One Year

Three days ago I passed the one-year mark with my current company and, perhaps more importantly, new career path. It has been a decent year but lessons about corporate America have been disheartening. It is all about the bottom line, and far too many times about the short-sighted bottom line at the end of the month, quarter, or year.

My company went through a significant salesforce reorganization in March with plenty of layoffs and territory restructuring. Since then the sensation has been one of being dazed, trying to recover from a stiff blow to the head. Understaffed and underfunded, it has been tough to maintain an adequate focus on growing business when it seems all you can do is try to maintain what you've got.

After a move into a different territory I am trying to grow while maintaining that most golden of dispositions: a positive attitude. I work with some great people and they really do make a difference in my day. I am being patient and hoping that things will change, although I am learning that having patience isn't a common virtue of corporate America. Should I be any different? I still want to be.

This tail's still twitching....

So after almost three years I've dug around my laptop's Mozilla password file and managed to successfully revive my nearly three year old blog. Gotta love that (I'm sure all my IT Security friends out there are rolling their eyes). I hated enforcing password policy when I was in IT. Poo poo.

I'm now in a different line of work. Is it everything that I've dreamed of? Maybe not everything, but it's pretty darned close. I can easily say I'm happy with my work, and that's a great thing that some people just don't have. I'm fortunate. Changing careers didn't come without its costs, however, some of which I'm still paying for (I don't have the life that most early 30-somethings have), and there were a few rock-bottom points along the way. Would I do it again? Probably, but it'd be better to ask me that five or ten years from now.

I'm getting back into triathlon again, too. Next stop is Cancun for the 70.3 Series race. I'm excited. I've always liked that distance but have raced only two. My last triathlon was the Quelle Roth Challenge Ironman in 2005. The race rocked. I didn't. Shuffled on home, I did, for the last half of the marathon with the six-fingered man from the Princess Bride whispering to me how many years of my life he had just taken away (refering to the dungeon torture scene of our good boy Wesley). And while I said it would be my last, I'm seriously considering IM Wisconsin next fall. Ask me after the race about how I liked it and I'll probably say the same thing I wrote two sentences ago.

So, in and out of the comfort zone, and back to hunt another day. In the words of Paul Sherwin, "That's what you get when you suffer - you get results." Bring it.

Classic Blunders

While Vizzini would have probably mentioned it had he not succumbed to iocane powder, another one of the classic blunders is wearing new shoes in a Marathon. Yes, I will admit freely my stupidity on this one. I assumed the shoes I bought would have had the requisite cushioning my feet needed for the 26.2 miles of road leading into Milwaukee at last weekend's Lakefront Marathon. Wrong assumption. I got fifteen in and called it quits.

Running Backwards

Destinations are often better reached while taking time to turn around and recall your origins. Something as simple as running backwards can give you this perspective.

On September 18th, after three days and sixty miles of pleasant weather walking through Donegal County, Ireland, gales and isolated rain showers were the conditions for the final day of my run, covering the last twenty-seven of four hundred and two miles from Mizen Head to Malin Head, Ireland's most Southern and Northern points, respectively. The day I started my run, August 19th, seemed to be ages ago and with the hours of walking I'd put in over those last three days, I was looking forward to this day ... the day I would reach Malin Head.

My left inner quadricep just above the knee, which I'd badly strained four days earlier forcing me to slow to the walking pace, was feeling better but would still revert to the sharp stabbing pain while walking downhill. With a storm bearing down on me from the West, I was starting a four mile descent into Carndonagh from one of the most beautiful mountainous tundras in Ireland. I was concerned about the stress this long descent would have on my quadriceps when the idea to try runnning backwards crossed my mind. It seemed completely logical. After all, running backwards takes a significant load off the quadriceps.

It was brilliant. It was working. Running with the traffic (running against the traffic while facing backwards would be suicide), cars flew by on the other side of the narrow Irish road honking and hollering, the pitch of their horns and voices dropping in relation to their speed. Up until then, I was just a runner on the road. Few had honked, none had ever yelled out anything. The looks from the rearview mirrors and turned-around befuddled passengers were priceless. Even better were the faces in cars driving towards me. Sheep scattered along the sides of the road, their lower mandibles calmly turning over as smooth as a finely tuned engine, also couldn't help but look on to see what this mad American was doing. It didn't matter. I was running again, and the fact that it was backwards only made the experience sweeter.

I covered those four miles in record time. Well, record time for running backwards anyway. I was once again a runner and found I had serendipitously stumbled back upon some of the early origins of thought for the run: the desire do something a bit different, a bit off the beaten path, and to take the time to slow down and enjoy the moment. No splits, no clocks, just a nice long run.

It is with this in mind that I welcome you to this blog. It's too easy to get caught only looking forward to the next task, next career, or next destination in life, soon forgetting what was passed. So, from time to time I will be sure to turn around to give you some stories of my journeys while still running towards that next destination.

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson