What is team building?

How do you team build with a remote team? Despite daily meetings and being virtually connected through chat all day every day there’s clearly a huge opportunity to bring people together face to face, which doesn’t happen like you would experience in a normal office setting.

Team building with half my team.
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The Mason Monster is 1!

Mason playing in the stream at Eleanor C Lawrence Park in Fairfax County, VA

Wow, I can’t believe how fast time flies. During our short excursion here to the New England area of the United States, Mason was born in our home and advanced through the first year of his life. It’s hard to even keep up. It’s impossible to spend enough time with the precious humans that are our children.

On-Site visit w/Zech!

It was a LOONG time coming but I finally visited Zech & Fam.

One of the pitfalls of moving around a lot is that time can blast by before you realize you haven’t seen your greatest friends in half a decade.

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Carnivore Diet for 30 days

What’s going on?

I’m trying the carnivore diet because, like any diet, it seems like it could have a positive impact on my life. I don’t imagine I will permanently damage anything by eating just meat and eggs for 30 days. I’m really curious how I’ll feel on this hyper-keto diet. This is of course not a very scientific reasoning but it works for me.

I’m going to log how I feel along with the food I ate. I’m training to compete in triathlons this summer so I may share some details about how I feel exercising but will save the exercise log unless it becomes relevant. On average I burn about 1,200 calories a day exercising 5 days a week. I’m weighing myself daily and will drop a graph of the time period at the end. I wear a Garmin Phoenix 6 so if there are any other neat changes to the metrics it’s measuring, I will share those at the end of this exercise. I’m also not logging all the extra salt I put on food. The only seasoning I’m using on anything is salt and I’m using a lot of it.

When this is all said and done, I will get the Walk-in-Lab Wellness #2 Essential Blood Test performed and see how broken I am. My cholesterol is already a bit high but all my other markers are within normal measurements. Here’s to hoping I feel great!

I fell off the bandwagon after nearly three weeks and my blog editor was throwing an error so I abandoned the completion of the project. I did however start to come around and feel pretty darn great after two weeks so I will come back to this and try it again.

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Back on the Auto Train!

We took the Amtrak Auto Train again to introduce Mason to great grandma and celebrate her 87th birthday! This time we upgraded from coach to a pair of roomettes and the experience was awesome!

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I love location sharing

Whether I’m meeting some friends at a huge venue, splitting the party while walking a city, snowboarding a mountain or even just living life on any random day, I’m always sharing my location with half a dozen people. Getting over the big brother aspect of it, the results can be wonderful.

Running into my dad in Phoenix is always a good reason to go to White Castle or In-n-Out. ^_^
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2022 Fitness Goals

I have a feeling these are going to change after I put together a legitimate training program to ensure I don’t do worse then I did last year for the few Triathlons Z and I are doing this year but as of the moment, here are my (likely superficial) fitness goals for 2022.

  • 100 miles of swimming.
  • 1,000 miles of running.
  • 5,000 miles of cycling.

I just barely broke 1,000 miles of running in 2021 but I did accomplish it so that one is just carrying over. The swimming and cycling is double what I logged in 2021 so they seem like some fair numbers. I may or may not actually reach these goals depending on if the training plan that I end up putting together supports this.

Overall, the theme I want to run with this year is consistency. I really want to be consistently putting up numbers and I will absolutely have to be super consistent to meet all these goals. I won’t be able to try and jam in a ton of miles late in the year like I did in 2021. hehehe.

Christmas Ice Skating at Pentagon Row

Christmas Ice Skating at Pentagon Row

Perhaps I’ve watched too many Hallmark movies, or maybe it’s due to growing up in the Minnesota or maybe it’s the winters I spent in Breckenridge and Vail that ultimately strongly influenced me to move to Colorado but there is something that really feels right about ice skating around Christmas time.

1,000 miles of Running in 2021

Over 1,000 miles of running in 2021

In 2020 I managed to run over 1,000 kilometers thanks to the map my fitness You vs Year challenge. I managed to cover 1,000 kilometers pretty quick in 2021 so I pushed for 1,000 miles and managed to capture it =) I think I’ll keep this goal for 2022 and add a cycling goal as well. I rode a total of 2,500 miles this year so I’m going to make a goal of doubling that for next year while also working to capture the tron bike in Zwift.

Bring on an even more fit 2022!

You destroyed my cast iron!

How dare you rape my cast iron with your bolognese pasta sauce!
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