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A Shuttle Run Inside the Vertical Farm — Pushing to the Physical Limit

Imamura here. There was a day at a vertical farm when I was reminded of the shuttle run — but not quite in the way I remembered it from school.

The Adult Shuttle Run

I’m going to tell you about a shuttle run. Nothing inappropriate — I promise.

Just hearing the sound “beep, beep, beeeep” still makes my thighs tighten up a little. You know the one — the fitness test where you run back and forth between two lines set 20 meters apart, keeping pace with beeps that get faster and faster.

I was in the basketball club, so the shuttle run was part of my daily suffering. Once I became an adult, I thought I’d left that particular misery behind for good. I did, for a while.

Then I found it again — or something very like it — on the floor of a vertical farm.

One day, a senior colleague told me: “You’re on transport duty today. Easy work — just carry the lettuce.”

Not knowing any better, I nodded. At that point, my legs were still properly under my control.

The Reality of 30 Meters One Way

The distance from the harvest area to the trimming area was 30 meters one way. Written as a number, it doesn’t sound very far.

But the factory’s layout made it difficult to install a conveyor for this stretch, so transport was done by hand. Meaning: I would become the human conveyor belt. The phrase sounds almost dignified. Doing it in practice is rather quietly brutal.

The details of the task:

• Load per round trip: 50–60 lettuce plants
• Trimming team’s processing speed: they process each delivery of 50–60 plants in about 40 seconds
• Required pace: one round trip every 40 seconds
• Actual travel time: excluding loading and handoff, about 20–30 seconds to move
• Duration: 3 hours

At first, I thought a light jog would get me through. Thirty meters there and back — in my head, it seemed like pretty simple work.

But load, move, hand off, go back. Do that every 40 seconds and 30 meters starts to feel very long. Sweat was seeping into my grip on the cart handle, and the line on the floor seemed to keep receding ahead of me.

Three Hours of Round Trips

For the first hour, I still had some bravado to spare. I thought of myself as reasonably fit, and my internal monologue was still “I can handle this.” Even as I was soaked through.

By the second hour, my legs were getting heavy. I was just carrying lettuce — but somehow my breathing had started to sound like the end of a club practice. The sounds of the factory began to recede a little, and the only thing that came through clearly was the sound of the cart wheels rolling across the floor.

Somewhere past the two-and-a-half-hour mark, my limit was getting close.

I can’t go on. No — if I don’t deliver the next load, the trimming team stops. If they stop, the whole operation stops. Just push.

That’s roughly what was running through my head. When the school shuttle run ended, you could sit on the gym floor. But on the factory floor, when I stop, the work stops. That’s the hard part about the adult version.

My colleagues were watching, and they called out.

“Are you okay? You look completely pale.”

“The first time I did this, I couldn’t move on the way home.”

“You should probably prepare yourself for tomorrow’s muscle soreness.”

Kind of them. None of it helped.

By the time the third hour rolled around, various thoughts were passing through my head:

• The shuttle run in school was child’s play
• Has lettuce always been this heavy?
• I can’t picture myself climbing stairs
• Is this going to count as a workplace injury?

Even now as I write this, I can still faintly recall that sensation of “Is there another one? Really?” The lettuce was innocent. But that day’s lettuce was a little too heavy.

The Work Got Revised

In the end, the transport operation was reviewed, and the approach changed. At minimum, the pace was adjusted so the transport worker could walk the route without running. My suffering was not in vain. Probably.

But jokes aside, what this experience made very clear is how important it is to improve working conditions.

On the floor, people sometimes come to accept inefficient hardship as “just how it is.” But changing the approach even slightly can dramatically shift both the burden on workers and overall efficiency. Any system built on the assumption that people will power through on sheer determination — the longer it runs, the more it will break down somewhere.

I’d like to be able to tell my younger self: society has shuttle runs in all kinds of forms.

That said, even now, when a “beep” sounds in a factory, my body reacts just a little. Conditioned reflexes don’t go away easily.

Does your workplace have its own version of the adult shuttle run?