Tigy's Blog

XTERRA Auckland, Race 3

Jay — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:59:07 +0000

Location:	Woodhill
Distance:	14km
Time:	1:10:46
Place:	58/229

Managed to knock off the third race in the series in the weekend out in Woodhill.

It was good fun, although my build up has been dogged by this bloody calf/achilles injury. I haven’t been able to run properly since the Run Auckland race the prior weekend, so although I knew my fitness base wasn’t completely crap it wasn’t great either.

Started with a 10 min warm up jog before the race so my calves wouldn’t be too cold and allow me to start harder, this may have cost me a bit in energy but at least I didn’t tear anything. Did the first 10 min of the race with a friend at a pretty quick pace to get onto some clear trails, after that I had to let Brent go on ahead as I couldn’t quite keep up. Managed to stay roughly in touch with him and just finished 45 seconds behind him. In hindsight I probably could have caught him but thought the run was a bit longer than it really was and was keeping some juice in reserve.

The course was pretty nice, undulating sand based trails. Very little mud and generally plenty of room for passing which made it nice. Managed to have my eyes closed for the photo coming up to the finish line, but at least I didn’t look like a half shot horse!

Given how much trouble my calves have been giving me I really need to give myself some time off. I’ve planned in 2 weeks of no running and then I’ll ease back into it. Want to do the Auckland half marathon in November so I need to get better so I can start training. Will let you all know how it goes!

Run Auckland, Race 6

Jay — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:24:30 +0000

Location:	Takapuna
Distance:	9.5km
Time:	0:44:20
Place:	6/35 (M 30-39)

Last run of the Run Auckland series was on the weekend. Still nursing a bit of an injury so my plan was to use this as a bit of a trial and training run for next weekends trail run. Have to say I was pretty happy with how I went on what was a fairly easy course.

I knew once the race started I wouldn’t be able to go as slowly as I should so I took the time to go for a very light 10 min jog before the race started to make sure my legs were warm. I really think that made a big difference as even though I ended up cooling down a bit before the start I found I ran pretty freely and was able to keep a quicker pace than I had previously. The lack of training didn’t seem to make too much difference, although its hard to judge as the course was much flatter than the one I ran last time.

Despite not having a good training base I still found I was able to find a good rhythm and really listen to my body. I knew with a couple of km to go I had plenty of juice left but kept it easy so I didn’t hurt myself again. Good running seems to be as much about knowing when to slow down as it does about being able to go fast. Last 500m was a sprint finish which I love, officially I came in third in a three way sprint but I know it was actually a dead heat for second place and I did come from about 100m behind the other two.

Every generation thinks it is the first

Jay — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:39:27 +0000

Roots of Breakdance (Run DMC - It’s Like That)

Tough Guy Challenge

Jay — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 07:51:37 +0000

In a fit of certain insanity the missus and I have entered ourselves into ’round 2′ of the 2008 Tough Guy challenge in Rotorua this year.

What is it? To quote from thier website: http://www.toughguyandgal.co.nz/other.htm

Challenge yourself on a course that includes swamp crossings, a rope climb, crawl under barb wire, beautiful native bush trails, a range of natural and man made obstacles, mud and more mud.

So come August myself and my lovely wife (and possibly the three sproglets) are off to Roto-vegas for the Event. For Fe she’s never done anything like this, and to be honest neither have I. Looking forward to it :).

The future is RED

Jay — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:29:12 +0000

Goodbye Telecom, hello Vodafone!!

I hate Telecom, or at least strongly dislike them and their attitude to me over the last several years.

Arrogant is the word I would use, stupid also comes to mind. They have lost my business over $100 they forced me to pay for moving house, actually its worse than that because I agreed to pay half of it, fair cop getting charged to change your number, but charging me to disconnect and then again to reconnect seemed criminal to me. I mean I was never actually disconnected, they admitted it didn’t cost them anything like that to move me over and that they only did it because they could. I think the exact words they used were: “If we had some competition we probably couldn’t get away with charging this.”

Little lesson for Telecom here (and to my new friends at Vodafone if they’re listening).

You fought hard to squeeze $50 out of me when I moved. I told you I would leave you when I got a chance. I moved but you got your $50 - what did it cost you?

Lets see, I’ve been with you for about 15 years, lately spending about $90 a month and intending to keep doing that. So over 15 years that’s $16,200 dollars worth of revenue for you. But you did get your $50 so we can offset that against your loss, and 15 years is a long time so lets call it 10. That means you’re down $10,750 dollars - not allowing for any inflation over the next 10 years. Throw into that the cost of all the advertising you’ll do to try and win my business back, the TV, telemarketing and so forth and it’s not looking good. Perhaps you should have just charged me the $50 to move house like I told you, and you admitted, was fair.

Just for the record this is a concept called Customer Lifetime Value and CLV is sometimes made a much more complicated equation than this. I’ve spent hours pouring over numbers to accurately calculate CLV but at the end of the day it really is a simple concept and should be implemented simply.

Anyway I’ve moved it all over to Vodafone now, phone, broadband and mobile. The outgoing caller ID on our phone is finally working (which Telecom said was a problem with our phone) and my internet speeds have shot up. My previous (Slingshot) full speed plan was giving me between 25-250 kb/s download (yes they had the cheek to call this ‘broadband’) and about 100k upload. My test last night delivered 8000kb down and 650kb up, at its worst thats 320 times faster - iTunes actually works again and a 3 minute Youtube video isn’t taking 15 minutes to load!! I’m a happy guy.