This past Thursday and Friday I attended a conference about employee ownership of businesses, more specifically, ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) and one of the featured speakers was our own Paul Horn. Paul, aka Dr. ESOP, gave at least two long talks (45 minutes, and an hour) which were both well attended. The talks were informative and entertaining. To learn more about what Paul does for a living, visit his company's website: www.workplaceconsultants.net. To learn more about what Paul is doing when he isn't working give him a call or send him an email. His contact information is on his company's website.
About three weeks ago I bought a road bike, after getting Chris to approve the purchase. I'm diving into this biking thing pretty deep, so I've gone with special pedals and shoes that require "clipping in" to ride and "clipping out" to stop. I was told that I would probably fall once or twice while I learned how to use the shoes and pedals and, sure enough, at the very end of my pilot ride (a short jaunt around the neighborhood) I fell when I neglected to clip out before stopping. My next few rides went well and I felt confident that I had mastered the clipping. Of course my confidence led to another fall. While I didn't get hurt badly on either fall, when I got up from the second fall I saw that I managed to damage one of my cleats, leaving part of it attached to the pedal (Chris will appreciate that this type of damage is not a common occurence). The place I bought the bike and accessories from cheerfully replaced the cleat and I hope I've had my last fall for awhile.
Last Monday I did my first serious ride--20 miles on hilly country roads as part of small group. I was not as sore on Tuesday as I expected to be. I think all the riding I've done on the exercise bike at home has actually been helpful. Today I did 20 miles on my own on a different route that was quite a bit hillier than Monday's ride. I hope I can ride with the group tomorrow. I think I'm averaging around 13 to 14 miles/hour.
I have been doing a little bit of running. I've been to the track four or five times in the last two weeks or so. So far my fastest mile has been 8:20. It's too early for me to know if the biking and running are helping each other or not. I'm more focused right now on improving my riding than I am on improving my running.
1 comment:
Wow! What a small world in which the Striders seem to play such an important role (Paul Horn update). Very interesting update on biking. I have a feeling that 10 years from now the blog may have more about biking and low impact sports than running, but the important thing is that we are still moving! I'm not looking forward to crashing, though!
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