If all goes well this picture post won't appear on Facebook (or in my rss.xml feed) for at least 48 hours. Found a little bug in the code that grants me this grace period between when I post with my camera phone and when I give the day's pictures a title and a description.
After a whirlwind week and a Saturday that just wouldn't quit I find myself on a Sunday morning. With some coffee. Doing some geeky research.
My Verizon New in Two plan matures on Feb 20th. Which means it's time to get a new phone. I've been eyeballing the Palm Pre since they announced it, what, a year and a half ago? Verizon finally started carrying them on Jan 25th. It's definitely the frontrunner.
But then Marty Trujillo goes and blogs up a storm about his Droid. I started looking into the Nexus One and like the notion of its many-pixeled screen and fab OS. It's not out for a while though. And its form factor is bigger than the Pre.
My laptop drive is again driving me nuts. It locks the CPU up and generally makes the CPU unbearable. It's my second SSD on the Dell d420 and last night I gave up on SSD after 3 years and was ready to roll out to Frys to get a new, standard one. My father was up for the trip.
This morning I woke him up on instant message and checked store hours. Also looked into the details of the drive I need more closely. Turns out it's hard to find and nobody in town will actually carry it.
Damn early adopter-ness.
Got onto chat with Dell... not in the mood for human interaction today. Took a while but found a 40Gb for $200. Most lappy hard drives are running $60 for 160Gb. But it has the hard-to-find ZIF connector and the Dell-won't-sell-separately rubber bootie that makes it fit into the case perfectly. Father was up for the spend so I started to place the order.
Then Sr finds my entire laptop on eBay for $300. With a 60Gb hard drive. Wtf? So I cancel the hard disk order.
And now we're in research mode trying to figure out what to do.
Still sipping my coffee, avoiding human interaction. Plenty of that coming up this week.
For years I've told people that "I'm not easily offended." But that's not an accurate statement. If you hit the right issue in the right way I'm terribly easy to offend. What I should have been saying all these years is that "I'm not offended by many things."
People take too many things too seriously. To many causes. To many us vs. thems. I like to pick my battles and if I don't have a dog in the fight I don't really care what you say.
Why the change? I told my dentist, Dr. Snyder, that I'm hard to offend. He raised his eyebrows and said that he's easy to offend. Which got me thinking. After a couple weeks, this blog post.
What are my issues? They usually boil down to respect for others. In life. In business. In politics. I'm quite sensitive to respect. Argue against somebody all day and I'm cool with it. But insult that person and I'm jumping in.
Today I was struck (again) by the power of ingrained thought patterns in training. A little review: in the beginning I went short and hard... after a season or so I learned the power of base training and did a lot of it... after three seasons or so I learned to base train early and then turn towards speed/intensity later in the season... by the fifth and sixth season I was trying to maintain certain speed targets year round.
Which brings us to today. After a couple (few?) good solid years I've had a major lull in training this winter. Thought patterns contributed to this lull and have made it tricky to get out. I'm not sweating it but it's worth noting.
As the season ends I find myself pretty fit with a bunch of speed. I always... always... say that I'm going to take it easy. And then I always... always... hit it hard... every single workout. Which burns me out, spends through my base training bank account and leaves me a heaping pile of not fit.
But why? I know better. I know base training is what I should be doing. Heck, it's what I want to do. The answer is thought patterns.
It's deeper than just "what should i do today?" It's a drive. It's in the reptilian brain. I'll start off-season workouts slowly but I can just feel myself getting pulled into the speed and intensity.
Fast forward through the burnout and bottoming out of fitness to today. I start to get back into it. I have no time goals. No urgency. Just out to enjoy a pre-dawn run. But there's the drive to go faster. It's what I remember. It's the last training memory my reptilian brain has so it pursues it.
I also experience the reverse. When I'm All Base, All the Time and try to switch into the speedwork I find that I have to change my thought patterns dramatically. I go for speed but suddenly find myself at a base exertion.
Being aware of it should help me counter it. But I've been aware of it for a long time. It's a skill. A skill that needs to be honed. Mixing up base with intensity is something I don't do well. I get into one mode or the other. I should try to be more balanced.
I suspect we all experience this patterning in many areas of our life. Food. Work. Relationships. But in triathlon the undercurrents come to the surface a little more obviously thanks to the magic of heart rate monitors and gps. Relationship-o-meter anybody?
Team I.D. presenting to, well, can't tell ya. But we had fun doing it and we look forward to the next steps. Michael Gibson worked on a mural for the Herman Miller space in Atlanta. They offered usage of their incredibly modern meeting rooms so we took them up on the offer.
My friend Michael Bennett is putting on the 2010 North Cobb Warrior Metric Century on March 27th. He's been kind enough to share behind-the-scenes with me over the past few months as he's gotten it off the ground, gotten township clearances, etc, etc, etc. It's going to be a great event with a great course. Put this one onto your calendars. Check the attached flyer for details. Thanks to Michael for putting this together. More info as it becomes available!
X-ray of my father's neck and the titanium hardware. Today was his one week checkup. He's doing well, ahead of schedule. Can take the neck brace off a bit too.
I'm getting better about balancing my life. Haven't worked out in over a week. Busy with travel and a new office. New partners. Lots of stuff to do. In the past I might have tried to turn myself inside out to get the workouts in. Or I might have beaten myself up about not getting them in.
Not in 2010! It is what it is! I feel some pressure with the 50 miler on March 6th... and I haven't run over a couple miles at a time in the last month or so. Maybe I'll skip it. Other things are more important right now.
And I seem to do better when I find a solid bottom to the season anyway. A clear point where I say, well, I'm officially completely untrained. I think I'm pretty darn close. Now the rebuild. Which is kind of fun to think about!
"Hi, I'm flying into LaGuardia today," I said. "Your reservation is for JFK."
Ok, so I figure the plan has changed. I didn't make the reservation. I get up to NYC and call the gentleman picking me up. "Where are you?" "I'm outside on the curb at Passenger Pickup." "Where? I don't see you."
Three or four calls later he asks "Are you at LaGuardia?"
Not exactly. Quite funny. An omnipresent narrator would have gotten quite a kick out of it.
Charles drove me up to his Connecticut home. I met Ed for the first time. Later I met Michael, Ted and Wes who I'd spoken to many times but never seen in person.
We had a working session from 6 until midnight, at which point most of us were nodding off in place.
Saturday was an all day session. Six gents around a table, trying to make sense of it all. What's the plan? What're we building? Who will we sell it to? Etc.
Tiring stuff. On Sunday Ted and Michael drove me into the city, giving me a nice little tour along the way.
In the city I stayed with uncle Robert. He recently combined two apartments into one and it looks great. With all of the extra wall space he's also building an art collection of bigger pieces.
Sunday night we had dinner with the Justers. I knew Chip and Laurie when I worked at my uncle's law firm before college. They didn't have Cleo, a delightful and enthusiastic 12 year old, when I knew them. Laurie now teaches 3 year olds so I got a bunch of great tips! Chip is a cyclist and investment manager. We at at Quarrto Gatti and had a wonderful evening.
On Monday I met Dave at Grand Central Station (yes, at the clock) for coffee. While waiting for him my goal was to get into as many pictures as possible. All the tourists out in force with cameraphones. Great to see Dave, lots of good ideas.
Uncle Robert and I hit a little Persian restaurant near his house. My salmon kebab was great. From there we retired to the apartment to chat. I enjoy my chats with my uncle Robert. Great perspective. And great to have somebody to vent to.
Today I fly back to Atlanta to my cabin fevered family. With the ice in the neighborhood (and its hills) they've been in since Thursday. Yikes.
There's a very solid layer of ice on the side streets. Our neighborhood is very hilly so a 4:45am departure meant that I was cutting first tracks and probably averaged 13mph to the gym. But the payoff was great. An LA Fitness all to myself. By 6:30 only a few folks had straggled in. Trip back was even more dangerous with a few very steep downhills. I have to head to the airport in a couple hours. The main streets are ok. But getting out of the neighborhood again isn't very appealing right now.
My father had some surgery on a disc in his neck that was causing nerve issues in his shoulder and arm. He's through it and recovering. Hopped up on morphine. In a neck brace. Not exactly happy but not miserable.
I took a sunrise walk after my morning swim and run. My father walks a lot. He's having surgery on a nerve in his neck/shoulder this week. It's cold by Atlanta standards... 18 degrees... but walks always have a way of warming up my thoughts. Around the new year is a great time to reflect on the past year and plan the next year.
For the first time in about six years I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm not a pessimist and I don't like the jaded side I've developed. But I chose a tough path with a steep learning curve. I've learned a lot and built a lot. In the next couple years things'll turn a corner. Things won't turn around for us in 2010. But I don't think they'll be much worse. Trust me, that's a big change in my thinking.
As often discussed, I see my life as a stool with three legs. Or a rocket ship with three engines. Or a three legged dog. Or a monster truck missing a wheel. Or a... well... you get the picture.
Family
Active parent. I want to be one of those parents that's always got an activity for the kids. Always dragging the family to the museum or north georgia or to see the world's biggest ball of wax. Doing this is important for many reasons. It creates family time. It gives the kids new experiences from which they can build perspective. It shows the kids that you need to take advantage of this life. It teaches the kids how to plan things. And, of course, it's just fun... ball of wax!
Get the kids into a good school district. This is a bit of foreshadowing... we're already trying... but the kids need to be in a better school district. Ava enters kindergarten this year. Our current school district is 460ish out of 1100ish schools in Georgia. And Georgia's 39th in the U.S. FAIL.
Work
Make some money from the IP. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? I've been building intellectual property for too long. I need to switch gears and start to monetize it. I may need to develop sales. Or raise some money. Or attract the right people to move things forward. None of these has anything to do with technology. I've been calling this "Going into BizDev Mode" for a while. For way too long. Need to finally do it or I'll lose six years of late nights battling code and servers.
More consulting. Consulting can bring much-needed financial stability to our family. I can't accomplish Family or Fitness goals when I'm working 16 hours days fighting servers and making no money. Consulting brings in some cash. It also exposes me to lots of new people which creates opportunities for the IP.
Fitness
Less iron, more man. I think I've pretty much burned out on my sub-10 hr Ironman goal. Coming within six minutes was such a tease. I was well on my way in 09 but colds/flus bumped me off course in the critical late season. The race failures forced me to ask whether or not it was worth the investment. Right now it's not. I still want to shave those 6 minutes but I'm willing to let it go for now. That said, I am signed up for Ironman Florida in 2010.
Long term ultra planning. I've always been intrigued by the big ultras... Western States, Badwater, Leadville, etc. It takes years to build the resume and find the luck to get into those things so I want to start laying some groundwork this year. I'd like another hundy on the books. I'm considering Christian Griffith's Run Across Georgia for some multi-day experience.
Mo fun. Having a tight goal is a good thing and can motivate. I rode my goal hard for five seasons but I think the sixth was one too far. I need to get back to having fun with it. Little/no structure. More epic workout experiments. More crashes followed by laughter and a blog post instead of tears and a life eval.
Generally I want to live life with less urgency. Heather says I have "urgency issues." I do. I don't respond well at all when somebody tries to artificially add urgency to a situation. But I create a ton of urgency myself. I feel like I'm always living on the edge... always late for something... always need to check a few todo boxes.
I noticed such feelings when I traveled many years ago. So I made a concerted effort to travel easy. To relax and not sweat the lines and general chaos that is travel. I got pretty good at it and do a good job of insulating my thinking from things around me. I need to bring that skill to my daily life.
And finally, the Big Lights video from the morning walk:
SoCon08