This week I’d like to kick off a series inspired by the miraculous wonder that is the human body.  Over the next few blog entries I’ll use my basic understanding of the way our bodies work to draw some parallels to life.  We’ll start this series by thinking about homeostasis and running.  Please don’t report my writings with medical.  They already know I’m not on their level 😉

I run.  Actually, I more or less trample across moderate distances.  My goal whenever I run is to survive the first 30 minutes.  If I can make it that long then I can usually get in a good 60 minutes without too much additional difficulty.  I believe the reason this happens is because the body is always trying to find a state of homeostasis, a balance or rhythm if you will.  When I run I introduce activities that disrupt the balance I had sitting on the couch.   This makes my body work really hard until it can get back into the rhythm of doing things.

Let me give you a play by play if my body could talk whenever I go out on a run.  First, I get ready and I do a walking warm-up.  My body is all like, “Wait a minute.  We were comfortable where we were.  We had everything figured out.  Now he’s on the move.  This isn’t too bad though.”  After a short warm-up walk I begin jogging and my body starts by saying, “Oh, this is funny.  He’s running.  He’s not serious about this, is he?  I mean, the dude runs like a baby hippo.  He can’t run for too long, right?”  After about 5 minutes my body is screaming at me, “What are you doing?  Are you an idiot?  Running sucks!  We were just fine hanging out before.  This takes effort.  This is ugly.”  Eventually my body decides that it’s actually going to run for a while, so then it starts barking orders like it’s a sinking ship under attack by pirates, “Release the adrenaline.  Raise the heart rate.  Get his legs more energy now!”    My body continues that cycle for the first 30 minutes and then all of a sudden my body says, “Hey, now we got the rhythm.  You’re good.  Just keep going.  You got this!”

You’re probably wondering how this connects to work.  At work I think we are always trying to maintain some kind of homeostasis, some kind of rhythm.  The problem is that this rhythm gets disrupted all the time.  I don’t know about you, but whenever I start work on anything new it’s ugly.  Maybe it’s a new role.  Maybe it’s a new project.  Maybe it’s a draft of a blog.  Whatever it is, it’s slow moving.  It’s clunky.  I feel uncoordinated and like I don’t know what I’m doing.  This is kind of like my first 30 minutes of running.  Before I started the project I was in a form of homeostasis and that got all messed up when I started stretching myself in new directions.  After a while, I begin to get into the flow of things and then things start to fall into place and become easier.  Sure it still requires effort, but by that time I’m at least in some kind of a rhythm.  Do you ever feel like this?  The main reason I bring this up is because if you’re in the beginning clunky phase it’s easy to get frustrated and think it will never get better.  It’s easy to want to stop, because you feel this ugly work isn’t going to go anywhere.  This is when we all need to take a deep breath and remember that in this phase we are in the first 30 minutes of our run, and if we can just gut it out for a little bit longer things will finally start to go smoother. 

The challenge: Can you gut it out for those “first 30 minutes”?  Here’s to us being okay with being a little clunky until we hit our stride 😉

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry