Now there is a word that you either love or hate. Meetings can be great fun and achieve great results or they can be turgid and dire wastes of time. Most are somewhere in between I suspect.

Today, a colleague and I tried something a bit different. We met up to progress a project we are both involved with, but instead of sitting round a table we donned our running gear and headed out for a four mile run. We managed to maintain a reasonable pace and talked as we went. Actually maintaining a conversation helped to keep our pace steady too.

Did we chat about work all the time? No, of course not. We admired the view talked about how we were coping with the pace too. But we did cover quite a lot.

One our return we quickly grabbed a shower and retired to a hot tub where we continued our conversation, before concluding with some lunch.

Now ok, this wouldn’t work for every meeting, we didn’t need to take any notes, but we did manage to agree how to take forward our project and it was all very amicable.

So in no more time than a traditional meeting would have taken, we got our work done, got some exercise and food and left feeling relaxed and refreshed. It felt easier to chat somehow and a lot less pressurised too. Definitely worth doing if you are meeting another runner for business. Who knows a race might even settle any disputes too!