Walls
Walls are in the news right now: physical walls as well as metaphorical ones - designed to keep people out from where they want to be.
In running we talk about The Wall - hitting the wall. It refers to the time in a long run where you can't go on - a step change in your physical and mental condition that is so great that you risk being unable to continue at all. They call it hitting the wall because that is what it is like - sudden, painful, and insurmountable. Of course many runners do surmount the wall - but it vividly captures the change of state between being OK and being decidedly not OK.
I have been lucky in that I haven't actually hit the wall - perhaps because I am so slow, I sort of stumble into it. So rather than hit the wall hard and bounce off, slumping to the ground injured and defeated, I tend to sort of tumble awkwardly over it. So I have got off lightly - so far - with hitting the wall. But still for me it represents that step change - an abrupt, surprising, and complete change of state.
I am lucky as a runner because I have - so far - never hit a wall over which I could not stumble, and carry on. And my walls have not been high, so I haven't - yet - been hurt by them. So rather than hitting the wall and catastrophically falling, I tend to get a sort of terrible weariness - wall-weariness - so that I can go on, but I don't want to, much.
I hit walking walls too - and mental ones. My work is abstract, logical, mathematical - long chains of complex reasoning, more of a math marathon than a sprint - and I have hit more mental walls than I care to remember. They feel the same - mental and walking walls - as does the running one. There is the same sense of a sudden change - of being OK, of doing fine, and then out of the blue you hit the wall. Well, stumble upon the wall, in my slow case.
I am quite interested in this sudden change. In running they have several explanations. One is that your body can only fuel the energy demand from fast-access stores for about an hour and a half - so anyone who runs a marathon in longer time than that hits the wall when your body switches to longer term but slower release stores. (The academic picture of this involves complex chemicals like ADP and ATP and tri-glycerides and all sorts of branching metabolic pathways, but I am not going all academic here.) So in this model, quite literally your body runs out of fuel and has to switch to a different fuel source - a bit like a dual-fuel vehicle switching from petrol to LPG. That is what it feels like - you want to say things like you 'have nothing left in the tank' or you 'ran out of fuel'. But it can't be the only explanation, because I hit low walls sometimes within much less than two hours.
It isn't predictable, or consistent. I have run only one competitive marathon but I ran several in training - hilly ones too - and I never hit the wall. But I have hit the wall in shorter runs - a hilly half marathon, and shorter runs - so it can't be simple physiology.
I hit the wall walking too. I have several times done a walk called the Four Inns - a 45 mile walk in England's Peak District. I stumble over that wall usually on Kinder Scout - the highest peak in the Peak District - or a bit later on the descent to Edale. That is a hard wall - about halfway on the walk, but devastating. Even so, I have been lucky enough to crawl over it and carry on. But after the wall is never the same as before - something changes totally, and you never recover during that walk, or run, or mental marathon.
Mental walls I have hit many times, and they are not related simply to nutrition - but they feel the same as the running wall. I am as slow a thinker as I am a slow runner, so I hit the mental wall slowly - but hit it I do. I can be thinking clearly, neatly - all the pieces slowly but surely clicking into place - and then I hit the mental wall and I just can't go any further. Well, I can, and often do, but the thought process is like dragging myself through mental mud - like slogging through the knee-deep peat bogs on Bleaklow. My mental wall is so like my running one that I think they are the same - or at least similar.
I am also lucky that my mental walls are in their way straightforward ones. And I have avoided emotional walls, which I think may be the worst. At the emotional crises I have encountered, I seem to have been too busy being emotional, or angry, or despairing, or just getting on with the whole practical pragmatic business of doing all the things that you still have to do even in an emotional crisis, so that I have been sort of too busy to hit - or at least to notice - the emotional wall. But I feel for people who do, and my own small walls let me feel sympathy and empathy.
I do feel empathy for the wall too, being hit. A few years ago I spent a week in bed with an eye injury, with workmen smashing down a stone wall in the hallway with sledge hammers. I could almost feel the wall's pain, being hit like that. The whole house shuddered in sympathy. Walls are things too - just not living ones - and deserve our sympathy at being abused. And the strength of a solid wall - the amount of energy in the sledgehammer swing need to even crack it, the number of blows needed to fell it - these illustrate how powerful, and how apt, is the metaphor of hitting the wall but with your body or your mind, not with a sledge hammer.
I hit the wall walking today - that is what inspired this blog entry. Sarah and I walked along the canal to Byfleet, which was fine - 9 km. But on the way back I stumbled upon the wall. We were close to Woking, so should have diverted and gone for a nice cup of coffee and a sit down, but we didn't - we carried on.
Big mistake, carrying on. When you hit the wall, stop. Rest. Go on only when you feel better. I should know, because as the author of Slow Running, I preach that: when your body tells you to stop, then stop. When your mind tells you to stop, then stop. Not stopping was a mistake. Of course I could carry on, so I did - but it became a slow progress with less of the pleasure of the first part of the walk.
Of course you can't always stop, nor do you always choose to. Stuck between Woking and St Johns (home..), stopping would have meant sleeping by the canal on the towpath - not much fun on a freezing day with snow still on the ground. And on a run, or in a race, you might decide to go on even so - only slower, necessarily.
Still, my advice would always be: when you hit the wall, sit on it. Don't pass it, or climb over it - sit on it. For a while. Or if you have to, then go on - but slowly, carefully.
So hitting this small wall today made me think about walls, and connect the mental one with the running and walking ones. And I remembered some time ago, talking to a physiotherapist. She was treating Sarah for a neck problem. Sarah's problems tend to be less hitting metaphorical walls that cause her to give up or slow down - slowing down is not in Sarah's vocabulary - but she suffers various and disabling physical problems. So for her it is less a matter of hitting a wall as of falling off a cliff - and then, being Sarah, climbing backup again. But were are not talking about Sarah here - nor even about me - we are talking about walls.
So this physiotherapist was helping Sarah to cope with pain. And as is my habit, while she was helping Sarah to learn how to cope with this pain, I was chatting about abstract concepts and philosophy of pain. Prompted, I might say in my defence, by a flowchart on the wall concerning the evolution of pain and the recognition of pain thresholds in physiotherapy. So this physiotherapist told me that pain is often a signal - from both body and mind, working in concert - to your brain (and probably to your body too, all unbeknownst to your conscious mind), telling it to stop.
But your pain threshold is normally set at a safe level - with a safety margin, so that you stop sufficiently well before doing yourself a real mischief. The problem being that sometimes that threshold does not take account of other needs: such as the need to stretch a strained muscle more than is comfortable, or to walk more than is comfortable to exercise an injury, or in training to deliberately stress your muscles just a little bit so they grow - or, in the case of the running wall, to go on even though you feel you can't.
The flow chart had some kind of graph, of pain versus risk, with the thresholds. I can't recall its details but I do remember the basic idea: that there is a threshold at which pain (or wall-weariness) seems unendurable - but that threshold is set lower than the real risk of final exhaustion or actual injury. Now this goes contrary to what I set out as a prime rule in Slow Running, which is, when it hurts, stop, because injury costs a lot more than not finishing a run. But we all know the exception proves the rule, so here I do suggest that so long as you don't hit the wall too hard, you can go on. It isn't necessarily super fun to go on, but you can - and if you do, so long as you don't go mad, you will probably be OK and will feel good about it later. And this probably applies to any hit wall - running, walking, or mathematical.
I suppose it is like the wartime slogan:
When you hit the wall
If you can't stop
And sit
On it
For a bit
Keep calm and carry on.
In running we talk about The Wall - hitting the wall. It refers to the time in a long run where you can't go on - a step change in your physical and mental condition that is so great that you risk being unable to continue at all. They call it hitting the wall because that is what it is like - sudden, painful, and insurmountable. Of course many runners do surmount the wall - but it vividly captures the change of state between being OK and being decidedly not OK.
I have been lucky in that I haven't actually hit the wall - perhaps because I am so slow, I sort of stumble into it. So rather than hit the wall hard and bounce off, slumping to the ground injured and defeated, I tend to sort of tumble awkwardly over it. So I have got off lightly - so far - with hitting the wall. But still for me it represents that step change - an abrupt, surprising, and complete change of state.
I am lucky as a runner because I have - so far - never hit a wall over which I could not stumble, and carry on. And my walls have not been high, so I haven't - yet - been hurt by them. So rather than hitting the wall and catastrophically falling, I tend to get a sort of terrible weariness - wall-weariness - so that I can go on, but I don't want to, much.
I hit walking walls too - and mental ones. My work is abstract, logical, mathematical - long chains of complex reasoning, more of a math marathon than a sprint - and I have hit more mental walls than I care to remember. They feel the same - mental and walking walls - as does the running one. There is the same sense of a sudden change - of being OK, of doing fine, and then out of the blue you hit the wall. Well, stumble upon the wall, in my slow case.
I am quite interested in this sudden change. In running they have several explanations. One is that your body can only fuel the energy demand from fast-access stores for about an hour and a half - so anyone who runs a marathon in longer time than that hits the wall when your body switches to longer term but slower release stores. (The academic picture of this involves complex chemicals like ADP and ATP and tri-glycerides and all sorts of branching metabolic pathways, but I am not going all academic here.) So in this model, quite literally your body runs out of fuel and has to switch to a different fuel source - a bit like a dual-fuel vehicle switching from petrol to LPG. That is what it feels like - you want to say things like you 'have nothing left in the tank' or you 'ran out of fuel'. But it can't be the only explanation, because I hit low walls sometimes within much less than two hours.
It isn't predictable, or consistent. I have run only one competitive marathon but I ran several in training - hilly ones too - and I never hit the wall. But I have hit the wall in shorter runs - a hilly half marathon, and shorter runs - so it can't be simple physiology.
I hit the wall walking too. I have several times done a walk called the Four Inns - a 45 mile walk in England's Peak District. I stumble over that wall usually on Kinder Scout - the highest peak in the Peak District - or a bit later on the descent to Edale. That is a hard wall - about halfway on the walk, but devastating. Even so, I have been lucky enough to crawl over it and carry on. But after the wall is never the same as before - something changes totally, and you never recover during that walk, or run, or mental marathon.
Mental walls I have hit many times, and they are not related simply to nutrition - but they feel the same as the running wall. I am as slow a thinker as I am a slow runner, so I hit the mental wall slowly - but hit it I do. I can be thinking clearly, neatly - all the pieces slowly but surely clicking into place - and then I hit the mental wall and I just can't go any further. Well, I can, and often do, but the thought process is like dragging myself through mental mud - like slogging through the knee-deep peat bogs on Bleaklow. My mental wall is so like my running one that I think they are the same - or at least similar.
I am also lucky that my mental walls are in their way straightforward ones. And I have avoided emotional walls, which I think may be the worst. At the emotional crises I have encountered, I seem to have been too busy being emotional, or angry, or despairing, or just getting on with the whole practical pragmatic business of doing all the things that you still have to do even in an emotional crisis, so that I have been sort of too busy to hit - or at least to notice - the emotional wall. But I feel for people who do, and my own small walls let me feel sympathy and empathy.
I do feel empathy for the wall too, being hit. A few years ago I spent a week in bed with an eye injury, with workmen smashing down a stone wall in the hallway with sledge hammers. I could almost feel the wall's pain, being hit like that. The whole house shuddered in sympathy. Walls are things too - just not living ones - and deserve our sympathy at being abused. And the strength of a solid wall - the amount of energy in the sledgehammer swing need to even crack it, the number of blows needed to fell it - these illustrate how powerful, and how apt, is the metaphor of hitting the wall but with your body or your mind, not with a sledge hammer.
I hit the wall walking today - that is what inspired this blog entry. Sarah and I walked along the canal to Byfleet, which was fine - 9 km. But on the way back I stumbled upon the wall. We were close to Woking, so should have diverted and gone for a nice cup of coffee and a sit down, but we didn't - we carried on.
Big mistake, carrying on. When you hit the wall, stop. Rest. Go on only when you feel better. I should know, because as the author of Slow Running, I preach that: when your body tells you to stop, then stop. When your mind tells you to stop, then stop. Not stopping was a mistake. Of course I could carry on, so I did - but it became a slow progress with less of the pleasure of the first part of the walk.
Of course you can't always stop, nor do you always choose to. Stuck between Woking and St Johns (home..), stopping would have meant sleeping by the canal on the towpath - not much fun on a freezing day with snow still on the ground. And on a run, or in a race, you might decide to go on even so - only slower, necessarily.
Still, my advice would always be: when you hit the wall, sit on it. Don't pass it, or climb over it - sit on it. For a while. Or if you have to, then go on - but slowly, carefully.
So hitting this small wall today made me think about walls, and connect the mental one with the running and walking ones. And I remembered some time ago, talking to a physiotherapist. She was treating Sarah for a neck problem. Sarah's problems tend to be less hitting metaphorical walls that cause her to give up or slow down - slowing down is not in Sarah's vocabulary - but she suffers various and disabling physical problems. So for her it is less a matter of hitting a wall as of falling off a cliff - and then, being Sarah, climbing backup again. But were are not talking about Sarah here - nor even about me - we are talking about walls.
So this physiotherapist was helping Sarah to cope with pain. And as is my habit, while she was helping Sarah to learn how to cope with this pain, I was chatting about abstract concepts and philosophy of pain. Prompted, I might say in my defence, by a flowchart on the wall concerning the evolution of pain and the recognition of pain thresholds in physiotherapy. So this physiotherapist told me that pain is often a signal - from both body and mind, working in concert - to your brain (and probably to your body too, all unbeknownst to your conscious mind), telling it to stop.
But your pain threshold is normally set at a safe level - with a safety margin, so that you stop sufficiently well before doing yourself a real mischief. The problem being that sometimes that threshold does not take account of other needs: such as the need to stretch a strained muscle more than is comfortable, or to walk more than is comfortable to exercise an injury, or in training to deliberately stress your muscles just a little bit so they grow - or, in the case of the running wall, to go on even though you feel you can't.
The flow chart had some kind of graph, of pain versus risk, with the thresholds. I can't recall its details but I do remember the basic idea: that there is a threshold at which pain (or wall-weariness) seems unendurable - but that threshold is set lower than the real risk of final exhaustion or actual injury. Now this goes contrary to what I set out as a prime rule in Slow Running, which is, when it hurts, stop, because injury costs a lot more than not finishing a run. But we all know the exception proves the rule, so here I do suggest that so long as you don't hit the wall too hard, you can go on. It isn't necessarily super fun to go on, but you can - and if you do, so long as you don't go mad, you will probably be OK and will feel good about it later. And this probably applies to any hit wall - running, walking, or mathematical.
I suppose it is like the wartime slogan:
When you hit the wall
If you can't stop
And sit
On it
For a bit
Keep calm and carry on.
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