and a very rare Nurofen tablet) but I feel great and ready to start to take on the world again 🙂