After a second month of full-time employment (a shock in itself after working for myself for more than 20 years), a particularly busy period of juggling important work priorities and the departure of our amazing house guests who arrived at the start of December, I finally managed to find the head-space to get out for a run this morning.
I feel that running generally results in a lower resting heart rate, better quality of sleep, and clearer thinking, but an absence of running inexorably drives a feeling of lethargy, which makes it progressively harder to find the motivation to run
Add into this that I’ve been suffering a heavy cold for the past week and it’s always tricky to gauge whether the exercise will help or hinder its demise… or my demise!
The run itself was surprising. Despite another month of not running (and lately having been metaphorically tethered, motionless, to my desk for ten hours a day) running felt fairly easy. I started slow and didn’t push myself, but it turned out that I ran slightly quicker than my recent runs since the end of October. I was also faster on the way up the hill than on the way back down… I did notice that my legs ran out of a little steam towards the end.
So just under 2 miles in 19 minutes 21 seconds.
Oh, and I was wearing shorts, t-shirt, hat & gloves and whilst the rest of me was comfortable, oh my did I have cold ears!
Shortly after my birthday each year there is a slow process by which each of my treasured schoolfriends in turn becomes a year older than me, until I finally catch them all up again… ever the laggard! Actually, whilst it wasn’t always fun being the youngest in the year, now it’s a pretty cool gig!
The Bank Holiday in honour of my friend Squiffee’s birthday today dawned bright & sunny and I felt the need for a celebratory run.
The distance was only a token gesture, using the same circuit as my recent runs, but it was great to be outside (in shorts and a t-shirt) and thinking about my friends.
Bizarrely, whilst I’ve not run for more than a month I was reasonably quick on the outbound leg (for the recent me), whilst the return leg was exactly the same pace as my last three runs.
So 2 miles in 19 minutes 30 seconds and a great start to the New Year 🙂
Sitting in the teahouse this morning, I was immersed in re-reading Susan Cain’s excellent book Quiet. She was pointing to research that suggests that the underlying fears that we’ve experienced don’t ever go away completely. We can work to de-sensitise our reaction to these fears and the pre-frontal cortex can then help to suppress them, but the amygdala faithfully remembers them over time.
In moments of stress, when the pre-frontal cortex is busy on other tasks, our suppressed fears can surface again.
I view stress as an accumulation of too many pressures, like having five juggling balls in the air when you’ve only mastered juggling three… it’s inevitable that they will all end up on the floor. To function effectively, we need to deliberately park a couple of pressures, or juggling balls, when we’re trying to perform at our best.
This is important in our day to day lives, but doubly important for those of us who have experienced, for example, stage fright when faced with a daunting audience. Reducing the non-essential pressures allows the cortex sufficient bandwidth to suppress the underlying fear, which then allows us to excel… in this case in spite of the sea of faces seemingly ready to devour us.
This all seems to make sense from an evolutionary perspective… I’m guessing that it’s the amygdala which alerts us when things are out of the ordinary, like creaky floorboards or alarms of various kinds, irrespective of whether we are totally immersed in some task or even fast asleep.
So immersed was I in this topic that I had run five minutes down the road before I realised that I had forgotten my door key… thank goodness that we’re both homeworkers!
The run itself was similar to all my other recent ones… more adventurous than the running machine, but not by much. This is not to say that it was not enjoyable… I love allowing my mind to roam across the landscape of houses, cars, people etc that I encounter.
I also love it when the amygdala is obvious in kicking in… in this case to duck me underneath a bramble that was hanging across the pavement, unseen until the very last moment because i was so busy thinking about other stuff!
Just under 2 miles in just under 20 minutes & managed to catch Kim between virtual meetings so didn’t have to wait on the doorstep too long.
I’ve been working hard to create a habit around running two times a week and this photo shows another five and a half weeks of success. Each run may be only one mile, but (combined with a small amount of yoga 4-5 times each week) there is no doubt that I feel holistically better as a result.
The other thing that has been on my mind for a while is posture. Those of you who know me will confirm that I’ve been ’round’ in the shoulder department since I was young… despite the number of people who have encouraged me to ‘stand up straight’ over the years. I typically ask for critical feedback at the end of workshops and one group was forthright enough to use those exact words!
When I started teaching presentation skills a few years ago I had to figure out how to explain to other people how to stand up straight (even though I found it difficult)… bizarrely I discovered that this requires only brief focus on your big toes and heels.
Later, when I was trying to sculpt the collar bones on an alabaster figurine (that’s another story, but the photo below shows the drawing on the original block and the finished piece), I discovered a further layer of insight… those people with great posture seem to have collar bones that are almost horizontal.
Put these two insights together and you have a simple recipe for improving posture.
The American organisational theorist, Russel Ackoff, suggested that there are three things that we can do ‘to problems’: we can solve, resolve or dissolve them. Solving is akin to curing a disease; resolving is managing the symptoms (like taking hay fever tablets); and dissolving is changing other factors such that the disease does not manifest (like staying inside to avoid pollen).
My sense is that the insights above are dissolving the postural problem… it doesn’t go away (at least in someone at my age) but by developing new habits elsewhere in the body, there’s a chance that the round shoulders will not manifest. Then the challenge is simply about keeping that basket of habits going until they become second nature.
I’ve been trying for a few months now and can report that its non-linear… nothing seems to happen for ages but the body starts to recognise the movement that is required, the muscles start to develop as they get used a little more often and that means that the desired posture can be held for slightly longer each time before it lapses.
Like my weekly runs, it’s about finding triggers that cause you to act with the least cognitive input, such as running Tuesday and Friday mornings before breakfast, standing up straight whenever I clean my teeth, sitting up straight when I first sit down and smiling each time I remember to do these things as a way to connect them to positive feelings.
Whilst I am eternally grateful for the positive attributes that I have been afforded, I often feel that I have learned way more through working hard to solve, resolve or dissolve one of my (numerous) flaws. One step at a time 🙂
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 🙂
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 🙂
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.
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 🙂
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 🙂
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 🙂
