Foster Runs – Page 19 – Observations of an occasional runner

January 12, 2014January 12, 2014

Two runs

Between imbibing brain food (aka reading), writing an article, preparing lectures and marking papers, I’ve managed to have a busy couple of weeks. Such that I ended up deciding not to try to write a speech for a conference, despite it being a really interesting opportunity. The amount of creative thinking and writing has probably had an impact on my motivation to write this blog, hence managing to skip it last weekend.

We’ve had a period of breakages. After one particularly windy night, I woke up Christmas Eve to find the fence in tatters… so much for giving the myriad visitors over Christmas a Zen garden to look out on.

The fence has been replaced, but the old bamboo front panels that I made won’t work with it so my mind has come up with a new idea to integrate the new fence into the garden… it’ll have to wait for the Spring though as it’s low priority! However, the ideation process threw up a great solution for a completely different problem… I now have more than one reason to learn some joinery skills.

I then smashed a salad bowl by clipping it with the cupboard door, our cleaner managed to smash a vase, and I cracked a piece out of my favourite pasta bowl in a drying-up accident.

As an incredibly versatile 15 year old ceramic bowl, used at least three or four times a week, it has survived more than 3,000 outings to the table and back to the cupboard via the sink. If I can manage to glue the fragment back on, it might even see a few more!

What amazes me is how fast accidents happen (in the blink of an eye)… and how much they affect other things when they do. Even when they are not health-threatening, they still affect our mood.

My commercial background means that I automatically do a lot of risk mitigation (which must surely be a bore to those around me) but even with this it’s not possible to account for all eventualities or else we’d be living in flame-proof, hypo-allergenic cotton wool.

So, two machine runs to report:

Last week I optimistically started off at 8 mph, but was forced to reduce this to 7 mph after a mile as I just couldn’t hold the pace. I completed 3.67 miles in 30 minutes, an average of 7.34 mph and was exhausted afterwards.

Today I was more circumspect and started running at 7 mph, but then increased the speed towards the end. At 30 minutes I decided that I might as well run for a little longer to make the distance 4 miles, which I reached in 33.17, an average of 7.2 mph. I even wondered about running further still… maybe another time.

I quite often walk outside to stretch afterwards, which I see as the English version of jumping out of the sauna into a freezing lake. This morning there had been a really heavy frost so I was looking forward to a chilly cool-down, but by the time I got outside, maybe around 10am, the temperature had zoomed up and it was in the ‘cold for a summer day’ category. England really is the place to go for changing weather!

Time to get back to the brain food… maybe prefaced by lunch!

January 1, 2014January 1, 2014

Call options

2014 has now dawned and thus far it’s an extremely wet and windy year! A run outside would have been a lovely idea under normal circumstances but, with the weather SO inclement, I chose to run on the machine instead of braving a cold shower outside.

To celebrate the New Year though I decided to go a little further than normal. Initially I thought that 7 miles would be appropriate, but as the run progressed (hard work at 7 mph) I thought that maybe five miles would suffice.

We’d had a series of house guests from the 18th December onwards, across what turned out to be a truly FAB Christmas!

Nigel & Kristin flew in from Seattle and stayed right through, my Mum & Dad for almost a week, Debbie & John for five nights (Debbie being my ‘knight in shining armour’ on the catering front!) and Kate & Alex drove down from North Wales to stay for one night. In addition to this Michael & Jenny came from Wiltshire on Boxing Day and brought Christopher, Philip, Cherry & Helen with them. Much fun was had!

We ate and drank really well but not to excess, except in the tea department where we eventually ran out of Twinings Earl Grey, something that has probably not happened in my household for 20 years!

We played a lot of guitar too! My guitar experiment is just coming up to its 4th anniversary and the cumulative effort really paid off over Christmas.

The house finally emptied yesterday morning, when I took Nigel & Kristin back to the airport, and I spent the rest of the day tidying up and washing linen. Ordered calm (and fresh supplies of Earl Grey) only returned yesterday evening!

Back on the running machine, in one of my rambling cognitive excursions, I started thinking about ‘call options‘. This is essentially a financial instrument used by City folk, but I quite like the general idea behind it.

In my version, the effort put in to learning and honing a new skill allows you to use that skill at some point in the future, thus exercising the option. You don’t have to use it, but you have essentially bought a call option which means that you can, if you choose… your time and effort was the price.

For example my daily effort in developing my guitar-playing skills over the last four years allowed me to play properly alongside my brother (who is a totally amazing guitar player!) for the first time ever in the 38 or so years I have played… I didn’t have to (and I’m still not brilliant), but it was fantastic to have that option.

Likewise, by designing and running short training courses over the last few years I essentially created a call option that made it possible for me to lecture at UCL and Brighton Business School last year… whilst the Fellowship of Higher Education course that I start in January buys me further options down the line.

In running terms, by putting in the hard work to run five miles I was essentially buying a call option to run a little further, say to seven miles, if I were so inclined. Two miles is a short run on its own, but tacked on to five miles it makes for a decent run for New Year’s Day.

In the end the lure of being able to write about this slightly tenuous argument was really what finally persuaded me to exercise the call option and run the additional two miles.

So a great start to 2014 with 7.1 miles in one hour… I sense that this year is going to be pretty hard work all round, but hopefully more rewarding as a result.

Of course, having put in more time and effort on the running machine than normal, I then needed to at least try to alleviate the potential after effects in my musculature… thus I didn’t manage to avoid the cold shower after all!

Happy New Year to you all! I hope that it’s a FAB one!

December 28, 2013

More fast tempo

Before I forget, Sunday 22nd saw me doing yet another fast tempo run on the machine.

Once again I completed 4.01 miles in 30 minutes, adding to the time I have spent running at 8 mph lately. I’d write more but I’m working on my iPad at the moment which is driving me nuts by not allowing me to select any of the words in the last sentence written. Oh for a back button and some arrow keys to move around with ease.

December 15, 2013

Ambivalentempo

I can’t quite put my finger on why, but a slightly odd week and weekend made for a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards my Sunday run today… as in, there was no reason not to run for a change!

Taking full advantage of this ambivalence, I set the machine to 8 mph and sought to repeat the fast tempo run I did two weeks ago, hoping that my legs would get used to this new pace.

It was hard work, but as before there was no single part of my body or mind which stood out to make me stop, so I completed 4.01 miles in 30 minutes.

That’s all for now folks! Have a GREAT week!

December 11, 2013December 11, 2013

Playing catch-up

I’ve had a day of playing catch-up… slowly clearing the office white-board of to do items. What has been interesting is that as fast as I have completed tasks and removed them from the board, so new (and generally more complex) things have appeared to take the space.

I’m now working to clear a note that says ‘3.51 miles in 30 minutes’, my short run on the machine on Sunday.

One of the challenges with setting a high bar (8 mph last two weeks) is feeling the need to compete with yourself to better it. I just wasn’t in the mood so I set the machine to 7 mph and had an easy session.

’nuff said?

Now, I wonder what’s going to come in to take that little space?

December 1, 2013

Fast tempo

I remember being in Mrs Simpson’s class at Woodingdean Primary School, which would make it the early seventies, when I first tasted a Kiwi fruit. The combination of this memory and the fact that I’m a Chinese Wood Dragon meant that Waitrose had a pretty much guaranteed sale when I saw this Pitahaya or Dragonfruit on the shelf. It’s actually the fruit of a cactus called Hylocereus and it was such a new line that the staff hadn’t even had a chance to try it, so we had to look on-line to see how to prepare and eat it.

It is full of vitamin C, antioxidants etc (that is, it’s healthy, so long as you don’t eat the pink outer skin) and is a little like a Kiwi in both taste and texture… close enough in many regards to make the less expensive Kiwi a more appealing prospect. Nice to try though.

I’ve had a couple of manic weeks and didn’t get around to writing last weekend… more specifically as a result of having to mark twenty 3,000 word essays on different aspects of entrepreneurship. I used the same excuse for not running last Sunday, but that didn’t mean that I had no exercise… in fact, I had really stiff legs for most of last week!

The reason for this was Clive’s 50th birthday party on Saturday night. There must have been 200 people there, of all ages, but it was the Falmer class of 1982 who dominated the dance floor with their totally weird gyrations. Still young enough to have the stamina to dance all night, old enough to be really embarrassing to anyone under 30!

It probably counts as the most fun I’ve had all year!

This week I’ve had the first normal weekend since July. Weekends in August & September consisted of recovering from heavy weeks in Cambridge, finalising modules for my Brighton Business School course and then driving off on a Sunday evening. Those in October and November have consisted of reading and preparing for Brighton, UCL or Terbell lectures.

Aside from catching up on sleep, my ‘normal’ weekend has consisted of minor chores such as cleaning the windows with Kim, washing the cars, stretching out a painful shoulder from these activities etc and more enjoyable things like reading, playing guitar and so on.

This morning’s run fell in between these two categories. To build on my good work two weekend’s ago I decided to attempt a tempo run at 8 mph… that is, running at the same speed for the whole duration.

The machine needs a little time to get up to speed, so despite running at 8 for the first two miles I was about 12 seconds behind at the halfway mark. As a result I ran the next mile at 8.1 and the final one at 8.2 for good measure, clearing 4 miles with seconds to go.

It was hard going, but at least the discomfort was balanced in all areas, with nothing standing out to put a stop to proceedings. Whether this training regime will result in a faster latent running speed outside is yet to be seen, but it’s an interesting (if not wholly enjoyable) exercise.

4 miles in 30 minutes, 8mph average.

Next week is looking a little quieter at the moment and although this is ot good, there is still time for new challenges to arise! Have a great week peops!

November 17, 2013

Stretch goal

I’ve had yet another hectic week: bearing in mind that we tend to evaluate things based on the high point and the ending, this was a GREAT week. I had a series of interesting conversations: with students at UCL; with employees during a change management intervention; and with the engaging children of the client concerned. I also managed to save a client a steep fee through bootstrapped recruiting. The week then ended on a real high, teaching twenty extremely hard-working Terbell PostGrad students… thank you for leaving me with a really BIG smile on my face at the end of the day guys!

One of the concepts that I teach (and utilise) on my Team Dynamics module for Terbell is Matthew Syed’s Purposeful Practice. Syed’s concept, drawn from his experience of becoming a Commonwealth Table Tennis champion, involves constantly seeking to fail at what you’re doing during your practice sessions. His model asserts that by constantly pushing the limits of our mental and physical boundaries, we slowly increase the envelope of our abilities.

Two Sundays ago, whilst thinking about hypothermia and other stuff during my run, I was also pondering whether it would be possible for me to run four miles in 30 minutes… I had managed 3.77 miles, but I recognised that the gap was not insignificant.

My run in Brighton last week, where I maintained an average of 7 mph for 35 minutes, made me realise that my recent focus on speed over distance was actually paying off… even though it was time constraints (and laziness) rather than a training focus that had driven my choice of machine over muddy track!

So my goal, as I climbed onto the machine this morning, was to push the current limits in order to see whether this translates into an overall ability to run yet faster… Syed’s hypothesis is that it will.

I warmed up for half a mile at 7 mph before increasing the speed to 8.1 mph and settled into running at this increased tempo. I quickly realised that the fan was not blowing the air at me and that I had left my water bottle in the kitchen but, whilst not ideal, I did not let these irritations distract me from my task.

I consciously leveraged two insights: one from my childhood, where a Scoutmaster (who was a Police Diver) taught us to expel the lactic acid build-up in our lungs, by huffing out all the air between breaths, to prevent the stitch; the other from The Bok (Nick Broom’s appropriate pseudonym), who taught me to relax my hands, arms and upper body (and even my jaw) when running fast, in order to allow more energy to go to my legs.

I could see that I was adrift of my target after 3 miles so I started increasing the speed by 0.1 each minute to close the gap… I really started to feel the impact of the extra speed above 8.5 mph.

Still clearly adrift with a minute to go I ramped up to 10 mph, sprinting through the discomfort to hit my goal… but had I done enough?

I had! 4 miles in 30 minutes and an average of 8 mph… well done Foster!

Of course the irritating thing about Syed’s approach is that you can’t rest on your laurels, so I’m sure that next week will involve yet harder work! At least there’s a whole week to enjoy in the meantime!

November 16, 2013

Skating on thin ice

Last time I went skating was courtesy of Martin F in Sweden, where the ice was probably half a metre thick… except at the edge where we later went skinny dipping!

On Thursday evening my very good friend Jo invited me to a lovely event run by Venue Masters London which included skating on the newly opened Somerset House ice rink.

We had a totally glorious time figuring out how to skate again and racing round in circles!

Thank you to Jo and to the Venue Masters London team and other guests for making it such a memorable evening!

November 10, 2013November 16, 2013

Pier pressure

We’ve all felt the pressure exerted by our peers and last night I felt that inexorable pull as the first of my school friends turned 50 years of age… they always seem to be able to drag me along when it comes to age! I drove down to Andy’s party in Southampton with Cliff, who managed to persuade me, during the course of the evening, to join the crazy crew on the Pier to Pier run today. Not for them the straightforward route along the pavement… their route just had to do in the opposite direction and take a big 28-mile loop around mid-Sussex to get from one pier to the other.

Fortunately (from my current perspective, at least) I had my excuses lined up in a row… I had not run further than 3.77 miles for weeks, I was inundated with preparation for my current heavy workload of lecturing /consulting and I needed to be able to walk next week… unlikely if I did even half of the distance they were running!

I took a careful look at the route on the map to figure out which short section I could most efficiently run, time-wise and decided that I would join them at the end of the day for the final few miles to the end.

I met up with them in Ovingdean towards the end of a gloriously sunny day. Nikki had sadly succumbed to fatigue (on the last run, from the London Eye to the Brighton Eye last year, she intended to only run half way yet ended up completing the whole thing in style!) so there were seven left accompanied by two cyclists and Dai on his motorbike.

The running was easy as I was fresh out of the starting blocks, but these guys still had capacious reserves despite having run 25 miles! What I particularly enjoyed was the camaraderie, something you tend not to have on the running machine.

We ran on down to the kayak club, pausing to regroup and allow the last man to catch up ahead of the final dash.

The final dash ended up being exactly that, with Andy P inevitably unleashing a final burst of speed in order to cross the line first! Fortunately there wasn’t really a line as such to cross, so the ensemble all won first place at around the six-hour-mark for 28 point something miles.

As the sun started to head from the sky, I decided to make tracks back to the car, but I couldn’t resist doing my own pier to pier to pier run on the way. Of course I opted for the sensible direct route: it took me six minutes.

Thus I found myself running back from the West Pier to Ovingdean as the chill of the evening descended and a combination of this and my recent fast treadmill sessions spurred me onwards. Whilst the outbound route technically took me an hour and five minutes, including standing around chatting at the landward end of the pier, the return leg took me a mere 35 minutes… a respectable 7 mph.

We won’t mention the overall stats for the 8.2 miles ! (Well okay… 4.9 mph).

I shall now wait with baited breath for the next sublimely crazy challenge… increasing age certainly doesn’t appear (a pier?) to be dimming my peer group’s sense of adventure or creativity!

November 3, 2013November 16, 2013

Slow thinking

I’ve written before about how my thinking seems to slow, running on the machine, as the speed rises above 7mph. Today that didn’t seem to be the case, although it was this subject that I was thinking about so maybe it doesn’t count.

I was thinking that the reason why thinking slows is that the subconscious draws energy reserves away from non-vital organs to focus on those that really need it. I remember from the Michael Mosley’s BBC series about High Intensity Training that that the energy-management programme errs on the side of caution, persuading us that our muscles are more tired than they really are, so maybe the same applies here… especially since the brain is such a power-hungry organ.

I remember from both the marathons I have run, Berlin in 2004 and Brighton in 2010, that I succumbed to what I can only assume is a version of ‘the wall’. My experience was of an increasing internal dialogue, almost voices in my head, trying to persuade me to stop… which I eventually gave in to. It’s hard to get going again afterwards as the conscious resolve has been weakened and the subconscious is more fully in control.

As I ran on I started to think how this related to hypothermia, where signs of early onset include disorientation… I wonder if this is the same mechanism at work. A tragic example of this in extremis is mountaineers, such as those on Everest, who sit down for a rest and slowly freeze to death. It often happens on the way down when their energy reserves are significantly depleted after 12 or 15 hours of extreme exertion at altitude, in sub-zero temperatures.

The intense fatigue prevents the climber from thinking clearly: it is this lack of judgement that allows the subconscious need to ‘maintain energy reserves’ to override the conscious need to keep going. I have read and heard a number of chilling accounts of climbers finding someone technically alive though deliriously unable to move and one, though I can’t find the book in my bookcase, where the account is given in the first person by someone whose conscious fought back from the warm & comfortable seat in the snow. In that case, though being given up for dead by others, he did actually manage to make it off the mountain… a herculean feat of both body and conscious mind.

3.77 miles in 30 minutes is an average speed of 7.5 mph was no such herculean feat. Whilst my cognitive excursion might have it’s roots in all kinds of stimuli, it might also indicate that I’m at least adapting to the speed as a result of the recent fast but short Sunday runs. Something more to ponder on!