Category: Short run

Posted on

Slower and sloweruns

Actually, whilst the run last Friday was slower (and the writing about it clearly yet slower still as I’m only doing it now), this morning’s run was marginally faster… though there’s not enough difference to call either run anything other than 2 miles in 20 minutes.

However, there were two dimensions where there were differences between the runs. Firstly the weather warmed up a little, from frozen-solid puddles last week to the removal of my hat & gloves this morning through being too warm. Secondly, the after-effects of the short runs this year, including last week, had been minimal, but I’ve really crashed today & feel quite tired. Though, of course, it may also have something to do with having to compile my quarter-end VAT return!

I think that my aim in February will be to add a one-mile run on the machine each week… watch this space 🙂

Posted on

And repeat

I had a busy day lined up for Friday, but much of the work that I do requires creative problem solving (hence my paper and videos on the subject) so I used a run as a way to think about a new task.

Before the run I spent half an hour immersing myself in the task. This allowed my subconscious to work on the problem in the background whilst I was running. Then later, when I returned to the problem, I was more productive though I ultimately didn’t make as much headway as I would have liked during the day.

The run itself was pretty much a repeat of last week’s 2-miler, with a very similar time of 20 minutes, similarly chilly yet calm conditions and a similar approach to the dirty laundry 🙂

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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 🙂

Posted on

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 🙂

Posted on

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 🙂

Posted on

Catching up… again

Over the last 14 months of absence from this particular writing chair, I have been only participating in ‘occasional running’.

More specifically this has been the circa-quarterly runs with Daren… 4.6 miles at the beginning of Apr18, 6.5 miles at the end of Apr18, 6.5 miles in Sep18 and most recently, 6.5 miles in Jan19.

This last circuit, a few weeks ago, was the first time that I had not managed to run up the Tank Tracks to the top of Home Hill. This was momentous for all the wrong reasons, though we had often discussed that this day would come (though maybe in our sixties or seventies). When it did, Daren kindly walked up the hill with me… though I’m pretty sure that he could have run it, given that he completed an ultra marathon a week later.

It might seem odd that, in my mid-fifties, I should think that I am still able to run up & down the Downs (more than 1,000 ft in height gain) on the spur of the moment and with no training! No wonder that over the last couple of years I have gone from having stiff legs on the second day after a run, to hilariously walking around like I’m on stilts for three or four days from the first morning after.

Irrespective, we agreed that by Apr19 we should have worked on our fitness levels (the royal we = me particularly) so that we can resume running up this hill.

Clearly, April was a long way off and I had yet to start even thinking about ’training’ when two things happened this last week.

First, Daren asked if I wanted to run again , with 2.5 days notice. Second, Mini-me Mark completed his 174th marathon by running on a treadmill for a few hours.

It took me half a day to think clearly about training ahead of our impending run. But then I designed a simple high intensity training (HIT, ignoring the simple for obvious reasons) programme, each one consisting of a warm-up and three cycles of exertion & recovery… with each segment lasting ten breaths through my nose.

OMG!  This circa-5 minutes of exercise left me gasping for air!

I managed to persuade myself to inflict this horrible medicine on myself a further three times in the two days before our run and the initial gasping receded to merely being exhausted.  I’m not sure that it did a lot for me, except maybe to tighten my calves to at least give me a mild foretaste of how I feel as I sit here now on the day after the run.

Meanwhile, Mark’s treadmill marathon reminded me that in 2010 I completed a 20-mile training run on our treadmill. I went back to the post in this blog and realised that my writing was actually worth reading (I should highlight that I have a conflict of interest in making this statement 🙂 ) which made me think that I should start trying to contribute to the blog again. Especially given that the original aim involved a cyclical motivation: run to write, write to run.

Yesterday dawned frosty with a sultry sun behind a thick mist, all of which made for beautiful scenery when viewed from above.

We enjoyed our normal ‘deep in conversation’ run down to Pyecombe, up to the top of Wolstenbury, down to Clayton and along (gently up really) to the bottom of the Tank Tracks. Here we walked the hill again, a full three minutes faster than three weeks ago (yippee), but with a greater degree of felt-pain at the top (ugh). Then we ran back to Jack & Jill, down the hill.

It was a truly joyous run on a beautiful day and it reminded me that, though unfit based on previous levels of fitness, I’m still in pretty good shape for a middle-aged bloke.

This said,  I am now motivated to work on my fitness level and in April I hope to be able to write yet another post, this time attesting to the fact that we are once again ‘running the hill’.

In the meantime, happy running 🙂

 

Posted on

Ups and downs betwixt first and second breakfast

My hearty breakfast this morning consisted of porridge with banana & yoghurt and a glass of orange juice followed (after a short break) by two eggs on toast with fried tomatoes, a large piece of coffee & walnut cake and two cups of tea… now three. Yummy!

The short break involved a particularly enjoyable run on the Downs with Daren.

It’s fair to say that the very first words usually spoken, when we meet in the car park next to Jack & Jill windmills after a typical few months’ absence, usually involves a question: ‘Shall we go for coffee instead?, asked from the warmth of one or other car. Today, as my car window whirred quietly down and the chilly wind blowing in made me wonder if coffee really might be the better idea, Daren smugly lifted a Small Batch cup to his lips :-))

The chilly wind encouraged us not to hang around & discuss whether or not we were going to run. This was a good thing as we quickly realised that we were on better form than either of us expected. After a short uphill section we coasted easily down to Pyecombe, already deep in conversation. After Pyecombe the gradient is against us all the way to the top of Wolstonbury Hill, but the conversation carried us all the way up, almost without effort.

It was a flat grey day and not so very cold for December provided that we were out of the wind. We thus paused only very briefly at the top before coasting comfortably down the other side and into the middle of a deep valley. The route then goes directly up the other side and is steep enough that steps have thoughtfully been cut… and effort is definitely required to climb them!

We then continued to do really well all the way along through Clayton until we reached the Tank Tracks, which cover 420 vertical feet from bottom to top, in half a horizontal mile. This is always our nemesis, but it’s fair to say that I really struggled with the climb today and that, but for Daren, I would have stopped to walk. In fact, even as we neared the very top, I was feeling the pressure building to walk, like the children in the marshmallow experiment who succumbed to temptation moments before they would otherwise have earned themselves a second marshmallow. Even our engaging conversation petered out!

I’ve never before needed to sit down at the top, but today I could hardly stand. Only the biting wind drew me back to my feet to finish the 6.4 mile run in a respectable 73 minutes. This is actually much closer to the times we were running a couple of years ago and a full 11 minutes faster than the last time we ran the circuit! :-))

As with my run with Nick three weeks ago, I now need to recover ahead of a two-hour yoga session this evening… time to do some work before lunch and a mid-afternoon nap, methinks!

Posted on

Revenge of the Bok

Early on Thursday morning we experienced tremors which gently shook our neighbourhood from its slumber, the source being a deep V8 throb which heralded the arrival of my friend Nick coming quietly down the road. We’d been wrapped up against the November cold for days, but Nick casually stepped out of his car in shorts and a t-shirt as if it were a summer’s day.

I had sought a coffee with Nick with a view to bringing some of my MBA students to hear about his approach to market entry and the challenges that he has experienced, but the reply I received was ‘no run, no coffee’ so I had to dust off my running legs and go hunting for my shoes. So far this year I had run only six times, the last time with Daren at the beginning of September, so I climbed aboard the machine last week for a couple of ten-minute miles to remind myself where to put my feet, and what kind of pain I might experience afterwards.

Despite Nick’s assurances I took no chances on the temperature, donning longs, a jacket, hat & gloves… though I came to realise that his analysis was correct. Part of the reason for this was the ferocious pace that he set from the start and I was gasping for breath before we got to the start of the mud.

Nick’s pseudonym is the Bok and if you’ve ever seen a springbok running, then you’ll know that it bounces effortlessly along. This is exactly how Nick runs. When I used to run 20 or 30 miles a week I was able to tag along despite his pace being uncomfortable. Having run less than 50 miles this year I stood no chance and he eventually backed off what he thought was already idling along rather than run the circuit alone.

Whilst my lungs were desperately searching for sufficient oxygen to move my muscles, he reminded me that I used to play a rotten trick on him. His heart rate monitor would give an audible beep to alert him to the fact that his heart was reaching its upper working limit. Despite already running at an uncomfortable pace, I would take this as a signal to push ahead a little faster. Being hyper-competitive, Nick would dig deep and go with the charge rather than let me get away.

I actually find it remarkable that I was ever fit enough to be able to keep up with him, let alone press ahead in those moments! Although it was a fun trick, I remember a personal trainer doing something similar to me in order to help me push my aerobic limits, so did I actually think that it would be good for Nick… although I completely understand why he wants to return the, er, favour! As it was I needed to pause to recover on several occasions, with Nick waiting graciously each time for his geriatric companion to catch his breath.

Though damp (Nick called it soggy, though he might have been referring to my pace), the morning was warm enough for shorts & a t-shirt and we had a super-lovely run around a very muddy circuit.

There is a slight dispute at Strava as to how far our run was and how long it took us… Nick’s Strava claimed 5.4 miles in 53 minutes, an average of 6.11mph, whilst my Strava claimed 5.8 miles in 54 minutes, an average of 6.44mph. I’m wondering if Strava factors in the frequency of runs and creates a more encouraging result for those people who had to work harder, or have not run for a while.

After showers & breakfast Nick’s V8 briefly shook the whole town as he blipped the throttle for me on exit… music to my ears!

Postscript. As I sit here writing, three days after the fact, my legs are only just vaguely starting to work as they should, rather than like unbending stilts. However the pain has been positive and I even managed to get some potential dates for a talk to my MBA students.  So thanks to the run, the deep conversation and the ear-candy, I still have a big smile on my face 🙂

Posted on

Two Daruns and a bunch of other odd things

Ahead of my more comprehensive post about Nick, it’s worth reporting that I had two runs with Daren from Jack & Jill whilst the weather was still warm and a couple of excursions in my kayak.

On 24th July we ran along to top of the Downs, past Ditchling Beacon and on the next gate before turning around and retracing our steps.  Daren kindly agreed to forgo our normal challenging circuit in favour of this more gentle run on account of my knees being painful… maybe on account of some gardening marathon or similar.  During the run we paused to marvel at a two-headed sheep that was sensibly sitting down so that it didn’t pull itself in two.  6.8 miles in 69 minutes, an average of 5.91 mph.

The 1st August saw me paddling a very dusty kayak for the first time in an age.  Daren & Charlie were feeding the other Martlet’s club members from a floating kitchen (strapped to the top of an open canoe) adjacent to the Palace Pier.  I have no pictures of this hilarious endeavour, but judging by the number of people and seagulls looking down from the boardwalk above, it was a spectacular attraction!

On the 29th August I joined Martlet’s for a second feast on the water, this time where a kitchen was hung from a tripod strapped onto two surf skis… very ingenious.  After a delicious light meal and as I finished eating a tasty piece of cake for dessert,  I vaguely heard Dai ask if anyone wanted to paddle to ‘the buoy’.  I finished my cake and chased after him and two others.  After what seemed like half an hour I was starting to get worried… I could see no buoys, only the wind farm in the distance.  They paused so that I could catch up and assured me that there was indeed a sailing buoy somewhere out there on this now glassy water.  We paddled on, maybe for another half an hour until the buoy came slowly into view.  Turning around for the paddle back, the view was stunning, with the coast from Worthing to Beachy Head arrayed in one long & narrow horizontal line, bounded top and bottom by acres of sea and sky.  As the sun slowly went down it was a magical view, though alas I didn’t dare risk taking my phone out of its waterproof bag to capture it.  That impromptu paddle is the furthest that I have been in my kayak in years… it was a really amazing workout for my shoulders, especially since I was trying to keep up with Dai & Charlie who were in sleek sea kayaks!

On 7th September Daren and I returned to our normal circuit, but at an uncommonly slow speed even for the extreme gradients… I kept my toe tucked under the accelerator pedal so that Daren could not push on faster :-).  6.5 miles took us 84 minutes, a rather pedestrian 4.64 mph!

Below are some other images I took over the summer… beware large bugs 🙂