How a Breakthrough in Marathon Training Led to a Breakthrough in How I Facilitate Brainstorming

I design and facilitate workshops that help people understand and solve their toughest business challenges. I love it. I’m also a runner. I love that, too. Recently, these two worlds collided in a very unexpected way. 

First, the running part. 🏃🏻

For me, running really started six years ago when I decided I was going to run the New York City Marathon. I started off like many people. I downloaded a training program from a running website. 

The program was pretty straightforward. The idea with any marathon training is to progressively build yourself and your miles up over time so that you can handle the 26.2 mile grind on race day and avoid injury along the way.  It all seems impossible until it isn’t.  

Each individual run has two main components. 

• Miles (how far you run)
• Pace (how fast you run)

A typical training week might look like this. 

Quantity-focused running plan: 

For a week like the one pictured above, I’d run a total of 33 miles. The following week, some of those runs might increase a bit in miles. Eventually, a week might involve 40-50 total miles and magically, you can handle a 20+ mile run! It’s pretty unbelievable how the body adapts.

I had completed 4 marathons in 4 years using plans like this one. My times improved a little from race to race, but not much. I was far from elite, but I was completing marathons. 

Then Coach Mike entered the picture. Coach Mike is a friend of a friend I’d known for a few years. We’d talk about running whenever we ran into each other. He was way faster than me, and I couldn’t fathom coming close to his marathon times. He disagreed. 

Mike was in town, and we met up to do a few runs together. When I say runs, picture me pushing myself to the brink of collapse while Coach Mike cruises along, sipping tea, pinky up, reading the newspaper without breaking a sweat. (At least that’s what it felt like.)

Around this time, I’d just signed up for what would be my fifth marathon and I was starting to ramp up my training using one of my usual plans. 

After the run, Coach Mike strongly encouraged me to try a new training method. He’d get me through it and promised I had way more in the tank than I knew. 

From my puddle of misery, I squeaked out, “OK, let’s do it.”

And so it began.

I began to follow Coach Mike’s training program. Immediately, I saw some differences from what I was used to. 

For one, I got my training plan one week at a time. I liked this a lot. All I had to think about was what I needed to do that week because I didn’t even know what the plan was for next week. It turns out he didn’t either. We’d check in each week to see how things went. Then I’d get a plan that built on how last week went.

My old tried and true plans always showed me the whole 18-20 weeks of training in one view, which stressed me out and made the whole thing feel less achievable. The thought of checking off 100 boxes was terrifying. And during week 1 where my longest run might be 6 or 7 miles, how the hell was I supposed to wrap my head around running 20? 

But in Coach Mike’s world, I lived one week at a time. I could make it through one week.

The next thing I noticed was how much less mile-focused it was. Yes, I was putting in serious miles, but the runs all had a different intent. I’d never before thought about running in “minutes”. A training week might look like this:

Intent-focused running plan:

I immediately loved the variety. On days that only required me to run a certain amount of time (50 minutes any pace), I could ignore my pace and just run how I felt. If I felt good, I’d go a little faster. If not, I’d go a little slower. I’d enjoy the trees, the birds, the clouds and know that the activity would be over in exactly 50 minutes no matter what I did. There’s something calming about that. 

Some days were intentionally “easy” which was a relief. If I was going slow, I didn’t beat myself up about it. I was doing what I was supposed to.

Tempo days felt much easier because I knew it was the plan to go fast. And I didn’t squander those days because I knew the next day would be an “easy” or something else. 

I also loved the breakdowns of individual runs. Instead of thinking I needed to run 15 miles, I’d head out thinking, “10 min warmup, 12 miles, 10 min cool down”. 

Of course, I knew the miles were the same, but reframing the activity in my mind totally changed my relationship with it. 

Also, almost every week was different. It never got boring. I always thought running was running. I didn’t think there were so many different ways to do it. But along the way, I rarely did the same kind of run twice. 

You might be wondering whether all of this “intent-focused” running makes you a better runner. 

YES! Along with enjoying the process, I ended up crushing my previous fastest marathon time by ten minutes, which is a lot in running terms!

OK, now for the brainstorming part and the magical tie-in! 📝

(You didn’t think I forgot did you?)

I design and facilitate Design Thinking workshops. A regular component of these workshops is structured brainstorming. I always believed brainstorming worked best if you had three components:

1. A prompt to provide focus (“How might we make the online checkout process easy for time-crunched shoppers?”)
2. A place to capture people’s output (sticky notes and a whiteboard)
3. A timer to encourage focus and avoid overthinking (4 minutes)

I’ve seen this recipe work wonders countless times. 

A typical series of brainstorming activities might have looked like this:

Quantity-focused brainstorming plan: 

Traditional brainstorms often take the form of unstructured discussions dominated by personalities and hierarchies. Those usually don’t produce anything useful, and participants leave feeling frustrated. 

An unstructured discussion is like going out for a run with no direction or intent. You might get the blood pumping, but any other outcome is unlikely. 

Compared to that, the Prompt - Capture - Timer approach above works wonders. 

I thought I had the right recipe, but, after facilitating a recent workshop, I received some feedback that caused me to reconsider my view. A workshop participant shared with me that they loved the workshop. It checked some important boxes.

• Breakthroughs? ✅
• New perspective? ✅
• New tools? ✅
• New ideas? ✅

But…. they said, by the 4th or 5th brainstorming activity, they were pretty burned out on the process. It had required a lot of extra effort to push through the last few. 

It got me thinking…. In that workshop, I used the same criteria for each brainstorming activity. A focused prompt, a place to capture, a timer. And I’d always encouraged them to “go for quantity”. Each brainstorm was quantity focused, a lot like my old marathon training plans. 

That was probably exhausting. Every time, having to come up with as many ideas as possible before the timer went off. Every time, knowing the task was the same. 

It reminded me of why I started to feel burned out on running. No matter what the day’s run was, I was aiming for a certain number of miles. The more I ran, the less I was enjoying the process.

Now, was that running approach successful? Absolutely. I completed four marathons that way. But now I saw a new way.

The new, intent-focused, running program gave me variety. It renewed my love for running by simultaneously giving me more freedom and more guardrails. I had the freedom to run fast or slow on the “any pace” days. I had the guardrails to do “easy” runs on some days and “tempo” runs on others. And the combo days did a great job of breaking the task into smaller chunks. 

Could this work for brainstorming? 

Spoiler alert: So far, YES! 

Since this revelation, I’ve started to break up the brainstorming activities into different intents. I still always use a prompt for focus and have a place to capture, but the rest is different. 

Now, a series of brainstorming activities might look like this:

Intent-focused brainstorming plan: 

So far, this mixed approach is working amazingly well. Keeping it simple is important. For example, I don’t outline all of these approaches upfront. That’s too much cognitive load and people don’t really need to know what’s coming next for it to be effective, much like I didn’t need to know what next week’s training plan looked like. 

The early results are strikingly similar to what I experienced with running.

• The methods simultaneously provide freedom and guardrails.
• The variety keeps it fresh.
• The intentionality provides focus. 

I’m planning to keep experimenting with this mix of tactics, but so far, I’m convinced. At times, I can’t believe I did it any other way!

Unfortunately, brainstorming doesn’t have a nice, clean, 26.2 mile validation test in the same way running does. 

That said, few would argue against the value of brainstorming, innovation, and the ability to make breakthroughs as a critical part of any successful business. 

And if you can be great at that part, you greatly increase your chances of excelling in whatever business race you find yourself in!

So why not try it?