Paleo eating, CrossFit and Business...

I realized that I've slipped a bit in posting a new blog each week, but I do have some things to write about.  This week, I'll write about Paleo eating and CrossFit and I'll bet you probably saw those coming.  But I'll hit another topic, that I rarely write about, business.  This whole post stems from a business trip I took 2 weeks ago for the full week.

If you're a long time reader (I know I have some regulars, even though I'm not so regular, so thank you), you might recall I used to work from home. I'd make occasional trips to my company's office, day trips or on rare instances, an over-nighter.  Now that I've changed companies, my travel has been different. This trip was a full week, which adds complications to eating paleo and doing CrossFit.

I was a little concerned about how I would be able to stick to my strict paleo challenge during this trip.  In the end, I realized it wasn't so hard after all. You do have to read the menus and be ready to ask for items to be excluded. I was in Arizona and when I went to the local Mexican restaurant, I had to turn down the chips and the tortilla with my dinner, and avoid eating the cheese covered beans.  In fact, when my plate came out, my fork went for the cheesy beans first and then I realized the error of my ways.  "Hold the cheese and hold the potatoes," was the standard addition to my breakfast orders at the hotel restaurant.

Group lunches during our meeting were a little hard, but I foresaw that and I made sure to bring some paleo friendly snacks to tide me over during the day.  The meeting organizers did a good job of trying to meet everybody's special diet needs, though one day instead of sandwiches, I was given a salad.  I could have just eaten the inside of a sandwich!

And I've found that in the west, specialty diet restaurants are becoming more prevalent. I've found restaurants in Portland and now Phoenix that cater to paleo lifestyles among others.  A quick search helped me find Nourish 123 and so a buddy and I went there for dinner one night.

Fish tacos in a jicama shell. How cool is that? And to top it off, I didn't need to ask them to hold anything or make any substitutions. I just ordered from their menu with the little Paleo icon.

CrossFit was a little more difficult. Our schedule was a little unpredictable, so I wasn't sure that I'd be able to get to an evening session at one of the local CrossFit boxes. But I made sure to workout (the first evening and then 3 more mornings), but it wasn't nearly as intense and I did skip one morning.  It just isn't the same, working out in a little fitness center (really a room to hold elliptical machines and treadmills), without music and without the motivation of my fellow 6AM'er CrossFitters.

My return flight to Seattle arrived at 5:30pm. I went straight to Cascade CrossFit and met my wife and youngest kid there. I was 16 minutes late, which earned me an 80 burpee penalty (I did 40 before the WOD and 40 the next day), but it was great to get a good CrossFit WOD in.  And in fact, that burpee practice helped me prepare for the CrossFit Open 13.1 WOD, but more on that later.

Thanks for reading this far and getting through all the CrossFit and paleo stuff. Although the trip was long and took me from my family, my own bed and my CrossFit box for a week, it was a good business trip.  But the neatest thing was that I got to spend several days with a CEO and see how he thinks about things when he is on the shop floor in the weeds.

I was impressed how he would listen to the associates tell how they did their jobs and every time, he'd ask them, "What can we do to make your job easier?"  Yeah, he had his own ideas, but he would actively seek that feedback from the associates, because the associates do the job day in and day out.  It was great to see that a CEO isn't that much different than you and I; they're people too. In fact, I ran into him in the elevator of our hotel as I was going to workout and he said that he didn't have that discipline to workout when travelling.

We all have our own strengths and weaknesses and through listening to others and learning from each other, we can all become stronger.

Working across time zones

I don't often blog about work, but here goes.

I work for a domestic company (you don't have to be a Sherlock Holmes to figure out which one) that has locations across the US. Our headquarter is located in the Pacific Time Zone, but I work with people in all of the US time zones.

In an effort to make myself available, I have told certain people in the Eastern Time Zone that they can call me at early as 5:00 am Pacific time, because that is when I wake up. I'll routinely schedule 7:00 calls (I can't convince the Pacific Time Zone people to come in too early), if I am primarily working with the Eastern people.

Last week, I was in an Eastern Time Zone office doing some training and we were having server difficulty. Our entire IT staff, helpdesk and data center are all located in our Pacific Time Zone Headquarters.

We were doing user training on a new application and you guessed it the server was down when we walked in that morning. I'm pretty darn competent when it comes to technology, but you can't believe the feelings of helplessness I had. None of the people I knew were around to help, it was too early.

I ended up calling our data center and they referred me to an on-call guy - who didn't know what server I was talking about.

I have to say it was pretty strange being on the east coast and all the support resources were on the west coast. It gave me a new found understanding of watching the time when I schedule meetings and how I make myself available to the people on the other coast.

It is funny how the majority of people live on the coasts, which then puts lots of company headquarters in those same areas; which naturally puts us at odds with the time zones.