I ran 20 miles today, my longest run ever. Everything’s shaping up well for my marathon on October 9th. Unfortunately for Gina, she got bad shoe advice from the Running Room. After a single 10-mile run, her arch started to collapse. She’s been unable to run for a week, so her marathon ambitions have been dashed. She’s still hoping to run the half.

From Forrester Research: IT’s inability to market effectively cements its cost center role in the enterprise: communicating status but not value, fulfilling requests but not solving problems, and partially deploying technologies but not delivering expected results. IT organizations need to embrace the concepts, terminology, and process of marketing — creating marketing plans, executing campaigns, and boosting brand equity. The result will be delivery of the right projects for the right audience, accelerated time to benefit, and increased trust of the IT organization. The firms that embrace the marketing of IT first will be those with customer-facing technology, shared services, and strong process discipline.

DG pointed out to me that every single picture on my blog has someone with their mouth open. This one won’t disappoint. Guess we’re a family of Big Mouths.

I had a meeting in Whistler yesterday. On the way back home, I stopped at Browning Lake and tried out my new 19 Riptide wetsuit. My only other wetsuit experiences were with old, ill-fitting wetsuits that I borrowed. This one fits like a glove and is designed specifically for triathlons. It practically did the swimming for me! It gives me a little more confidence that I can do the swim portion of the Vancouver Triathlon next month without drowning.

Understanding sarcasm is this huge mental feat. From “The Guardian Weekly”: “First, the language centre in the brain’s left hemisphere interprets the literal meaning of words. Next, the frontal lobes and right hemisphere process the speaker’s intention and check for contradictions between the literal meaning and the social and emotional context. Finally, the right ventromedial prefontal cortex–our sarcasm meter–makes a decision based on our social and emotional knowledge of the situation.” Wow. Just the thought of hearing a sarcastic comment exhausts me.

If you don’t have a GPS, try the Google Pedometer. It’s a hack of Google Maps, and it lets you trace out any route and get a distance calculation. It was put together by a marathoner from Britain.

Sam has been drooling since he was born. People always ask me if he’s teething. If teething means getting new teeth, I guess he’ll be teething until he’s twelve.

I’ve been working on redesigning my training schedule for the marathon. This month’s Runner’s World talks about the FIRST running program, which has you doing just 3 intense running workouts a week plus 2 cross-training days. Another great site is McMillan Running–check out their calculator for figuring out how fast you could run for any distance. And to find an event in the Lower Mainland for any weekend you want, see the BC Athletics Calendar.

I took my 16-year-old time trial bike out for a ride today. It’s neon pink, which was a wicked cool color in 1989. The tires were flat and the chain was dry, but I fixed her up, rode down to the delta, and opened it up. I used to be able to do a 40K time trial under an hour, but I had trouble averaging 35km/h today. It was still fun. Gina and I are going up to Nelson next weekend, and we’re thinking about doing the short course triathlon on July 31st. Just for laughs.

It’s really felt like summer for the past 10 days. It’s hot and sunny and I want to be on a beach somewhere. Instead, I’m sitting in my office procrastinating on finishing up a few jobs. I should bite the bullet, work 24 straight hours, and then take off.