Category: Gratitude

Just one for this week, as it’s pretty important.

• Functioning Marriages - I have been fortunate to be married to the same woman for just about 15 years. We’ve been together for 17. We can, and do, talk about anything. We don’t have any secrets. The vast majority of divorces are tied back to money issues. We put a stopper in that one very early on in our marriage with a simple two-spouse-approval rule. Any purchase over $500 required both of us to agree. Due to our ongoing conversations about each of our concerns, interests, fears, etc, my wife understands how much I need this time to decompress. And she has been 100% supportive. It’s pretty amazing that she let me leave for our family vacation a week early to get some mountain biking in, as well as take my 5 days of silence in the woods. This years edition is British Columbia, Canada. It will be me, my bike, my kindle, and my computer (strictly for coding, no internet access for facebook or email) for 5 days. Human interaction will be kept to a minimum. I will be engaged in a silence retreat (no use of my own voice) during that time. She gets me, and she allows me this time. I would do the same for her. Our mutual understanding of, and respect for, each other allows this. I can’t imagine being with anyone else. Life is hard enough to get through when you don’t have a functioning marriage, and I know that I am incredibly lucky to have one.

• Discovering Humility in Serving Others - I never worked in a restaurant. Nor any traditional service industry job. I was very fortunate to have the opportunity this past week to act as an extra pair of hands for my tri coach Ben Bigglestone. He ran a training camp in Coeur d’Alene this past week, with all but 2 of them racing the half Ironman on Sunday (whilst preparing for the full Ironman in August). It was an incredibly fulfilling week of camaraderie, laughter, setbacks, successes, and fun. I was there for the other athletes, looking to give them a “pro athlete” experience of not worrying about things, and having everything taken care of, and also looking to anticipate their needs based on my own experiences over the years of my racing.
• Hard Plastic - a longer love note to Garmin will be coming, but let’s just say that my Garmin Forerunner 310 changed from workout computer to fully-load-bearing-hockey-puck during a nasty little crash this week that destroyed a bicycle. My first ever road crash.
• Underdogs - From the agony of Yonny Hernandez to the ecstasy of Jack Miller, the first Sunday-running ever MotoGP race at Assen will go down as one of my absolute favorites. Rain is the great equalizer. It was so great to be able to yell and cheer for the first non-factory race winner since 2006 in Portugal when Tony Elias won. Rain is a field leveler. A fact I relished when I raced in my first national race at Road Atlanta. I got greedy and went for a pass that would have put me into 9th place. I ended up in the gravel. Fun fact, I beat World Champion Ben Spies that weekend. Of course, he was only 14 that weekend…and started at the back of the grid…with a split field wave start…and he crashed…from third place. He was (is) fast.

• Mountain bikes - this one should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, but now that I am back on the bike a bit more regularly after a several month hiatus, I really do miss it. More than anything, it’s the ability for the bike to take me to places that I might not otherwise see, and venture out into the woods where most people won’t go.
• Slippers - I guess this is my “old man” moment, but I have to say, having a nice pair of foam soled slippers to wear around the house really makes a huge difference. However, it’s that my kids now make it an annual Christmas thing to get me a new pair that I really love.
• Moore’s Law - I felt super old last week when reading a post by someone referring to Moore’s Law in a way that it was clear that he had to look it up. This is one of those things that you should just “know” if you are in tech, but I suppose that once upon a time some old fart was grousing about the fact that I didn’t know what the heck a punch card was. In any event, there are two things which happened in the last week that really make me appreciate Moore’s Law. First, I had a near death experience with my nice laptop. I don’t buy many things, and I tend to be discerning when I do, and will spend money for quality. I also get too attached to things. When it was clear something was wrong, my mood really turned south. With all the travel I have coming up, some to remote places, I didn’t want this stress. So I picked up a Lenovo Ideapad 100s this week from Best Buy for $150 (restocked). That’s not quite throw-away money, but it’s damn cheap. And the power of this laptop is amazing for the $. However, it has limitations, which has forced me to find some alternatives to some of my personal projects. One example required running Python code with a massive dataset. Not on this thing. However, for $0.65 per hour, I and turn on a hosted virtual machine on a big piece of hardware in the cloud and run my code, and turn off when done. Amazing. A little more exploring and I found I could run my Jupyter notebooks in the Azure Machine Learning Studio for free. When we started AskMe.com, we built our own infrastructure in a data center with a bunch of MSFT software. I don’t remember the exact cost, but it was north of a million dollars. For $150 (laptop) and bus fare, I can do much of the coding (though not deployment to live services) thanks to Moore’s Law.

As part of my sabbatical, I have made a commitment to much introspection. I have also wanted to take the path of logging things for which I am grateful. I am not sure what the ultimate form will be, but for now, it’s a bullet list.

• Family Vacation - I was lucky enough to be able to persuade my younger brother to join us while we were in Hawaii. We have never taken a vacation together (which is bonkers when I stop and think about it), and he’s never seen me race. Double rainbow!
• Happy Dogs - When picking up our dog from the kennel post vacation, he was incredibly happy to see me. It’s silly, but it’s nice to be missed.
• Durability - Despite a limited training calendar to prep for a half Ironman coming out of an all-mountain-bike schedule for 6 months, my body didn’t get injured. I was able to transition from one to the other, and performed relatively well. My swim was fine when considering how little time I had in the pool to prep. My bike was a course PR, despite a 6 minute stop on the side of the road for a flat. I look forward to many more adventures.