On long runs and thinking time
Why running is the most effective thinking time I've found, and what that says about how I work.
Most of my best ideas come on runs. Not shower thoughts — longer, more structured thinking that seems to need physical motion to unlock.
I’ve tried to understand why this is. My best guess: running occupies just enough of my cognition to prevent the anxious loop-checking that happens when I sit still and try to think hard. The part of my brain that wants to check Slack or reopen a tab is busy managing my pace and route. What’s left over is surprisingly productive.
The ideas I work through best this way tend to be the stuck ones — problems where I have all the pieces but can’t find the arrangement. The run doesn’t give me new information; it gives me a different context to recombine what I already know.
What I’ve noticed
Long runs (90+ minutes) are significantly better than short ones for this purpose. There’s something about the second half, when the novelty of the effort wears off and the thinking can go deeper.
I’ve started treating a hard problem like a deliberate agenda item for a long run rather than hoping for accidental insight. That works better than it has any right to.
The limit
This doesn’t work for problems that require reference material — code I need to read, data I need to interpret. It works for design, for writing structure, for arguments I’m trying to make. Anything that can live in working memory.
I don’t know if this is universal or specific to how I’m wired. But I’ve talked to enough other engineers who describe the same thing that I think there’s something real here.