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!