Strategies and plans - worth it or not?

Everyone will be familiar with these sayings: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy” (Tim Harford) , “Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face” (Mike Tyson), “By failing to prepare, you're preparing to fail” (Benjamin Franklin)…..

So, is it worth having a plan or not?  What’s the point if your plan is always going to change?

Strategies – a plan for (almost) all eventualities

Imagine this:  You’re 85 miles into a 100 mile race, chasing a cut off 5 miles from the last check point, you’ve been running for 30 hrs, it’s dark, it’s raining and you’re starting to get cold.  You’re GPS (planned navigation strategy for the whole race) just ran out of battery.  Then without warning your head torch dies as well.   This can end two ways:

1.      1. You sit down on the side of the trail and curse your bad luck.  “Why did they both have to run out now?”.  Sitting on the side of the trail you have a little [cry]/[shout of frustration] and lie down to give your aching legs a rest.  Before you know it 5 minutes has slipped by.  You suddenly realise you’re shivering and getting really cold.  You start looking for the spare batteries in your bag.  You can’t find them because you can’t really see as it’s so dark and wet.  It’s all going wrong.  Another 5 minutes slips by.  You find the head torch battery and then quickly find the GPS batteries.  You start moving but are really struggling to warm up – mentally you’re fried.  You get to the next road crossing still really cold and now very unlikely to make the cut-off.  That’s it, you’re done.  You sit down on the side of the road and decide to call it a day.  You call your support car to come and find you and pick you up.  Race over.

.       2. You stop, without thinking you get your spare tiny head torch you carry for just this situation.  You know exactly where you keep this.   You find both spare batteries.  You realise you’re getting cold.  You don’t feel like eating but know that you need some sugar to burn to get warm.  You take a sugary snack and get another layer on.  You quickly change your head torch battery but your fingers are so cold you can’t change the GPS battery.  You know exactly where your map and compass are and decide to go with this strategy until the checkpoint. You hardly break pace and keep moving.  You generate some heat and warm up pretty quickly.  Before the checkpoint you aren’t concentrating and your map blows away.  You don’t panic.  You’re warm now and look in your pack for the spare GPS batteries. You reach the checkpoint with 10 minutes to spare.  You change the batteries of your GPS, have some food, restock and keep moving. You finish the race and complete the journey you started.

Implementing my foot care strategy at Wasdale on the Bob Graham Round

You could say that in the second situation the person was just able to think more clearly about their situation and therefore salvage their race and finish. I don't buy this - no one is thinking clearly 85 miles into a race and having been running for 30hrs!  Both people had a primary plan that didn’t work but the key difference is the second person had strategies – they’d thought through as many eventualities as they could and made a plan for each one.  If this happens, then I’ll do this; if that doesn’t work, I’ll do this…. and so on.  Sometimes you might have A, B, C, D and even E options and you'll need to move quickly from one to the other.
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Effective strategies can be critical when the weather gets hostile!

I bang on all the time about strategies to people that come on my courses. “What’s your eating strategy”, “What’s your glove strategy”, “What’s your navigation strategy”…. the list goes on.  It’s clearly not possible to think through everything that could happen but mentally it puts you in a great position if you know what the options are without having to come up with anything new when you’re already knackered/cold/hungry.  No one makes good or quick decisions in that state.   The person in the second scenario had spent time thinking about the options, what could go wrong and what they would do.  They moved from one plan to the next plan as soon as they realised the first one was no longer viable. They carried extra kit to account for a particular situation.  They practiced using it and practiced alternative strategies.   They had done all the thinking up front and were in auto-pilot when everything went wrong.

The running ability and desire to finish of both people is identical but one finished and one didn’t.  The one that finished had strategies and had thought about things that might go wrong.  That got them over the line.

Don’t just make a plan, have a strategy, a strategy for everything that you can think of!  Even if it sounds too simple to bother about – nothing is too simple after 85 miles going into your second night of running when it’s windy cold and wet!

End of the UTS 50 in 2019 - strategies worked!