Dead weight!

Running long distance can be boring. It can be soul sapping and something you want over and done with as soon as possible. Often we pay a lot to enter races, we get up super early to train, in all weathers, we become fastidious about kit. None more so than multi-day races where you carry all your own food, water, kit, sleeping systems. Every gram seems to add to the misery, and nags at you on mile 50 that you’ve carried this useless collection of material around with you.

This is where my obsession with Human Factors is brought to bear. How can I shave off as much dead weight as possible. Well, firstly off me (but that’s a whole different subject). Secondly off the things I have to carry. For the Marathon des Sables I had the lightest bag of anyone I met (7.139kgs). Did I win? No I didn’t win. BUT I did get to the start line knowing there was not one more thing I could do to lighten my load, and that is worth a couple of miles a day.

It made me think about every piece of manufactured artefact. Toothbrushes, they are 90% handle! So that was cut down to the bare minimum, just so much so it fitted my fingers. Toothpaste and sunscreen was weighed and rationed for each day and put into a contact lenses cases. The pack I had was stripped to the bones, all elastic loops, strings, pockets, straps I didn’t need were trimmed off, even the labels were cut off. This went the same for all my running clothing, each t-shirt was weighed and all labels were removed, why did I need to carry around someone else’s marketing slogan? We had to carry 200 Euros, one 200 Euro note is lighter than four 50 Euro notes. The roll mat was cut down so it fitted my shoulders to hips and no more (230g). Energizer Ultimate Lithium batteries are the lightest AAA’s out there (8g). These marginal gains along with many others stopped me carrying upwards of an extra 3kgs of dead weight across 250kms of the Moroccan desert.

In my Human Factors brain I was reducing the error producing condition of physical overload/exhaustion to the minimum. In hindsight I should have carried 3kgs more of food…

But as the bag of cut off dead weight grew heavier and heavier I began to see dead weight everywhere. The use of resources over function has become fashionable. Look at the thickness of a car door, granted there are safety features and mechanisms but there are kilo’s and kilo’s of padding, wadding, materials, cup holders, fancy handles, filler. Does a thick door look like it has more quality? Why do I need to drive around so much dead weight? I remember my Mum’s Mini Metro had super thin doors, they must be at least three times thicker nowadays.

Military kit is ridiculously heavy. All procured separately and therefore the full load of a soldier never seems to be considered. Take the standard issue water bottle. Ruggedised for sure and solid heavy black plastic. My adventurous Aussie mate showed me the best water carrier is a 1.5ltr Coke bottle. Super light and can withstand anything. Try it. Throw a full bottle of coke (use water…) out of the window, slam it as hard on the concrete as you can, it won’t break. Ever. My standard issue walking into conflict equipment regularly topped 50kgs, very hard to react quickly to a contact instigated by a lightly equipped enemy. Every supplier of manpacked equipment must be challenged to reduce the weight of their equipment by 20%. Peace is won by increasingly and needlessly overladen young soldiers.

There’s dead weight everywhere, especially at work. So many things I used to focus on which were just window dressing, they were not a core element of my work. Why spend hours and hours making sure the formatting is perfect on a document that is fundamentally flawed? Why force a Word document out of a simple Excel sheet if Excel is the best tool to display the data? Why sit in a meeting because we’re not brave enough to say I’m leaving as I can’t contribute, and I don’t find it useful? Why review an incomplete document that has been handed to you by a lazy author?

I found that differentiating necessity over dead weight has saved so much time and energy. Which is great because it can be used far more productively elsewhere. I can run an extra metaphorical work mile every day now!