Building Capacity

Building the capacity for long-term thinking, is a form of exercise. Running a marathon is not a one-day event. It starts on the first training run. 

Developing a movement culture to gradually increase your strength. Putting yourself under controlled stress to learn about yourself. To build your skills and knowledge in a way that you believe you are capable in difficult situations. Reflecting on how you react. Seeing what kind of support you need. 

The body has a use it or lose it efficiency that comes standard. Once confident in similar situations, auto-pilot gets turned on, but where you don’t use something regularly it disappears. 

Which means you need to build up capacity to stay involved and stay conscious. Part of endurance is reserves. The ability to pull on extra when you need to go deep. Very physical requirements that come from eating properly, cooking properly, and recognising what your body needs beyond what it craves. 

A very sad legacy of Apartheid was promising sports stars coming through where despite “picked from nowhere” support, the gap of early childhood nutrition meant their body didn’t have the structural back-up for sustained performance without injury. Grounding matters. Consistency matters. Back-up and reserves, matter. 

When running a marathon, you need to take on nutrition and water regularly even before you need it. Otherwise, if you only respond when you do need it... it is already too late.