Immersion 3: Week Two Report (Chessing vs Running)

Good news. Parkrun - a weekly free 5k run held at 700+ different locations in 20 countries around the world - is coming back to Britain.

Or maybe it isn’t. The clowns and jokers that constitute Her Majesty's Government continue to make a total fecking horlicks of COVID. Not a surprise, I suppose, but still hugely depressing.

Still, it’s probably a good time to do Couch to 5k again anyway. It’s free, it’s proven effective and it gifts me a neat little lead in to a few thoughts on the difference between chess players and runners.

What’s not to like?

Parkrun venues around the world

This blog +40-odd in terms of countries,

Minus several million in terms of individual participants

I follow a bunch of different people on twitter. This includes a lot of chess players, obviously, and a lot of runners. Both camps are very much a mixed bag of pros and amateurs.

Here’s what I’ve noticed the runners don’t do on twitter:-

... spend any time talking about how to get better at running;

... spend any time debating whether anybody could become an olympic athlete if given the opportunities and encouragement to do see.

Literally not even once have I seen anybody tweet about this.

Here’s what runners typically do instead:-

talk about running;

talk about their training programmes;

often have coaches/trainers;

run regularly;

run a lot of miles;

spend most of their running time training and relatively little of it racing;

warm up before running;

mix it up by doing, e.g. hill work, intervals, different distances and speeds

run regularly;

run a lot of miles;

most of their running at relatively low intensity - often known as the weekly Long Slow Run;

talk about motivation - keeping it, losing it, getting it back;

train in cycles building to a peak before dropping the things right back and building up again;

have rest days;

cross train;

run regularly;

run a lot of miles;

collect medals not prize money.

Here’s some other things that is very noticeable about runners and parkruns. What we might call the 'running community’ for want of a better phrase:-

It’s much more diverse than chess in terms of gender;

It’s much more diverse than chess in terms of race and ethnicity;

It’s much more diverse than chess in terms of age;

Runners are often to be found supporting each other in terms of keeping motivation to keep running;

Parkrun in particular is designed for 'hobbyist’ runners. People who go to parkrun may have particular targets for their finish times, many do not. There is no community pressure on parkrunners to 'get better at running'.

Oh, and there’s no spurious bullshit about 600 million people doing park runs each week or whatever. Every park runner has a unique barcode so the numbers they report a guaranteed precisely accurate.

In consequence, the amount of spurious bullshitters within parkrunners are considerably reduced.

Not*

As a by-the-by, it’s kind of depressing that it’s hard to think of one single way in which chess is preferable to running in terms of 'community'.

My main Take Home this week, though, is what a chess training programme - my programme - could take from runners and running. Warm-up exercises prior at the start of the session for sure. Where else can I go with this?

We know what successful chess training isn’t (KMKY 8). We might not know for sure what successful training is - but I’m willing to guess that when we find out it’s going to look a lot like an effective programme for running.

* In case you were interested, the first item on the list is "bluffing". Then there's a link to an article "What Runners Can Learn from Golden Retrievers"