The Importance of it All

As soon as you are ready, I am willing - Kevin Cronin - REO Speedwagon

It's just running shoes!
This small picture above (couldn't quite figure out how to enlarge it) is of me and my budddy and long time Asics Rep Mike Matranga. In my 12 years at Road Runner Sports Mike and I built a substantial Asics Business and RRS business. We did it through great focus on the goals and on marketing trial and sometimes error. You can't do that unless there is trust in the relationship. I always trusted Mike to represent RRS to the folks at Asics and it was my job to represent Asics back to RRS. It sounds rather simple but when millions of dollars are on the line along with pressure from individuals in each of the organizations it makes for a rather dyamic relationship. Beyond the work though Mike and I developed a friendship that will last a lifetime. Virtually every meeting and every phone call started or ended with family. Many times the subject came up but it was always there, "This is just Running Shoes." I think that perspective helped build the business to what it was. Yes, the decisions were worth money but it was really just running shoes.


2009 Training

Week #1 went quite well. I executed my 5K test on Tuesday. Some Bike testing this week and my targets and training levels are set. I wasn't fast in the least on Tuesday. That doesn't mean I bagged it, it just means that the effort was hard (as hard as I could go) and the results were surprisingly slow. As I said last week I'm changing things up this winter. Typically I would have jumped into some sort of high volume low effort training to build an endurance base. With some help from the folks at Endurance Nation I am doing much less volume at a much higher effort. For instance I ran 5 times this week. Only 1 of those runs was at an "easy" pace and it was 20 minutes long. My longest run was 45 minutes and each of the runs had some sort of 5K (from the test) efforts. The reasoning behind this is rather simple now that I've had time to think about it. Time in the winter is short so it's better to use that short time to the maximum and get faster.

It's a good life.....
Dave