Tag: Brighton Business School

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A faster tempo hour

Sitting in the tea-house this morning deep in thought thanks to HBR, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to allocate any time to running.

I was still a little shell-shocked from having watched The Dark Knight Rises, the latest Batman movie, last night.  Whatever my expectations, I was stunned by the scale of this film… if you like fast-paced action films, then this is a must-see.  I really enjoyed it, even though we had somehow managed to miss the film that precedes it in the story… DVD being sought as I write this!

The highlight of my (already interesting) week was attending the Brighton Business School student awards on Friday and presenting Charlotte Horwood with the prize for Best Strategy Student, along with (appropriately) a one-year subscription to Harvard Business Review.  This was especially well deserved as she worked hard enough to graduate with a rare First!

I would encourage other business folk to engage with their local universities (not to mention schools and higher ed colleges)… it really is very inspiring!  Add to this the myriad ways that business and academia can collaborate to drive collective value and I’m surprised that more organisations don’t do it… though the 50 other organisations sponsoring prizes on Friday would seem to agree with me.

Despite the stuff buzzing around in my head this morning, I eventually reasoned that I needed to get on and run, so I climbed aboard the magic carpet with another tempo session in mind.

One of my curiosities at the moment is to what extent the conscious and subconscious can collaborate to good effect, so rather than trying to trick myself into running further that I initially planned, I simply decided to run for one hour at 7mph.

I covered the distance readout with a towel again so that I could focus purely on time-to-go and then set off.  My expectation was that the faster speed would preclude any deep thinking, but this was not the case at all.  In fact, at the end of an hour I had planned out two potentially interesting cognitive experiments.

With just over a minute to go I sneaked a look under the towel to make sure I was ahead of my 7 mile target, but found I was behind, so increased the speed to 9mph to catch up.

Overall, the run was relatively easy (as evidenced by the deep thought) including the short sprint and I could probably have run further if I had been in the mood.  This might well have had something to do with the mid-week run (from which I had tight calves for a couple of days).

Now I’m sitting back in the tea-house with my copy of HBR waiting patiently by my side… while I hurry to finish this post before my lap-top battery runs out!  Have a great week peops!

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Chubby rides again!

Slightly unfair, I feel, the comment from Cliff on last Monday’s post, but the least I can do is to roll with it when I’ve blatantly blanked his excellent advice for such a long time.

This week I had a moment to celebrate.  In the past I have, on possibly two occasions, half-heartedly set out to write something longer than a post… and even longer than a letter to the Right Honourable Nicholas Soames MP containing yet more of my ideas that he really doesn’t want.  On each occasion my effort has fizzled out and quite rightly so.

However, at 3pm on 10th February, I set fingers to keyboard to write the inaugural words of my first proper book, on a subject that I have been teaching and writing about for a couple of years.  I know how long the book will be (thanks to Aidan Berry, Dean of Brighton Business School), have created the structure of sections and chapters, and in a little over 11 hours writing, over the last three days, have already clocked up 3,419 words.

I have also already had half a dozen helpful tips from my fellow alumni at London Business School, having replied to a fortuitously-timed post from someone else in the community who also just started writing a book.

There’s a long, long way to go, and writing it is only a small part of the challenge, but it feels great to have finally reached clarity about this project… I’ve effectively been preparing myself from it since 2007!

So my run this morning had to be shoehorned into a busy day, which is why (here comes the crux of the excuse that you were waiting for) I chose to run on the machine again rather than facing the seemingly sub-zero temperatures outside!

Based on my experience last Sunday, I didn’t bother to even put a tee-shirt on today, but I equally didn’t open the door either.  It’s FAR too cold outside!  I set the fan to blow air at me, filled a bottle with water and set off in the general direction of the cheese plant.

My approach mirrored that of last week, starting at 6mph and increasing by 0.5mph every quarter mile until I reached a mile.  Then I reduced by 1mph and repeated, eventually reaching a terminal speed of 9.5mph as I ran towards the 5 mile mark.

 

The Monday circuits have definitely improved my footing and although the last half mile was undoubtedly hard work, I was quick to feel a sense of recovery afterwards… albeit through a thick layer of sweat that even a shower couldn’t abate!

So 5 miles in 39.28, an average of 7.6mph.  And if nothing else, all this exercise is at least increasing the speed of my writing!