Tag Archives: systemic archetypes

Thinking in Systems

Hitting The Wall: “The Tragedy of the Commons” in the marathon.

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All of us marathoners have a feared enemy: “The Wall”—that shock of exhaustion that always hits around mile 19. Those of us who are ultrarunners have gotten to know it better than our oldest friend. For some of us, it just might be our oldest friend.

We’re all beset by The Wall, until one day we outrun it, and it vanishes in the road behind us.

But why is The Wall such a shared experience? Why does it happen? And perhaps most intriguing: is it possible to find a way around it?

Yes. Systems thinking lets us explore recurring patterns of behavior, which is why it helps us to understand The Wall. The Wall isn’t inevitable; it isn’t “a fact of life” for runners. Most runners use their bodies in a particular way, and The Wall arises from the reality that most runners don’t use their bodies in the right way.

How many times have I heard a runner say, near the beginning of the race: “I’ll charge up this hill while I still have energy!”

Many. And that’s because the patterns of behavior that elicit such thinking are rampant. Continue reading Hitting The Wall: “The Tragedy of the Commons” in the marathon. →

Biomechanic Issues, Thinking in Systems, Training Ideas

The language of “static stretching:” How to identify systemic archetypes using linguistic clues.

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Static stretching is one of the most entrenched exercise habits in the western hemisphere, especially for runners. It doesn’t do any favors to our running economy, our injury rates, our long-term development of power—and yet it endures.

You would think this means that we have an unabashed cultural acceptance of stretching, but that isn’t so. No matter how positively we speak of stretching, or how much we proselytize its benefits, the language that we use to describe it (and its effects) continue to carry hints that it isn’t—and will never be—a real solution.

Continue reading The language of “static stretching:” How to identify systemic archetypes using linguistic clues. →

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Systemic archetypes: Shifting The Burden.

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‘’Shifting the burden” is a classic systemic archetype, which tends to show up in many social situations—including athletic training. “Shifting the burden” systems show up whenever there is an apparent, “symptomatic” solution to a problem—a quick-fix—which seems to clear it up. However, that solution has the disadvantage of causing side-effects that hinder the system’s capability to put in play a fundamental solution (which actually would solve the problem at its roots).

This archetype is called “Shifting the Burden” because the burden for solving the problem is “shifted” away from the fundamental solution to the “symptomatic” solution:

Shifting the burden m

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