10 lessons from training for my 1st half marathon that can be applied to System Engineering.

In September 2022 at the age of 42, I completed my 1st half marathon. Now I know this isn’t exactly a major achievement for humankind but for me it was a challenge. Before this, I’d run one 5k “fun run” some 5 years prior and certainly wasn’t getting any younger or fitter. My reason for wanting to run was multi-fold. It was something I thought about doing for years and actually, I had tried training back in 2015 before injury stopped me.?It was something I thought I should do before I was 40 before a Master’s course and Covid got in the way (Well that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it). It was a way to make me exercise more and to help with general fitness and health. I find that when I am exercising for exercising sake, it’s easy for me to skip sessions or cut short the effort, whereas if I have an objective, it helps me stay motivated toward the bigger goal. This led me to a realization that training for a race and the methods and tools I used are similar to those I’ve used to help me succeed in Work.

So here it goes 10 lessons from training for a half marathon that can be transferred to the System Engineering work environment.

1.????Know whom you are racing against.

I’m sure this answer is different depending on your objectives. If this was my 50th half marathon and I was an avid runner I might be competing for the win or at least a top prize in my age group, but in my case, I’m not the fittest person ever and certainly not fast, my objective was with to finish and not be dead by the end. Therefore, I was racing myself.

In work settings inevitably the same lesson can apply. Whom are you racing against? Maybe it’s the competition to be the 1st to market, or maybe it’s the march of climate change to develop solutions that help the world live with modern comforts, in a way that is sustainable to our planet. However often in work settings, the focus of the competition is internal. Often too much energy is focused on competing with colleagues or other teams, departments, and business units. Maybe it’s due to misaligned incentives or competing forces, or maybe it's due to the team and project structure. This in part is natural human behavior – we are after all, for the majority of our existence tribal in nature, our group vs the others, and based on our current social discourse that probably hasn’t changed.

The best project teams I’ve been in have been partnerships where everyone is rowing in the same direction, and everyone is delivering their best. If one person has an issue the team rallies around them and helps keep the effort moving. It is almost infectious and is certainly fun work. Hard, but fun work.

So as a project leader make sure you identify the competition and use this to motivate your team but work to avoid infighting, by aligning individual and group incentives and aligning the project with the companies, communities, and global goals.

2.????Have a plan with a longer-term goal and shorter milestones.

Just like a project, this wasn’t simply a spur-of-the-moment decision, training to run a half marathon took time to plan and execute to be able to succeed. I wasn’t going to be able to wake up in September and decide to go for a run of 13.1 miles and succeed without preparation and planning. I had an overall plan to get me to my target on time that also had short-term milestones where I could target knowing that it would lead me to the longer-term goal. Those short-term goals were simply having a plan of what I needed to run in a given week. When training, I wasn’t thinking about the half marathon instead I was thinking of the distance of that run, or even in some cases getting to the street corner or fire hydrant, without stopping and then willing myself to the next visual target.

3.????Measure and adjust

I’ve been known to utter the phrase “Measures drive behaviors and behaviors drive results”. Following on from #2, having metrics is a powerful way to drive the feedback loop but having the right measures can be difficult. In a former job, I planned the testing of diesel engines in test cells to collect data on emissions and performance. As test cells are expensive, management wanted high utilization of the assets and implemented a utilization measure that was shown on screens around the facility. What happened? The operator would come in in the morning and start the engine, letting it idle for an hour or so while they went to their morning meeting, etc. They increased the utilization but didn’t increase the actual objective which was useful data from the test cell. They were measuring what was easy but not getting the desired results.

In the case of running, I used several measures. Distance run vs plan is a direct indicator of progress and can be used to measure progress made toward a milestone. Aka this week, run 20 miles, but what about measures that provide faster feedback, that can have a more direct impact on performance? It's often challenging to directly measure the desired outcome and so we have to find surrogates.

Whilst running, I used my fitness watch to measure my pace and heart rate. If my heart rate got too high, I found I could focus on my breathing to lower it and maintain the same pace. I used the pace to see if I was running at a near-constant rate and to see what caused me to speed up or slow down. One issue is the GPS signal on watches is not the best and so it would often give pace in minutes/ mile that varied by as much as 30 seconds. It’s important to understand that your measurement might not be perfect, but it can still be useful when it’s driving the right behavior.

4.????Plan for known delays, Expect delays

Years ago I was on a small project where we were tasked with providing a plan to deliver the project over several months. We included 2 weeks of idle time as the key contributor was taking a vacation. The project manager told us to remove those 2 weeks – we’d just have to figure out how to cover it. We did as we were told and the project ran over (actually by more than 2 weeks). What’s the point of creating a plan that doesn’t address the reality of the project? From the start, the team know the plan wasn’t achievable with the available resources in the allotted time, but frequently I’ve seen if we make a plan and cut the time allocated somehow magic will occur. It doesn’t.?Now, this is not to say provide excess time as Parkinson's Law can easily take hold. For the marathon, I found an online 12-week training plan and started 14 weeks before. I also have a vacation planned at the time as I knew I wouldn’t train during that period and wanted a buffer for unexpected events, which in my case was covid after returning from vacation.

5.????Focus on continued progression rather than heroic efforts

Do you know that scene from James bond Goldfinger where Bond saves the world with 7 seconds to spare? Yeah, rarely is life like that. Rarely do we get out of bed and make a heroic effort to save the day, instead the way most progress is made is by incremental improvements. The mRNA Covid vaccines were overnight success decades in the making, and running is the same. I didn’t wake up in September to go from couch to 13 miles overnight, I built up to it over time. The training plan I followed established a baseline run that increased slowly over the weeks and a long-distance run that built over weeks until by the end my baseline run was longer than my initial long-distance run.

In work, projects succeed in the same way, by incremental changes and learnings each day and building upon what was learned prior to progress towards the goal. It's not always linear and sometimes you have to take steps back to move forward but the general it's achieved by incremental steps.

6.????Remove distractions, and use tools, methods ideas to help you succeed

I find that in projects distractions are my biggest enemy to progress, we spend time attending meetings rather than working on the hardest problem. Equally, sometimes the work is mind-numbingly tedious but still needs to be done.

In the case of running, I tried running with my dog. This is a great time saver by not having to walk them after my run. Except… We have 4 dogs that I walk several times a day. 2 of those dogs will not run, one will run but get hot quickly (Husky mix) and the 4th can run at my pace. Even if I only take the 4th dog he needs to stop to do what dogs do, which destroyed what rhythm I had. So I found not taking the dogs on the run and walking them separately easier for my running. Equally, I find running quite tedious so I use tools to distract myself. Sometimes this is music with a good beat, other times especially on long longs I distract myself with deep thought – allowing my mind to wander off the task of running and into some distance problem or scenario. ?When the task is hard I concentrate on the goal. Breathe in, breathe out. Left foot, right foot. Just reach that next milestone then the next one, then the next one.

Whatever it is find tools that help you remove the distractions and manage the tediousness and focus when you need to.

7.????Expect failures and identify mitigations or corrective actions

A common tool used in engineering is Failure Mode Effect Analysis. This is a thinking tool to guide your team to identify the potential ways the system of interest may fail and helps you identify potential mitigations to eliminate or minimize the risk. In the case of running several, I identified several failure modes and identified mitigation. Shoes are the most important part of your equipment so before starting I did my research and found a good pair. I tried them and when I was happy with them I brought a 2nd pair that stayed in their box. Why? Well, running shoes have a finite life and start to break down, not providing sufficient support. To prevent that failure about 2 weeks before the race I broke out the new pair did a couple of runs in them to break them in and then was ready. Was this overkill? Maybe but that’s the point, it terms of the cost of the mitigation it was a fraction of the time value I’d spend training.

Muhammad Ali said, “It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe.” This metaphor is about the struggles of the apparent small or invisible annoyances or barriers that can stop our progress. Well in terms of running it can be both figuratively and metaphorical. Sickness, stress, and prior commitments can if not managed wear us down and distract us from the goal – in this case completing the race. But it’s also it’s hard to run with a stone in your shoe, a blister on your foot or chaffing (and every distance runner knows the discomfort of chaffing). So, prepare mitigations to either prevent or remedy an issue if it occurs. For running, band-aids and Vaseline are your friends ??.

That injury that stopped me in 2015 was my left knee. Each time I did a 4-mile run my knee would be in pain for a week afterward. Some of this I put down to the quality of my shoes, but this time I wasn’t taking any chances. 1st I did 80% of my short distances on the treadmill – not because I prefer running indoors (although when it’s 90F & 90% humidity I certainly don’t enjoy running outside) but because of the flex of the treadmill, the impact on my knee was less. I still made sure I could run outside, the last thing I wanted was to only train on a treadmill and fail because I wasn’t used to the impact of the outdoor environment. As soon as my knee started to twinge, I wore knee support and applied the following lesson…

8.????Seek expert advice when larger problems occur

In both projects and sports, there will be an event or issues (likely many) where you’ll benefit from outside help or support. In most cases (outside of academia) there is little reward in solving every problem alone. Instead where an issue comes up reach out to your network and find someone with experience in the field who can help you, be it someone who has the expertise to solve a technical problem or someone who can help you navigate regulations or import laws, or if your knee starts being painful after a run seek someone who is trained in the autonomy of the body and can recommend exercises to strengthen the area of pain.

My expert in this field was a sports physio at my primary care medical facility. He prescribed an exercise where I lock my knee straight and push backward to strengthen the muscles that counteract the over forces of running. I’d do this exercise 200 times a day while waiting with my son for the school bus or standing in a queue at the grocery store and it worked. I still ran with the knee support but the exercises help and I wouldn’t know to do them without expert advice.

9.????Avoid fully committing until you have an idea of how to succeed and avoid committing too soon.

In Engineering I’ve seen many people tend to select their architecture or design early without understanding all the trades-off and then spend much time late in the program needing a heroic effort to resolve issues. Instead, it’s better to test your ideas early and show a potential path before committing funds. A method to achieve this called Set-Based Design

In the case of the half marathon, I could have paid the entry fee back in June and saved $10, however at that point I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it and so I delayed entry until the next price increase in mid-August once I’d demonstrated I could run 7 miles in a reasonable time I was sure my training plan would work. That doesn’t mean there was a risk to manage, a new injury, sickness, or bad weather on race day, but by delaying the decision before committing funds I was able to minimize the risk of failure.

10. It’s easier with others

When race day came, I decided to use others to help me. The race organizers provided pacers who would run at a steady pace and aim to finish in a set time. I had estimated my time would be 2:15 minutes, I initially lined up with the 2 hours, 10-minute pacer, however before the race I decided to drop back to the 2h:20m pacer. Again, my objective was to finish more than set a time. Using the pacer made a huge difference. For one at the 2:20 pace holder conversions were relatively straightforward. I was able to chat with my Pacer, Ruthie from Cincinnati who was running her gazillionth half marathon (I don’t remember the number but it was something like 45, or 70th – a lot anyway). I pointed out several restaurants she should check out the next time she was in town and pointed out some of our renowned architecture as we passed by. ?I discovered the miles just drifted by with relative ease, much more than the training runs by myself where only a few weeks earlier the 10 miles had felt like self-torture. We passed many who started strong but then slowed over the miles, but by running a steady pace for 12.3-minute miles and before I knew it I was at mile 12 where I bid Ruthie farewell and up my pace for the final mile and crossed the line in 2 hours 16 minutes and 44 seconds, feeling very much alive, and thinking to myself – you know if (and a big if) I do this again I should aim for sub 2 hours – I could do that.

So why was the race easier than the training? Running with others allowed me to use focus and distraction, to measure and adjust, and because using the support of those around you and supporting those around you helps. But maybe it’s best summed up by the 16th-century English writer Izaak Walton who said “Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter.” The same is true in a project – progress is easier when you have good company. People discuss ideas and arrive at a better answer or help avoid pitfalls.

There you have it. 10 lessons from training for a half marathon that I think align with System Engineering work. What do you think? Do you agree, or disagree? What obvious parallels did I miss or are you wish you could have 15 minutes you spend reading this back (sorry no refunds). Let me know in the comments.