Lessons from teaching myself to run again

I've been running on and off for nearly 30 years - but more off than on. My whole family have had been runners at some point, undoubtedly due to Dad who's still a dedicated runner now as he gets towards 70. In my teens I was quite into it and could do an 11 mile run over pretty serious terrain at the drop of a hat.

So I've always been working off a base of assumed competence - like a lot of organisations. No-one ever taught me to run - certainly not Dad, who could 'just do it'. As so often seen in other disciplines, if it comes easy to you, you've probably not gone through a learning process to become expert in it, and so you're not best placed to teach excellence in it.

But my running has been more off than on. Allowing for a mis-spent late adolescence and early adulthood, it's been off and on for two reasons; lack of pace and recurrent injuries.

Over the last few months we've finally nailed the right asthma medication for me. Of course, my asthma was fine; I was running every other day, usually comfortably. But the nurse said, 'all very well but you're running to your limits', i.e., without the right meds there was no knowing what my potential was.

The other breakthrough was finally teaching myself to be a forefront striker; I now land and push off on the balls of my feet rather than being a heavy heel striker. Heel striking is all very well but you have to roll forward onto your forefoot to push off which increases the risk of pronation/supination, but also seems to massively increase the shock to your system with every step. Every time you land on your heel it's like a car crash; the force travels straight up your leg.

So forefront striking has really reduced the injuries. I've been running for a couple of months now without injury.

The final key is not to overdo it. Instead of thinking, 'yeah, 11 miles used to be no problem…', the right way for me has been to limit it to half an hour every other day of walk/run, building up to complete sessions of running. The aim is to get the muscles and mental capability developed gently. 

I think these lessons have relevance for organisations too.

1. What medication does the organisation need? Is there a tool or process that will delimit the capacity of a process?
   
2. Can we make simple changes to reduce friction and risk at the point where work is actually done?
   
3. Can we make lots of small steps to increase capacity, rather than a single, high-risk change?