As I was boarding the plane today in Dulles, I twittered At Dulles on the way to Raleigh durham. Post marathon travel is painful. Within a minute I got an email from Jeff Turner, the founder of Blogbeat: “I just saw on Twitter that you’re in route to Raleigh… I know you’re probably booked up, but just in case you aren’t, I thought I’d check in & see if I could buy you a beer or cheeseburger (or something). really just want to say hi and thank you formally for the FeedBurner connection. Either way, hope you’re doing well & recover soon from your marathon!”

I’ve never totally understood the “send out physical greeting cards” thing. I get that it’s a “tradition”, but it has always seemed like a waste of time, energy, and money to me. Yes – I know I’ve signed my share of these cards – I’ve just played along, but it doesn’t change the way I feel about them. I now get a flood of electronic cards (and birthday wishes – thanks everyone!) These make me smile and often generate a response via email from me to people I haven’t talked to in a while. I received very few physical birthday cards this year (which is good) since pretty much everyone that would send me a card sent me an electronic one.

As Q408 stumbles to a close, I’m seeing a distinct trifurcation of sales performance among the companies I’m working with. I’m pleasantly surprised by the companies that are solidly outperforming their Q4 plan, especially since Q4 is the hardest quarter to outperform (since the plan is now typically great than 9 months old.) Some are fighting to get to their Q4 plan and some are going to fall short regardless of what they do between now and the end of the month.

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.