Marathon #14 is done. It was fantastic – I finished in 4:39:21 which is my fourth best time of the 14 marathons that I’ve run. The course was fantastic, the weather was perfect, and I had a great pace car (Matt Shobe). As I mentioned in my previous post, I didn’t feel particular ready for this one. My running has been solid and steady with a good base, but I was feeling tired from the cumulative effect of travel combined with four other marathons this year. I had a great vacation a week ago, but last week was brutal and I didn’t really spend any time thinking about the marathon until Friday. Oh – and I’m still heavier than I want to be (although lighter than when I declared a jihad on my weight.)

I’m running the Rocket City Marathon tomorrow. It’ll be my 14th marathon in my quest to finish one in every state in the US. My co-host in this experience is Matt Shobe, one of the founders of FeedBurner. Matt’s a real runner (PR of 3:25) but, as he writes in his post This time, I’m running for charity, he’s going to pace his slow friend Brad. I’ve had a hard time getting my head into this marathon. I had a great week off the grid in Mexico but then returned to an incredibly intense week. After four 15+ hour days, I finally had a little chill time which masqueraded as “travel to Huntsville day”. I went to the Expo (small and cute), got my number, and started to get excited. I don’t feel especially trained or well rested for this one, but the weather looks like it’s going to be perfect, the course is flat, and I’ve got a friend who is going to suffer through 26.2 miles with me – what more could a marathoner want?

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As you probably noticed, for the past three weeks my blog has been up and down. The week of November 20th, Feld Thoughts came under a large distributed denial of service attack. While we’re not sure who began this attack (or why) we have finally been able to mitigate it enough to get the site back online thanks to ViaWest. Now for a little history as to what happened and how we combated it.

On October 7th, I wrote a post titled Ok Entrepreneurs, Time to Step Up. There were plenty of great comments about the post that – as with most good comment threads – are better than the actual post. In it, I linked back to a post I wrote on April 21st titled Fear Is The Mindkiller (my favorite quote from Dune , one of the best science fiction books of all time). The basic message of both posts – fear and anxiety shuts humans down in extreme ways.

Ahhh – that was a very nice vacation. Q4 vacation is often around my birthday, so Amy whisked me away to Cabo for a week of being completely off the grid. If you don’t follow me on Twitter, I was on a blogging vacation for a week before that because a distributed denial of service attack (what did I say, who did I piss off?) apparently took me off line for the previous week.

Ted Rheingold at Dogster has a great post up titled 10 Tips for Building a Profitable Business. My favorite is #4: Spend at least 50% of your time selling. Many technology companies assume if they built great product it will sell itself yet that almost never happens. Usually we’ve found that incorrect assumption is a rationalization of people who love building product, but secretly loathe the business side of running a business. Such a strategy is a great way to lose a lot of money. So constantly ask yourself, are we spending 50% of our time selling? I bet you’ll always realize you’re focusing too much on the product and not enough on finding customers that want it. (Of course the inverse is true. If you love selling you need to make sure you spend at least 50% of your time building product or your sales effort will be for naught.)

The nice folks at Down to Business have republished my post The Priorities of a Venture Capitalist. Down to Business is a website and online show that is a fresh take on the business Q&A. Host Pat Croce cuts through buzzwords and jargon to find out what drives the people who are revolutionizing business in the worlds of media, technology, entertainment, fashion, and beyond. It’s got some fun stuff on it.

Thanks to the guys at Lookery for making Feld Thoughts their site of the week. As an endless obsessed data weenie, I’m enjoying seeing the data and demographics that Lookery is tracking for my site. Neat stuff.