Observations of an occasional runner
Having completed the clear goal of 21 runs for the last post, it was almost inevitable that my habit would lapse (yes, I’m human too 🙂 )
The next week I managed another two but last week I missed one and ran more slowly on the other one… but that’s okay as you’ll see in the next post.
I’ve been holding out for a couple of weeks to be able to use that title… simple things like this make me smile, which is never a bad thing!
This said, whilst I have been managing to complete two machine runs each week, my cognitive bandwidth has been too stretched lately to come up with anything of real interest to write, so holding out was no real chore! Having said this, it is possible that my head has been so crammed-full of other stuff that I have too much of interest to share.
I’ll give you just one example.
Have you ever reflected the amount of control that Finance teams have within organisations, by comparison to say HR or Marketing? Measuring the quantitative stuff (time, money, material quantity etc) is so much easier than measuring all that other messy qualitative stuff (happiness, satisfaction, experience etc) and this means that the Finance agenda tends to dominate decision-making.
As a result we tend to ask ‘Which of these strategies or new products shows the greatest return on capital employed?’ rather than ‘which strategy is going to give employees a bigger smile… leading to more discretional effort, greater customer satisfaction etc?’ Like the inebriated man searching for his keys under the streetlamp (where the light is better than where he actually dropped them) we tend to default to the quantifiable measures.
(I feel the need for a disclaimer here… I’m not saying that we should ignore the quants, just that we need more balance)
The same sort of challenge exists in management. We know that the most effective teams have members with diverse perspectives, alongside psychological safety so that each person’s voice is heard and considered. However, the task of managing this type of team requires much greater skill… not to mention a higher salary. It’s so much easier and cheaper to resort to some version of ‘command and control’, even though, aside from making the team less effective it directly affects the life experience of the team members and indirectly affects their families and communities.
We stick with all this quantitative stuff because it’s easy, or because it’s always been done that way, or because everyone else does it this way… but in the process we ignore the huge opportunity costs.
I was told last week that Brighton City Council had decided to stop treating the weeds in the local pavements. I’m sure that, aside from saving them time & effort (well maybe not that much effort, if you’ve ever seen the guys driving the mini tractors or grass cutters around), they can now justify their decision on environmental terms.
I’m not immune to the environmental argument, however a more balanced decision might factor in the needs of small children wanting to learn to roller-skate, or elderly parents and grandparents trying to stay active outside without tripping over. It might also consider the messages that we’re sending to young people about attention to detail and the frustrations of house-owners (aka voters) trying to get the best price for their house or simply feel safe in their home when the neighbourhood looks increasingly shabby.
Finance drives the agenda, but at great cost to everyone else.
From this one example of something on my mind (which isn’t even anywhere towards the top of my cognitive priority list), you may be able to see why I’ve not had the headspace to write lately.
I will endeavour to post on topic next time… and in the meantime I will try my best to keep up the running 🙂
Stay well and positive!
It’s Saturday again and I find myself sitting to write about another pair of short runs on the machine, one on Tuesday and the other earlier today.
I felt comfortable running at 7mph for two minutes at the end of the session today, and whilst that’s not really anything to write home about (I’m sure that I remember being able to sprint at 14mph for a couple of minutes in years gone by), I feel that I’m progressing simply by turning up and putting one foot in front of the other, one run and then another.
I’ve been pondering the time aspect of habit maintenance… two minutes brushing teeth twice a day is easy, as is a five-minute shower… perish the thought that either don’t happen.
Amusingly, as these words tumbled out I realised that I didn’t actually brush this morning, because I jumped into housework mode first thing. I immediately felt the need to rectify the situation… my teeth are now sparkling clean, as I continue to write 🙂
My one-mile machine runs and blog posting, on the other hand, take more than 10 minutes and 20+ minutes respectively and despite the tremendous benefits of both, I’ve been finding them really hard to maintain recently.
It wasn’t always so. Several years ago I would spend a couple of hours running maybe 10 or 12 miles at the weekend, then spend most of the rest of the day recovering and writing… and then repeat the exercise with shorter runs during the week. I don’t feel the need to return to that at the moment, but it would be nice to be able to get back into the habit of doing at least a couple of short runs each week. Preferably outside.
Thanks to my hairdresser’s chiding I did actually manage to do two machine runs this week, but, as is clear from the title, only one piece of mediocre writing. Ho hum! Maybe it will be a little easier again next week.
What you might notice from the two photos below is that at least the time is slowly coming down. 🙂
After my run earlier in the week I felt cognitively and physically revitalised, so I thought I would at least try to keep up the momentum. I was more mindful of the time today so ramped up the speed to a greater extent and could easily have got under 10 minutes. However, the main aim at the moment is to gently build back up so I can run a longer loop outside… there’s no point if I injure myself by being competitive!
Please forgive me reader, for I have clearly lapsed since the last time I wrote here at the start of February 🙁
Life and work got in the way of running, though that’s not much of an excuse given that I walk right past a running machine on my daily commute from the kitchen to my office!
Thanks to Suzie, a fellow runner who cut my hair yesterday, for encouraging me to simply put my trainers on again… today!
And it seemed a shame to pass on the opportunity to use the title that occurred to me last night 🙂
My one mile on the machine may slower than ever, but it’s another step in the right direction… and I’ve felt great today as a result 🙂
It was going so well, but then after this short run on the machine, life and work got in the way of running.
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 🙂
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 🙂
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 🙂
