Month: April 2012
Boulder Startup Week, a five day celebration of the tech scene here in Boulder, is offering several free plane tickets to people who would consider relocating.
Since I moved to Boulder in 1995, I’ve watched and participated in the evolution of an amazing startup community which I believe currently has the highest entrepreneurial density in the United States. On top of the the hundreds of open tech company positions, Boulder has an incredible quality of life which I believe makes it the best small city in the United States to live in.
May 16th-20th will be packed with several dozen meetups, events, parties, and outdoors activities. It’s a great way to learn a few things, socialize, job-hunt, and discover the magic of Boulder.
Boulder Startup Week is open to all, and full of (mostly) free events. Come visit and, if money is tight, see if you can convince the organizers to fly you out for free.
We had our Foundry Group annual meeting yesterday. I enjoy our annual meetings – we get to spent a focused chunk of time with our investors. We have a straightforward meeting – a dinner for our advisory board the night before, drinks after for all LPs, our advisory board meeting first thing in the morning, and then the full meeting until lunch time. There’s no crazy party, no big events – just substance on our part and direct interactions with the investors supporting us. Our goal is simple – provide a clear update about what is going on in our funds, talk about what we are thinking about, and get direct feedback from our investors.
We spend the day before the meeting as a team putting the final touches on our presentation and reflecting on the previous year. We always talk about our key principles that we established when we started Foundry Group in 2007. One of these key principles is a “thematic investing approach.” An important part of our themes is that they are continuously evolving (if interested, we publish details on how we are currently thinking about themes on our Foundry Group website.) Our LPs understand this well and always like to hear how we are currently thinking about themes at our meeting.
On Tuesday, we realized that we have made several investments yesterday that have a concept in common – that of raving fans. I first thought of raving fans when I read Ken Blanchard’s book by the same name in 1993 when I was CEO of Feld Technologies (my first company). The message rang true for me then and still does today. The tl;dr version is “Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans.”
Our investment in Sympoz (owners of Craftsy) is an example of a company built on raving fans. Craftsy is a community of people who love to make things – knitters, quilters, sewers, jewelers. If you know a knitter (I do – Amy is a fanatical knitter as is my mom Cecelia) you know that knitters are “raving fans of knitting.” We invested in Sympoz in our Distribution theme, but it has this special characteristic around its community that felt a little different to us.
We classify our investment in SideTour as “Other”. We say that we aren’t slaves to our themes – we’ll occasionally do something outside of a theme if we love the entrepreneurs and have a special connection to them. In the case of SideTour, they were one of our favorite companies in their TechStars New York class and we were infatuated with the types of experiences they were talking about providing in their marketplace. As we were talking about Sympoz (which is doing extraordinarily well) and SideTour, we realized that the “raving fans” concept applies to each of them.
I had a call yesterday with another entrepreneur running a company that we passed on the seed round. We all like the entrepreneur a lot, but the company didn’t feel like it fit in any of our themes and was too vertically oriented for us. The company is doing great and as we were talking about it a week or so ago we said “it feels a little like Sympoz, but has some characteristics of SideTour.” Yesterday, when I was talking to the entrepreneur, I realized it also was about a community of raving fans.
I love raving fans as the phrase for this theme since it sets an incredibly high bar of the dynamics of the people in the community these companies appeal to. These aren’t “vertical social networks” or “vertical exchange marketplaces” – there is something deeper going on in the relationship between the people and the company, and the people and community. And it’s something that is magically enabled by the current state of technology – mobile, video, real-time social – a bunch of things have come together than make this work.
Look for more on raving fans from us as it evolves. For now, you have a little bit of a window into how we think about themes.
Update – My partner Seth reminded me that our investment in CrowdTap (in our Adhesive theme) is all about helping brands interact with their raving fans, Todd Sawicki said “dude – how about Cheezburger” (in our Distribution theme) and Jeff Malek, the co-founder of BigDoor (in our Glue theme) said “ahem!” So it seems like we’ve got a lot companies involved in the construct of raving fans!
The Magic Moment When You Shift To Executing As Fast As You Can
There is this magical moment that happens when a startup finally puts the key components together to build a successful business. After months or years of iterating and pivoting, they finally have the right product for the right market at the right price. At this point, the company has to shift gears and change their mindset a little. They need to stop looking for gold and start mining as fast as possible. My friend Chris Moody, President/COO at Gnip, refers to this as the execution phase of a business and there is no better example of execution in our current portfolio than the team at Gnip.
After 2.5 years of product development and varying business approaches, Gnip found their magic moment about a year and half ago. Since that time they have been heads down executing and the results have been incredible.
Today Gnip announced an exclusive partnership with Tumblr. This monumental partnership will give Gnip’s customers full coverage of an amazing source of social data that has never been available. With 50 million new posts per day and 15 billion page views per month, Tumblr offers a huge new data stream for companies to analyze and use to drive business decisions. The fact that businesses will be able to receive this data via the same reliable and scalable Gnip infrastructure that currently delivers Twitter and other important data sources is a major win for the ever growing social data economy.
The Tumblr partnership is the kind of announcement that companies plan their entire year around. However, in Gnip’s case, it is just the latest activity in an impressive series of events that shows the Gnip team knows how to get shit done. It is only April and Gnip has already done the following in 2012:
- In January, Gnip announced an exclusive partnership with Automattic to provide firehose streams of WordPress.com and WordPress.org data to the enterprise. This partnership increased the amount of real-time blog data available for business analysis by 70% overnight.
- In February, Gnip announced a premium partnership with Disqus. Disqus is the largest third party commenting system in the world (I use it on my blog) and the data offers tons of valuable insights to drive lots of cool business use cases. The Gnip/Disqus partnership makes this comment data available in full firehose coverage form to businesses for the first time ever.
- Also in February, Gnip released the first ever commercial Twitter historical product. Gnip’s 30-day replay product allows their customers to go back and replay Twitter history. As the old saying goes, hindsight is 20/20, and Gnip’s replay product allows companies to replay the entire Twitter stream for a full 30 days to look for things they might have missed. This product was a monumental engineering feat and a huge portion of Gnip’s customers have already taken advantage of this product in just the first two months after its release.
- In March, Gnip announced Big Boulder, the first ever conference dedicated to social data. Take a look at the list of speakers – it will blow your mind.
- Just last week Gnip announced that they added the largest microblogging service in China to their Enterprise Data Collector offering. Sina Weibo has over 300 million members; brands across the world are very interested in the conversations happening on this enormous platform. Gnip continues to push to increase the number of international data sources in their offerings and Sina Weibo represents a huge addition to their portfolio.
Okay, so the Gnip team is getting stuff done, but at what price? They must be cracking the whip pretty hard and creating a real sweat shop, right? Wrong. In spite of growing their number of employees by 300% in 2011, Gnip was just named The Best Place To Work in Boulder. Not the best startup, the best company. And, the best news of all? They are hiring!
Why Don’t We Make Learning A Computer Language A Requirement In High School?
I spent this weekend at LindzonPalooza. Once a year Howard Lindzon gets together a bunch of his friends at the intersection of financing, tech, media, and entrepreneurship, we descend on The Del in Coronada, and have an awesome 48 hours together. Many interesting and stimulating things were said, but one I remember was from Peter Pham over dinner. It was a simple line, “why do we teach languages in junior high and high school but not a computer language?” that had profound meaning to me.
When I was in high school, I had to take two years of a foreign language. I had three choices – French, Spanish, or German. I didn’t really want to learn any of them so I opted for French. I hated it – rote memorization and endless tedious classes where I didn’t really understand anything. Fortunately I liked my teacher for the first two years and I did fine academically (I got an A) and ended up taking a third year of French.
Year three was a total disaster. I hated the teacher and apparently she hated me. We watched these stupid reel-to-reel movies of french cartoons aimed at English speakers trying to learn French. Beyond being boring, they were incomprehensible, at least to me. Somehow I ended up in the front row and it was my job to change the movie when it finished. One day, when I was sure the teacher was out of the room and I was changing the reel, I muttered ” tu es une chienne” (one of the few French phrases I still remember, along with “va te faire foutre.”) I was wrong – she was in the room and, after a trip to the principal’s office (the principal liked me and let me off easy) I dropped the class and took a study hall instead.
Now, before I use the old line of “I have a hard time learning languages”, I’ll call bullshit on myself since during that time I learned BASIC, Pascal, and 6502 Assembler. I was good at learning languages – I was just way more interested in computer languages than romantic european languages.
We didn’t have AP Computer Science at my school so I taught all of this to myself. But today, schools have computer science courses. And, based on what I’ve learned from my work at NCWIT, looking at course curriculums, and talking to a lot of students, most high school computer science courses suck. Part of the problem is the word “science” – they teach computer science theory, how to program in Java, math, logical, and a bunch of other things. But they don’t teach you software development, which is much more useful, and a lot more fun.
When I compare it to French 3, I wanted to learn conversation French. I probably would have enjoyed that. But the teacher, who was French, insisted on grinding us through endless grammar exercises. The movies were sort of conversational, but they obsessed over the different tenses, and we were tested endlessly on when to use tu and when to use vous, even in French 3.
I’m not a language instructor, nor do I have any interest in figuring out the best way to teach a language – computer or otherwise – but it seems to me that we are shifting into a different period where learning how to write software is just as important – and probably more so – to a high school student as learning to speak French, at least at a two year of course level where all you remember are a few swear words.
Am I wrong? If so why. BTW – Google translate quickly tells me that is “Ai-je tort? Si oui, pourquoi.” My bable fish is on order.
I was in LA for the past three days hanging out at Oblong, meeting with a bunch of entrepreneurs I know, then spending time at MuckerLabs, giving a talk at SCVStartup, and finishing up my trip with a half day at LaunchPad LA followed by a dinner that LaunchPad LA and Mark Suster put on. Even though I still felt fried from my 50 mile run, I had a great time and I’m sure I fed off of the energy of all the people I spent time with.
At the dinner I gave a short talk on Startup Communities and then answered some questions. The first question was “what do I think of the phrase ‘Silicon Beach’ for the LA startup community.” I responded that I thought it was stupid. I hate Silicon Whatever. LA should be LA. When I was in downtown LA at Oblong I didn’t notice a beach. Before I could go on a rant about why you should not call things “Silicon Blah” I got a round of applause.
In the late 90’s a wave of “Silicon Blah” appeared. Silicon Alley, Silicon Mountain, Silicon Prairie, Silicon Slopes, Silicon Gulch, Silicon Bayou, and on, and on, and on. The rallying cry was “we are going to be the next Silicon Valley.” Whatever. At the time, my opinion as someone who disliked generic marketing was that this was the worst branding ever. I feel even more strongly about this today.
If you are going to create a startup community, build your own identity. People now talk about “New York” and “Boulder” as amazing startup communities. They don’t talk about Silicon Alley and Silicon Flatirons. Well – I suppose some do, but I don’t hear it anymore (or at least my brain doesn’t process it) – I just hear New York and Boulder. And when someone says “Do you like living in Denver?”, I say “I live and work in Boulder.” Sure – Denver has a startup community also, but it’s distinct from Boulder.
Even within a city like LA there are startup neighborhoods. I made this point when I spent a month in Cambridge, MA in January. Sure, you’ve got Cambridge, Boston, Waltham, and Hopkinton. But you’ve also got Kendall Square, Central Square, the Leather District, and the Innovation District. In New York you’ve got Union Square, and Brooklyn’s DUMBO. These are the “neighborhoods” – high density areas of entrepreneurs and their startups. And, in a small town like Boulder, you’ve got – well – Boulder.
LA is huge. The startup community in LA isn’t “Silicon Beach.” It’s downtown, Santa Monica, and I’m sure a few other neighborhoods that I don’t know the name of. Brand the neighborhoods locally so the entrepreneurs know where to go, since you want them clustered together. Then brand your city (LA) which should be an easy one. And dump the Silicon Blah.
New Book: Brad Feld’s Burning Entrepreneur – How to Launch, Fund, and Set Your Start-Up On Fire!
Inspired by my friend @FAKEGRIMLOCK, I’ve launched a new self-published book with the gang at Hyperink. It’s titled Beyond The Blog: Brad Feld’s Burning Entrepreneur – How to Launch, Fund, and Set Your Start-Up On Fire! and available digitally on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Hyperink.
For the next 48 hours, you can buy it for $2.99 from Hyperink. After that it’ll go to it’s normal price of $4.95. But, in either case you’ll get six copies for the price of one as with each purchase you get to gift five copies to any friend you want. If you are interested in my writing, I encourage you to buy a copy, give five copies to friends, and tell me what you think of it.
This is an experiment in self-publishing. Part of the way I learn is to just try stuff, see how it works, measure the results, get feedback, and iterate. I have a good understanding of how the traditional publishing industry works now that I’ve done two books with Wiley (Do More Faster and Venture Deals) and I thought working with Hyperink would be a great way to learn more about self-publishing. They approached me, told me they wanted to do an ebook based on a bunch of blog posts I’d written, and asked if I was interested. They reminded me recently that my reply was “Totally game to play – tell me what I need to do.” They hired an editor Jason Karpf who did an excellent job of curating a bunch of posts, organizing them into a coherent book, editing them so they all worked together, and putting it together in a clean, extremely readable format.
When I got the first draft and read through it, I was really psyched with which posts they had built the book around. While you can obviously find all the original posts on the web, seeing some of the best posts I’ve written about entrepreneurship organized in a cogent fashion was very satisfying. But I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it’s any good or not.
The outline of the book is on the Hyperink site. Grab a copy (or six) and tell me what you think. Feedback welcome!
I’m now officially in the cloud business, courtesy of my friends at Standing Cloud (we are investors.) Standing Cloud delivers cloud application management solutions for cloud service providers, technology solution providers, and their customers. Their application management layer, automated managed services and Application Storefront make it easy to build, deploy and manage applications in the cloud.
Back in November, I wrote that “If you are a hosting, managed service provider, or building a cloud service (public or private), you have three choices. The first is to ignore this stuff (dumb). The second is to try to build it all yourself and keep pace with Amazon (good luck). The third is to use Standing Cloud.” And that’s exactly what I’m doing. Basically, Brad’s Amazing Cloud makes me a cloud provider.
Built on a white-label version on the Standing Cloud platform, Brad’s Amazing Cloud provides all the tools to get applications up and running in the cloud quickly, affordably, and without the hassle of managing hardware and infrastructure. So it’s goodbye to server racks, terminal windows, and sys admin headaches. With Brad’s Amazing Cloud, it’s simple and hassle-free, whether you’re a skilled developer or a non-technical application user.
With Brad’s Amazing Cloud, you get your choice of clouds, applications, and developer frameworks. You can run on AWS, Rackspace, GoGrid, and several other cloud hosting providers. Through the Storefront, you can fire up preconfigured instances of a wide range of open source apps – and you need no technical knowledge to do so. Nearly 100 open-source and commercial apps – including popular business applications like Drupal, WordPress,
All account management with the cloud provider you select is handled transparently – no separate account needed. Pick the cloud of your choice, and change at any time, for any reason. Your applications are completely portable from cloud-to-cloud, so you’re never locked-in to a single cloud service or provider.
Brad’s Amazing Cloud is real, and it’s open for business now. Check it out and tell me what you think.
If you’re a solutions provider looking to provide an application management layer for your customers or resellers, a developer looking for the easiest way to build, deploy and scale applications in the cloud, or just want to get your business up and running in the cloud, quickly, cost effectively and without the typical technical challenges, Standing Cloud may have a solution for you. With their white-label capabilities, your cloud offering can be customized to meet your specific needs (just like they did for me), including branding on the storefront, management console and support pages, and your choice of applications (including proprietary apps and software), infrastructure and supported clouds.
If you want an intro to Standing Cloud, just email me and ask. I’ll also be doing a webinar with with the Standing Cloud team on Tuesday, May 15th, register here.
Wow. That was an amazing experience. I ran the American River 50 Mile Endurance Run on Saturday and finished in an official time of 11:57:37, just under my goal of 12 hours. My un-official mile by mile splits are up on RunKeeper which served me well with my iPhone 4S and Mophie Juice Pack until the very last few minutes when my battery finally died on my phone. Before I get into the story of the race, thanks for everyone out there who supported me in any way – it was awesome to scan through the twitter stream and comments post race.
Today’s post is the blow by blow of the race. I’m going to spend a few more days and process the emotional dynamic before I write about it. I’m still in the middle of it – yesterday was emotionally really hard; today feels more normal, but I expect to have lots more ups and downs this week as my thoughts, and my brain chemistry, sorts itself out. So I’ll consolidate the deeper emotional reflection into one post some time in the future. For now, here’s what I remember of the experience.
The idea started some time last year when Katherine McIntyre, my partner Ryan’s wife who is an excellent marathoner and triathlete, said “do you want to do a 50?” She summarizes the windup in her post Crazytown – the short version is I said “sure – why not.” The picture above is of us moments after we finished – Katherine the studette turned in an 11:33:21.
The race started at 6am so I woke up at 4:30. I had a bagel, some peanut butter, and coffee with the hope that the coffee would do its magic trick. Amy called promptly at 5:30 to wish me good luck (she usually is with me but stayed home this time because of her broken wrist) and I hustled out the door with all my gear to meet Katherine, Ryan, their son, and my assistant Kelly in the lobby at 5:35 (the time specifically prescribed by Katherine after a minute long negotiation with me the previous night for between 5:40 and 5:30.) We did the last minute good morning do you have everything drill in the lobby of the hotel and got ready to hop in the car for the mile long drive to the start (no fucking way I was going to go an extra mile today.)
At that moment I had crisis #1. I run with two water bottles that are exactly the same. I’ve been training with them for months and they are extensions of my hands at this point. As I grabbed everything off the table, there was only one water bottle. I looked around frantically but there was still only one. “Fuck – where’s my other water bottle?” Everyone (including the eight year old with us) looked startled. “Fuck fuck fuck – those other runners must have accidentally grabbed it.” After a minute of this it was time to go – the night manager gave me a bottle of water (very different than a “water bottle”) so at least I’d have two and off we went. I took a deep breath and calmed down as best as I could.
The start of the race was uneventful. It was dark and cold so I was happy I dressed with two shirts (including a long sleeve shirt) and gloves. There were around 1000 people at the start (I think there were 800 runners) and everyone smelled like “eau de early morning start of race.” Within minutes we were running on the American River trail, our friend for 47 of the next 50 miles.
For the first two miles all I thought about was my fucking water bottle. I hated my bottle of water – it didn’t have a strap. After the second mile I decided to toss it to the side of the road, where I proceeded to obsess for another mile over my missing water bottle. At around mile three I noticed a water fountain on the trail, refilled my bottle, and decided that if my friend Andy Sack could go through life with one testicle, I could handle the race with one water bottle. That was the last time I thought about my water bottle until after the race.
I had decided to break the race up into five segments of 10 miles each. The run from my house in Eldorado Springs to my office is right at 10 miles so I figured it was five laps from Eldo to the office. I know the mile markers well since I’ve done that run a hundred times so whenever I found myself at 4.4, 14.4, 24.4, 34.4, and 44.4 I thought “ok – I’m at the Eldo Market now” and at 7, 17, 27, 37, and 47 I was at Table Mesa.
The first 10 miles were easy. I used an 8:2 run:walk pace and held myself back. My coach Gary had told me numerous times to take it easy on the marathon segment. While my last marathon was 4:28 and I felt in better shape, I decided I would try to do the marathon in 5:30. Whenever I felt myself picking it up, I reigned myself in and took it easy. The sun came up, it started to warm up, and I enjoyed myself.
The next 10 miles were also easy. The only annoying part in this segment were the bikers. 80% of them were fine, 10% were super nice, and 10% were abusive assholes. “Get out of the way – bike coming through”, “Runners are supposed to stay on the left”, and “Get the fuck out of my way” were some of the things I remembered. I almost got hit head on by a guy going 20+ mph swerving in and out of runners. It was a curvy path which made it even harder – the “runner drift” settled in a little around mile 15 (where it’s impossible to stay focused on a straight line) and I remember looking up a few times and being startled by a bike heading right at me. I found out later that there have been a lot of battles about this in the past – apparently it’s a “bike path” and bikes are “superior” to runners. You’d think for one day a year they could close the path to bikes, but someone on the run mentioned there’s even been a court case about it. So for 10 miles the 10% of the bikers who were assholes spoiled the runner / biker relationship for everyone.
Before I knew it I’d gone through the marathon point right at around 5:30. I still felt fine – kept it slow – and had plenty of water. The aid stations were awesome – better manned than many of the marathons I’ve been part of, so my fueling strategy was working fine. I took a Gu gel every 30 minutes with water and a salt tablet every hour. At the aid stations I refilled my water, grabbed a few more Gu’s, and ate some pretzels, boiled potatoes and salt, and a dixie cup of coke (yum). There was a huge aid station at mile 27 (Beal’s Point) where I saw Ryan and his son and heard the best line of the day “this is a race, not a birthday party.” The line was wrong – it was a party – and a good one.
By mile 29 it hit me that I’d now run the furthest distance in my life. I went through mile 30 with the thought of “only 20 miles to go.” And this is when it started getting really hard. The segment between 30 and 40 was physically and mentally tough. It was a technical trail run – not the hardest I’d been on, but there were some gnarly parts. I’m an ok trail runner but hadn’t trained much on trails during the winter in Boulder so I was extra careful, which took even more mental energy. By the mid-30’s my pace had slowed from 12 minute miles to 18 – 20 minute miles, which became depressing. I only had one really dark mile where I started feeling sorry for myself, but during this mile I got a hilarious txt message from my friend Andy which jolted me out of my dark spot. There were a few horses on the trail – I’m terrified of horses so these spots were emotionally bizarre moments for me – but the horse people were super nice.
At mile 41 I met up with my assistant Kelly at an aid station where she joined me for the last nine miles. Ryan and his son was there again and after a fuel refill and an exploding fist bump we were on our way. At this point I only had one more trip to the office from Eldo and I knew I’d get it done. I was physically tired but had a nice pick up emotionally as I entered hour #10 of the run.
Somewhere around mile 43 or 44 I started having trouble getting my feet to go where I wanted them to go. Up to this point I hadn’t had much real difficultly on the trail, but now I was stumbling all over the place. After a few minutes of this I took two salt tabs hoping that would help. It did – 15 minutes later I was back to normal, whatever that meant. I have no idea if this was physiological or psychological, but by 45 I was motoring along pretty well. Every now and then Kelly would say something to jolt me out of my stupor – one that I remember was “Do you want to talk about cap tables for a little while?”
At mile 47 we started a long uphill climb to the finish. At the base of the hill was some eye candy – for the women. The aid station was called Last Gasp and the guys manning it were all shirtless ultra runners who ran to us, grabbed our water bottles, and had them refilled by the time we got to the aid station. These guys each had that crazy v-shaped abdominal muscle – I think it’s the inguinal ligament – with insane definition pointing suggestively – well – you get the idea. “I used to look like that – except for the muscle part” I told Kelly as we finally got out of range of the Adonises.
The last three miles is 1000 ft uphill. Everyone walked. There was a short downhill stretch – I took off running with a loud manic scream at the top of my lungs. As we went through mile 48 I realized I might break 12 hours. At 49.25 it flattened out and I sprinted for the finish and came in two minutes and change under my goal.
Katherine, Ryan, and their son were at the finish line waiting for me. Katherine looked great – she’d had a lot of knee pain during the trail part after falling once, but she had good color and a great attitude. After a few minutes of congratulations and hanging out, Kelly and I piled into our car and went to Chevy’s for my first non-Gu meal in 12 hours while Katherine and crew drove back to San Francisco to have some “excellent pizza” that they could only find in San Francisco. I called Amy and had a celebratory talk – she had done an awesome job of keeping track of things during the race (due to RunKeeper live) and being my communications director for the day. I dropped my coach Gary a note of thanks and then ate and ate and drank a beer and ate some more.
When I got back to my room, I discovered a very lonely second water bottle sitting just where I had left it 14 hours earlier. For the first time all day I had tears in my eyes, but of laughter – at myself. Staring at the water bottle that had bedeviled me during the first part of the run it finally hit home that I had just run 50 miles.
Doing something for the first time is always fascinating for me. In an hour I’ll be starting the American River 50 Mile Endurance Run which will be the first ultramarathon I’ve ever run. Assuming that RunKeeper and my iPhone works (with it’s special magic Mophie juice pack), you can track me live on my RunKeeper account. I also imagine my wife Amy will be tweeting things out during the day.
While I’ve done 21 marathons, there’s a big difference between 26.2 miles and 50 miles. I’ve spent the last three months studying it, training for it, and thinking about it. Today I get to experience it. It started out with a simple question. My friend Katherine McIntyre (my partner Ryan’s wife) says it best in her post “Crazytown.”
So, at the end of August I sent a link to the American River 50 mile run to my marathon-running friend Brad, with the subject line “Crazytown?” and asked if he had any interest in doing that race. Within 48 hours he signed on to do it with me. Gulp. Ah, the danger of hanging out with people who have the same willingness to dive into an unknown and quite large challenge. So, I was committed.
I didn’t really start thinking about it until January, when I also went “gulp” and decided it was time to get serious about training. There’s no way I could have done it without the help of my coach Gary Ditsch and the support of Amy, who put up with about 50% more running than usual, including about six weekends that were basically all about running.
While we were in Hawaii, Amy and I decided that it’d be too much for her to come sherpa. She’s still struggling with a broken wrist and she didn’t want to add anything else to what I had to do or think about. It was a tough decision because I love it when she’s with me on these marathon (and now ultra marathon) weekends. But due to the magic of technology, she’s close by and I’m thinking of her a lot.
My amazing assistant Kelly Collins (who is also a runner) offered to run the last ten miles with me so she’s here with us. I know it’s going to be great to have a friend who knows me well help me through the last 20%. At dinner last night with Katherine, Ryan, and their son we all acknowledged how special an experience this is and how much we appreciate all being here together. And, as I sit here eating a bagel with peanut butter on it and hoping the coffee I’m drinking does it’s special magic trick in the next ten minutes, I’m deeply appreciative of all the help and support I’ve gotten from my partners, friends, and people I don’t know directly but have an online relationship with who have been helpful along the way.
Thanks to everyone who has provided any sort of support – especially emotional – during this journey. I’m looking forward to the experience of the next 12 hours. See you on the other side.