Although this blog’s initial raison d’etre is to chronicle my marathon preparations and issues that seem to touch on an injury-free progress to Apr 22, the wider purpose is to explore how to safely increase workload to a sustainable higher level. This is a major issue in our culture, given arguments about work-life balance, educational achievement, and even income inequality. Why can some succeed and others struggle? What can we do if we are among the also-rans – at least to improve our personal best?
There was a tragic case of a City lawyer reported last week, where the cause of death was attributed to a long-hours culture in so-called “magic-circle” law firms. Unfortunately, it is one of those cases where the reader is left with lots of suggestion but insufficient information to draw any fair conclusions. But that should not prevent us from asking hypothetical questions as to how we should work, and expect others we employ to behave.
An ability to sustain a high work-rate is implicit in much success, and is part of what David Shenk is documenting on his blog, The Genius in All of US. The assumption of what I’ve seen of this literature is that success in more complex careers or elite sport requires an appropriate support structure (family, friends, coaches, colleagues, teachers), and a work methodology that avoids exhaustion, burnout and injury. There are other factors of course, like a facility for understanding and taking risk, and resilience in the face of failure. But not all of us are likely to start out with those support structures, or have thought about how we establish them for ourselves or for others – whether family, friends, colleagues or employees.
Marathon is the only phenomenon in popular culture that I have observed where a high-order goal is pursued by a large number of people, independent of education, social position and underlying career or academic ambition, where the participants have a well-researched road-map to help accomplish that goal. While there are many who fail in this through injury or lack of time, for the most part there is a good chance of success if well-publicised and well-researched training guidance is followed. It is not perfect, but seems to be heading in the right direction when compared with other sectoral approaches to achieving success, whether inspired by economists’ check boxes, or bullying.
The problem with workload approaches to training, as in the training programmes doled out to marathon applicants, is that they cannot take into account the other stresses on an individual’s mind and body, so they have to be intelligently applied, and even then are far from foolproof. For example, core stability differs from individual to individual. Someone whose work involves sitting at a computer all day every day, like mine, will have a weaker core, than a builder working outdoors shifting heavy loads by hand. Core stability has recently been shown to have an influence on hamstring injuries. So between the two of us, absent a strengthening programme for me, I’m more likely to fail to appear at the start line because of a pulled hamstring in training. By contrast, as a self-employed homeworker, it will be much easier for me to fit in a stretching regime because I save time on the daily commute. The builder is more likely to suffer an industrial injury, and on days when he is tired from training, his compromised coordination will make him even more vulnerable.
That is why the recovery based method is so intriguing. Through a standard measuring device, the heart rate monitor, we can accurately guage and manage fundamental physiological trends which affect our ability to exercise, work, and deal effectively with other areas of our lives. Why are they not as popular as iPods?
What marathon training does demonstrate, though, is that you cannot sustainably increase your workload by either sudden jumps, or in a straight line. This is what I have tried to do in the past, and I see many do now in practice. Some will get away with it for a while. But for very good reasons marathon training programmes take an undulating route to a higher plateau of physical (and, less obviously, mental) performance. Recovery based training using heart rate monitors allows those undulations to be more accurately mapped and predicted.
For example, the past week has seen me exercise across the full range of heart rate zones for some time, taxing different parts of the body’s mental and physical systems. The heart rate monitor, along with guidance from the Bath University Human Performance Centre, have helped me avoid doing too much when my impatience to improve might have gotten the better of me.
As a writer, what I love most about the results of this is that my typing is so much more fluent this week than last. That said, I dropped £40 kitchen knife on the floor last week and broke the tip, with a resulting loss of favour from my immediate support network!
Resting heart rate 49 bpm
Weight 72 kg
Mood 
Rest day
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Tim,
You raise some good points. As someone in the financial sector, there is a poor balance between work and exercise generally. There is a lot of gym attendance and many of us join lunch-time runs, but too often these are just squeezed in, usually at the expense of lunch. There is a lack of an allround approach. Exercise is too often seen just as a break from work, rather than an integral part of the entire picture.
Keep the blogs coming. As I said, you are raising some good points.
Frederick M