I Live in Iowa: Week 167

I'm back.

I have been trying to down play my negative attitude the last four months, but in the last two weeks, it's turned around. You see, I was depressed, because of the Mt. Everest debacle. I was a day away from maybe dying. I spent a lot of money and never touched the mountain. I've given a few interviews since then, three presentations, with around 200 people total, and I've talked about it with maybe 70 people. It's like reliving a bad dream. My life, in many respects kind of stopped to make that trip happen and the outcome was not all all what I was prepared for.

For whatever reason, and I have a few, my motivation is back skyrocketing. I needed to hear that I am loved and cared for, and a couple months of going to church and reading the Bible and talking with family and friends finally got me back to the mental place where I do feel loved and cared for. I have a few 100+ mile weeks of running under my belt and that's always a motivation booster. I'm feeling very valued at work recently. After agonizing about quitting coaching, it was the right decision, I'll get back to that. A lot of things have come together and I'm on a mental motivation high.

Work is work because it is not play. Talking about work is nearly impossible most of the time. It's such a big part of my life, 40 hours a week, sometimes 50 hours a week, or more and I can't share much of it with the world. Hopefully, in 2015 I will finally have the chance in concrete terms to describe what I have been working on the last three and a half years. Regardless, I'll keep up my ambiguous descriptions.

Sometimes at work, just like in my personal life, people need to know that others care about him or her or this issue or that problem. I don't know how many people are in my extended product team, maybe 100, maybe more, with varying levels of responsibility, but to make the best product we can, we need to work together. There have been some gaps. Some communication was not good enough between different groups of people. This can lead to problems. I feel this week we upped the communication significantly and going forward are going to solve more problems because of that increased communication and trust.

Running is great! I ran 82 miles this past week, taking Monday totally off and putting in a good workout. Going forward I think a high mileage week followed by a low mileage week with a day off is a rhythm I will be trying. Then on Tuesday I cranked out a 10 mile moderate tempo at 6:10 pace. Not the best 10 miler I've done in practice at all, but really good. This is one reason training on my own instead of with the team has benefits. Not many college teams go crank out 10 mile tempos at 6:10 pace. Yet I need those kind of runs to be a good marathoner. Another example, Friday I left work at 3:30, got home around 3:50, which would have been late to make it to practice as a coach. Then I was tired so I laid around and read for an hour before getting out the door just after 5 PM for my second eight mile run of the day. Another benefit of not coaching is I don't have to rush out of work and immediately go running, I can take a break if I want. Then I slept 11 hours Friday night and when I went out to run Saturday morning on Heritage Trail I saw the runners I used to coach finishing their run as I was starting. Had I been a coach I would have had to miss an hour or two of sleep to make it to practice on time. Training on my own is going well.

What else? I'm reading Ben Graham's The Intelligent Investor which is a sure way to fall asleep at night. Reading about bond prices and inflation in the middle of the 20th century might actually be more boring than reading genealogy. I'm working on some writing, about some personal stuff… I'll publish it soon, probably. It's pretty personal so I want to make sure I say what I mean.