Two toddlers. An international move. Brexit. The pandemic. Where’s the time for running?

On Friday we finally put the key in the front-door of our own flat again. It marked the beginning of the end of a three month odyssey through Brexit, covid and how to stay sane whilst parenting two kids under three.

In January we moved our small family back to my wife's extended family in a little town in the northwest of Italy. Rising cases here mean we're now in a red zone. Yesterday we went back into lockdown. Nursery is closed again and, except for essential journeys, our world is limited to a radius of 200m. As two working parents the juggling of priorities continues.

There’s never enough time in the day

Exercise is one of the pieces we’re juggling as a family. It’s often the first that gets dropped. When times get busy it seems more efficient to prioritise other bits of life.

When we started Byrd we thought it was too mechanical to talk about time. 

Running isn’t about efficiency it’s about the wind on your face, the excuse to listen to a podcast, a chance to have an adventure. We associated time with quick fixes and it didn't feel like it fitted with the holistic approach we wanted to take.

In our user testing and interviews we heard about time - or lack of it - a lot. It was a top barrier to getting out. But we remained skeptical. Surely, we said internally, talking about time would limit what we were trying to create. 

We were wrong. Time is the most essential component that Byrd works with. My experience of the past three months made me, and us as a team, better able to see the real ‘why’ of what we’re building.

Byrd's the only running product that works with everyday life. 

Working with everyday life

At the most basic level Byrd does this by understanding your schedule, placing runs at runner-friendly times and phasing runs so that they sync with your body’s natural cycle of recovery and supercompensation. But it also fits around everyday life by being perfectly tailored to how fast you run, how far you run and what type of running you want to do. 

The product is designed - from the ground up - to support disobedience: if you want to do something different to the plan Byrd’ll figure it out.

More broadly it’s fitting around everyday life by following Steve Krug’s maxim of “Don’t make me think.” Using Byrd you don’t have the constant tension of guessing at what the best thing to do next would be. If you miss a run, change a run, add a run or have an immovable object in your calendar Byrd will adapt. 

As with supporting disobedience it was a starting principle of the product that technology should adapt to runners and not the other way around.

Over the past months I've had to auto-pilot my training. It’s been a good dog-fooding test.

In Bristol I changed the training mode to ‘maintenance’. When I arrived in Italy, and all I could manage were some loops of the garden, it got shifted down to ‘holiday’ mode. Now I’ve put it back up to ‘performance’ since it felt like I could start pushing forwards again. 

I'd be lying if I said I was able to rely 100% on Byrd. I often found I was following the spirit but not the letter of how it was coaching me. It’s one of the reasons we’re still sitting on the next beta release (and were celebrating ticket #1,111 last week). But even the spirit of an adaptive plan coaching me to my goal was a step change improvement on working it all out myself. Without the nudge of knowing what I was doing, and the impact it was having, I wouldn’t have made it out the door as much as I did.

The right run at the right time

The ‘what’ of Byrd is to give the right run, at the right time, personalized to you as an individual. Depending on your circumstances that could be a five-minute jog or a five-hour hard run through the mountains.

When conferences still happened I saw Bill Buxton give a talk titled 'Wild Design for Living in the Wild'. Unpacking at the weekend I found a sketchbook with notes where he talked about his view of ubiety. It had a formative impact on my thinking with Byrd. Byrd could only work if it was relevant to the locality and context of the individual at that specific moment in time. Or as his conference text more eloquently put it, “Interaction design is not about technology but about understanding interactional dynamics within a given context and designing for them". 

Creating the right run at the right time requires Byrd to think laterally about time. It isn’t just about time on your feet. Our bodies are debilitated by stress. In training we consider this to be a good type of stress. It's the kind where you're consciously working certain systems to make them stronger. Life stress though has the same debilitation and there’s no point having a coach telling you to layer stress on top of stress.

The only way then to know that it's the right run, at the right time is for Byrd to know more than just your schedule. Byrd goes beyond the schedule to track the cumulative stress created by your training alongside the stressors you have elsewhere in your daily life.

Stretched days

Moving into a new flat there’s a whole new layer of work to do. Here in Italy there’s a weird thing where all the light fittings and the entire kitchen go with the previous occupant. I’ve gotten very good at wiring in LEDs and swapping out UK-style plugs for the Italian L-plug.

If we hadn’t moved there’d have still been constraints. There's never enough time in the day. Especially right now in lockdown, time has taken on a strange amorphous property where it seems days can disappear without making a noise. As the well worn aphorism goes, time’s the only commodity we can't buy.

Before Byrd I worked at Dyson. I left, in part, because I couldn't justify the commute. There were two dead hours every single day - a working day a week, 23 waking days a year - that I could never get back. No amount of team, interesting projects or salary could make up for that loss. 

In hindsight the early genesis of Byrd was trying to claw back some of that time. I had a mad scientist spreadsheet pulling together all the various mathematical models from my research underpinning my training. It meant, as I rolled along the M4, I didn’t have to plan anything, the plan had already been created and it meant that I could still fit running into my schedule.

Now, as a small team, we’re continuing in that vein, building a platform that works around everyday life to keep you running. We’re doing that by recognising that everyday life is complex, complicated and ever shifting. It’s only by creating something that’ll adapt, learn and respond to every person using Byrd that we can create something worthwhile.