Circle of Capacity
We’ve been in St. Augustine for the past two weeks. I’ve met and run with some folks from the Ancient City Road Runners, a club with about 300 members of varying ages and abilities. It’s amazing how runners quickly connect and develop threads of friendship. I attended their monthly club meeting at the local library where Matt Reider, a local physical therapist, made a presentation about the importance of building and maintaining what he called our “Circle of Capacity.”
This was a term I was not familiar with but drawing from Reider’s presentation and a bit of research, it’s clear this describes what we should be considering in our training plans. In short, the Circle (I’ll call it that here) represents the outside borders of our physical, mental, and psychological conditioning. When we push the circle outward through rigorous efforts, it gets bigger. When we let up, it shrinks. Reider used the example of an injured runner who sits around waiting for the body to repair itself. He notes this leads to a smaller circle such that when we return to action, we have to go through the process of building back up. He did not specifically mention aging, but it’s well known the use-it-or-lose-it syndrome pertains more to our physiological systems in senior years than in our 30s and 40s.
I find it helpful to visually think about this concept by extending my hands to draw an imaginary circle. I then consider the area within this circle, which might (loosely) be seen as our total capacity. Since the area of a circle is A=p (3.14) x r2, and if this area represents our total capacity of some or all of our physiological capacities, then we can compare the total area when the radius decreases.
To make this more concrete, let’s look at a simple example. Say our Circle of Capacity is represented by a radius of 3. Then we get injured and slack off and the radius of our Circle declines to 2, a one-third decrease. On a relative basis, this is not that unrealistic as we lose peak fitness quickly with inactivity. Using this example the measure of our pre-injury capacity is 28.3 (3.14 x 32) whereas the post-injury capacity is 9.6 (3.14 x 22), or just 34% of the pre-injury capacity. That is a lot of ground to make up!
Without getting buried in the math, the point is there is a geometric increase and decrease in our physiological capacity. And this has psychological implications, since if we’re feeling tired and unable to push it, this impacts our disposition and can affect our motivation to train using alternative modes. The good news is this circle grows exponentially as well, though it typically takes longer to increase capacity than it takes to lose it.
For sure, this is a simplistic example (that a learned person might find holes in) that I am using to make a point. And this is we need to be constantly on guard to maintain and ideally increase our capacities so that our circle remains as large as is possible at each stage of our lives. The tendency is we lose strength, flexibility, and balance with age. And the hard truth is it takes regular work to offset these losses.