Everyday Systems

Hi, All. After a year's absence, I've manged to get back into Urban Ranging for my daily commute. I'm trying to remix it for my own needs, and here's what I've come up with so far.

The system I'm developing I'm calling Urban Recon; I laid it the basics out last year in this post;

http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=672

But in essence it's this; I keep with the idea of useful movement, and start with walking as the most basic method. I Jog when I can. When I become fitter, I intend to mix in running and parkour (for more on parkour, check out the similarly-named http://www.urbanfreeflow.com/) It's going to be a while...

Here's some things that have been helping me over the last few days.

Create a role

For me, it's really helping to do something of a role-play while I'm moving. Inspired by shovelglove's imaginative aspects, I've started imagining myself as an action hero -- that's where the name 'Urban Recon' comes from. Plain old meaning-free Jogging then becomes part of a mission; part of a purpose. You watch the surroundings more when you're on a recon mission. You're less likely to get run over. It gives you a way to fight back the voices that say 'you're not a runner,' a way to break out of old assumptions and to oust bad habits.

Use a costume

When I run, I wear the same baseball cap and fingerless gloves, and listen to the same playlist on my iPod. For me, it establishes a familiar routine. Again, part of the attempt to establish a 'program' in my brain that's all about running.

Name the course

If you're moving over the same route regularly, give the different parts names. Anything evocative helps; my route right now goes through;

- 'The ministry of love' (my local barracks)
- 'the old battleground' (the site of the 1066 battle of Fulford)
- 'tough crank hill'
- 'death hill'
- 'the concrete fens'
- 'the short half-mile' - that last few hundred yards before the door of my work.

Don't overdo it

I'm going to be doing this long-term, so I'd rather take it slow than strain myself. If I get particularly out of breath, I slow back down to a walk, wait until my breathing is more regular, then restart.

Steve,

Great to see you here again! And glad to hear you're still urban rangering (and then some).

These are great suggestions -- simultaneously very original and in the spirit of urban ranger/everyday systems. They're all great, but I particularly love "name the course." I've occasionally/unsystematic ally (well, at least once) named stretches, but not methodically like this. I think I'm going to. I'll post whatever I come up with to this thread.

I've been thinking of updating the urban ranger page with some more specific, practical suggestions for a while... these are better than anything I've been thinking. If I stick them or something like them there I'll give you credit, of course.

Thank you!

Reinhard

Glad you liked them. Feel free to use whatever you want.

More on naming the course; what's particularly cool about this is it can give you a way to react to the course. 'Tough Crank Hill' is named after the really short paces I do to take me up the hill at a jog but without being too winded -- small ratchet-steps that take me up. At the foot of tough crank hill, I don't need to think about my strategy for climbing it, which makes it subconscious-friendly, and better for habit formation.

And I never stop for breath on Death Hill.

--

I have one thing that I'd like to change on the list, to make it more specific;

don't overdo it becomes 'running through the pain' is a red light

It's day four and I've been trying to macho it out. I got some muscle soreness after day one and two. Yesterday and this morning I ran through the soreness, but it's just getting worse. I'm giving myself a day off, and using the habit traffic light system, I'm going to have to give myself a red light every day in the future where I run with muscle soreness. I don't need my animal brain making the link 'jogging=forks in legs' So overdoing it becomes a failure.

I'm thinking of a similar rule for no-s. If, on an s-day, I follow the n-day rules out of some overvirtuous 'more is better'/'eating s's on s-days is bad' feeling, then I'm sabotaging the diet just as much as if I snack on n-days. Put another way, the only way to fail an s-day is to force it to be an n-day.

This is my second week, and I've got a few more bits to share.

Only one week of pain. The first week I did this, I ran nine 2km stretches. The muscles ache through this first period; lots of muscle soreness, mainly. But that melted away at the weekend, and after just one week, my legs have toughened up so that now, I am in no pain at all. If anyone else wants to try this, don't worry - if you're like me, your natural enthusiasm will carry you through the first week, and after that it's just pleasurable. Know that there is a limit to your early problems.

A thousand start lines. I don't believe there's any virtue in jogging the whole distance. As the distance gets longer, you become less likely to be able to jog the whole way, so don't count it as a failure. If you have to slow down so much to keep 'jogging' that you slow down to walking pace anyway, what's the point? Rather, a jog-walk-jog alternating style works fine. It's the fastest way to cover ground. I'm counting it as a green light every time I work up a bit of a sweat.

But when should you jog and when should you walk? When I've been running, and now I'm walking, I have to decide when to run again. I find it useful to pick a visual start line when you're about ready to run again. Look say, 20 yards ahead. Pick out a tree by the side of the road, or a lamppost, or the end of a wall, or a bus stop. Decide that this will be your start line. Then, when you get to it, start running. Don't worry about how far you run -- just make sure that you do. Every time you hit a start line, you want to know, reliably, that you're going to run. Work on a persistent starting habit, and everything else follows automatically.

I've also taken to using a 'signal action' whenever I hit the start line. I pat the side of my leg a couple of times, a 'let's get going' signal that's a bit like the soft pat of a whip against a horse to tell it to start cantering. I don't suppose the particular action is of any consequence. It could be a little phrase you say to yourself, or a little boxing action if you want to feel like Rocky. Anything that ties the action of starting to run. I find that the trigger action pushes me reliably into a run.

Again, this type of running means that I'm not tracking times or distances; just using the state of my breathing to judge roughly when to start and stop, and nearby landmarks as starting lines. It could be more effective, could be more precise, but just like the No-s diet, the lack of counting helps establish the unconscious habit.

Week three was a bit of a washout, because I overdid it in the earlier two weeks.

From now on, I'll be running monday/tuesday and thursday/friday, and having a break on wednesdays.

I've also photographed my route and put it up on a flickr map;

Map of the Route

Steve,

Very cool... those flickr maps are perfect for urban ranger.

Sorry I haven't gotten around to the home page mods yet. I will. I'm slow, but very persistent.

Speaking of slow, a coworker invited me to go running with him today after work. I haven't run since before the turn of the millennium... so I have a feeling it's going to be a pretty pathetic and unpleasant experience. But I am a little curious (and cautiously hopeful) to see if all these years of urban rangering haven't done SOMETHING to prep me for this...

Reinhard

Reinhard, what's the report back on your running experience?

Pretty good!

More here:

http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=1885

I'm slow, but it's a respectable distance given I haven't run in years, and I'm not going anywhere near capacity.

Reinhard