Sunday, December 14, 2008

Stuff

Friday morning work. Reminds me of old times.
I just love the beer garden village. I ride through it every day and it's just a neat place.

Winter at it's best. O.K. it would be better if there was a big beautiful Mountain in the back.


The winter sky.
Random thoughts from the week.......
Boredom
I was running a fitness test yesterday. It was 6 laps all left turns in the forest. Each lap was 1.37 miles long. By lap 5 it was getting boring. I thought to myself, "that's o.k." The task itself was not boring at all. It was a field test and when I do it three weeks from now I'll know if I'm improving or not. The steady not fast, not slow pace was the boring part. So I thought more and finally determined that you have to do the boring. You have to do the head down steady pace in everything you do. The reward is that thing you're working towards. That's the really exciting thing. If you turn the boring into excititng maybe you aren't looking down the road or maybe you'll never get there.
By the way, the Test:
6 laps 1.37 miles or 8.4 miles total.
Lap's 1,2 5, 6 were on 10:15 pace. Laps 4,5 were slower.
Total Time: 61:46 or 7:21 pace.
Average HR 148 - My LT (race pace) HR is 164
I'll do the same test in 3 weeks. The first goal is to run the same 6 laps faster at the same or lower HR. Once I'm comfortable there, I'll begin to add laps with a max of 10 laps.
Remember the goal is win my age group in at least one race in 2009.
Who do you work for?
Work right now is centered around one big meeting in January with the world. Our goal at the meeting is to tell the world our story and get them to tell their world the same story. Simple right? Not when you do as much as we do. So we build this book for everyone. When they go back to their world and all the hoopla is gone they need to work and the book is there for them to reference and say "Oh Yeah". So this book is rather important. The first rough draft deadline was last Friday. We had been working on the concept since late October. We were working on the piece of the document that could be a great tool. Back in October we agreed that this part of the document was a huge effort to build and nobody in the world used it. But it was determined that the Big Boss likes it and therefore we will build it. So on Friday, the interns were working on the document and I had my part to do as well. One of our people came in and said "Dave, can we talk about this thing". I grabbed our boss (not the Big Boss) and discussion took place. We talked about the immense size of this section (216 pages) and the either really small pictures or really big pages it required. We talked about the usefulness and finally I said "It seems we are building this for the Big Boss when he's not the audience." So we worked up a solution and just then the Big Boss walked by. We told him the format was too much and that we had a suggestion. He said yes, that is the right way to go and add this stuff too! End Result, we brought 216 pages down to 11. Back to where we thought it should end up in October and the document will be highly usefull. The end result is know your audience. Heck we were building something for the Big Boss when it wasn't what he wanted in the first place. Long story there but it's usefull. Now of course not everyone was happy. One poor sap came in an argued, "It's Friday, deadline day, my people have done all the work already and now you want them to change, this is bull-shit, you don't change on the last day" I think he was missing the big picture. Besides we didn't ask "His" people to lift a finger.
It's a good life......
Dave



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