Click the map to follow along!

Here is the overview of the course and event. Gory details can be found here.

Congratulations to everybody who came out. Check out the full race report.

Note: Blue the dog and I didn’t do the 50, we did our own custom length of 24k and ended up at Delaney’s for a mocha to warm up from the rain and wind!

Here is a CrunchGear review of the new Vibram Five Fingers KSO Treks. I can’t wait to get and try a pair. I have the Classics and the regular KSOs and they’re great but I need more grip for the snow and also the mud in the trails near my place.

I want to step into my “office” which would be more like a World of Warcraft world and it could be in a giant hamster ball on wheels so I could run any direction I want. And I should be in a fully immersive environment where I can run in any direction, and interact with my applications with big motions (must jump onto 4 foot box so I can see my email!) or if I want to talk to somebody who is in a different system, I should have to “run” to the other room to answer the inbound message. I want to be completely utterly physically exhausted from my day at work, not sore from a complete lack of activity and too many hours of no motion in the joints.

Or I suppose I could quit and become a labourer. But my work is so damned interesting and I love interacting with all of the people I know. I just wish I could do it while running, jumping, leaping, climbing, and crawling so I could work, have fun, and stay in great shape all at the same time. Maybe I should be quitting work in the web industry and working as a firefighter but I know it wouldn’t hold my mental interest!

I’ll be listening to this all the way home. I got it from a very dear friend who means a great deal to me.

“Breathe Me” by Sia (the soundtrack to the final six minutes of Six Feet Under shown here below.)

It was a crisp beautiful autumn day. I was the only runner in shorts, and one of the only runners out at ALL. There don’t appear to be many runners in Paris. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places.

On the way back home, I ran through a back alley and found this great cathedral.

And a few blocks from home there is a little shop with this sign. I liked the sign and thought that it was worth taking a photo.

There are a lot of tiny little shops near our place that have art in them. Wait what on earth is that in the window??

It’s a bust of Michael Keaton’s Batman. Creepy.

The first gym I found was actually a combination gay sauna, bar, and weight room. All in one. Not quite what I was looking for. On to the local mega corporate chain Club Med – owned by…Club Med. Lots of neon, a lot of space, a ton of machines and almost no free weights in site. And it was also $36/day! Next, I went looking for the local Univers Gym. I never did find it. But while I was looking for that gym, I found this building facing a back alley. It looked like something from the future – possibly a set for Gattaca or Minority Report:

And then right across the street was an entry way that took me from the future all the way back to the past:

  Inside a massive park was this man sitting with his feathered friends:

After wandering in the park here for a bit, I headed back to the other side of town to try to find Body Gym.

On the way, I passed through the Place de Bastille, a very large roundabout with this in the center:

It was ever more impressive zoomed in:

Eventually I found the gym.  I almost didn’t go in. The front entrance was all graffitied (graffited?) over. But once inside, the owners were friendly, the gym had real people working out hard, and they had free weights, a somewhat old change room, and the whole place looked like it needed to be…closed….or renovated. Perfect! And the price was right too. Managed 10 sets of “Cindy” (5 pullups, 10 pushups, 15 squats) in 20 minutes. That was about all I could do today between my minor jetlag and my bum cramps from the flights over.

Once the workout was over, I wandered home feeling like I was going to be sick. I’m sure that was the workout and not the jetlag which is gone by now.

As night fell, the neighbourhood seemed to get LOUDER as people came home from work. This is the view out of the window. It’s pretty funny to watch. It eventually settles down though by bedtime.

Technorati Tags: crossfit, paris, gym, travel

My time at Business Objects has finally come to a close. It was an awesome two years, with a lot of learning. I met a lot of extremely talented people there and through my association with the company. I was feeling the entrepreneurial urge again so i decided to throw myself back out of the perceived safety of the corporate life and back into the chaotic startup world.  I have been out for two weeks so far and couldn’t be happier. I feel like I’m “home”.

Now that I’m out, I’m taking on a few different projects. I’m working with a group called Hinchcliffe and Company. They are a leading Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consulting, training, advisory, and media firm headed by Dion Hinchcliffe. I am joined by a top-tier team that is seeding the company and it our goal to ramp up this company very quickly. I will predominantly work in the corporate training, enterprise consulting, and startup advisory area – helping startups with their business planning, go-to-market planning, technology strategy, and/or sustainability practices.

You can see some of our sites here:

Main site: http://www.hinchcliffeandco.com
Training: http://web20university.com
Media: http://enterprise2tvshow.com

This will also give me the time and flexibility to work on some other business, technology, and sustainability related projects that I have been wanting to work on for a while as well as to build out my speaking engagements and writing and blogging.

Some people ask me how I tie this all together? I explain it like this. I have come to the conclusion that it is my mission to use business and technology to create a better world. That includes Web 2.0 (bringing a social aspect to computing and to business) or Sustainability (bringing a social and ecological aspect to business).

In my new role(s), I will be doing all of that – sustainability, web 2.0, business building. I have the best “job” in the world! Because I get to work with entrepreneurs, BE an entrepreneur, and work with people who want to change the world for the better.

It’s going to be a crazy and fun year – I can sense it already!

My new contact information is: troy at hinchcliffeandco dot com. My cell hasn’t changed: 604-551-8275 (Vancouver). Drop me a note if we haven’t spoken in a while and we’ll catch up!

Have a great 2007 everybody!

My friend Michael and I met at Seymour Mountain at 10am on Sunday morning. Even from the parking lot, we could see a thick white cloud cover blanketing Vancouver and Burnaby. We headed up the mountain, stripping layers as we went and it didn’t take long before we were down to our single layer shirts.

There were lots of people up there skiing, boarding, snowshoeing, and enjoying the sun. We had lunch on top of second peak, lay in the sun for a while, and then ran, slid, and fell down the mountain as fast as we could. Note to self: wear pants with a stronger material on the bum…

Thanks for a great day you two!

This film was made entirely with my pocket-sized Olympus Stylus 750 camera and iMovie.

Soundtrack: “Running Two” from “Run Lola Run” available at Amazon.com here. To watch the large version of the film, click on the YouTube logo in the lower right hand corner, and then when you land on the video on YouTube, click the icon in the lower right hand corner of THAT. (It’s two steps from here is what I’m saying.) Otherwise, just click on the middle of this video and enjoy it right here on the blog.