A pretty lame week training wise - but it was planned. It served as the break between ski season and bike race season. I am pretty excited about the bike season to come.
I took a trip out to Seattle to goto represent the Skirack at a symposium hosted by Brooks running shoes. Emily Steers, the fantastic shoe buyer at the store, and I flew out a day early as we both had friends in Seattle we wanted to visit. I'd been in touch with my friend Charlie Lozner, who I used to ride bikes with when her lived in Burlington, about getting together and hanging out. Charlie worked for Karhu when they were based in Burlington and when they got bought by the K2 copy he moved out to Seattle to work for them out there. Charlie's very good at what he does and so he is now helping guide the Karhu, Atlas (snowshoes), and Madshus brands for K2. I took a bus from the airport right to K2 and Charlie and I got some lunch before he gave me the tour of K2. K2 just moved into a new facility last September and it is impressive. They're one of the biggest sports companies in the world and you feel it when you tour their operation. They have a testing room next to their normal engineering department that is about the size of a trailer home and its a refrigerated testing laboratory. It was a really cool place and it was fantastic to visit with Charlie - he's good people. I then went downtown for a little while in the late afternoon and evening to tour around before taking a bus back out to West Seattle where Charlie lives to crash with him that night. He had some other friends in town already visiting but he and his wife Elizabeth made me a really comfortable spot to stay. Again - good people. Then the next morning I did a really enjoyable long run and took the bus into town to start getting my symposium on.
Brooks invited about 25 specialty running shoe retailers out to a 3 day event in Seattle to do everything from meetings with their footwear design team to group discussions about best practices in their stores. Brooks made sure we had fun too and took us to an NBA basketball game (Seattle vs. Minnesota) as well as including us in their Friday afternoon run (which everyone from secretaries, to CEOs, to sales people in their office does). I think the best part of the whole experience was just getting to talk to people from other shops from around the country. Almost all of the other stores were only running stores. A few did some business in casual shoes or team sports. There were no other stores there like the Skirack (running as well as bike, x-c ski, alpine ski, snowboard, casual, swim, rollerblade, etc) which really made me realize that there aren't many other stores like the Skirack. I found it a little hard to describe the store to other people without sound like I was bragging - a weird feeling. The other stores at the symposium had a real range of people working at them (3:56 milers to fitness walkers) and a range of what they focused on at the store. It was clear though that all the stores were very well run, put the customer's interests #1, and were innovative in some way. All the while during the whole symposium Brooks had us staying at a very cool downtown hotel called Hotel 1000. It was a place for hipsters and people with pointy Italian shoes. And for a couple of day - runners.
Monday: -off
Tuesday: -off
Wednesday: -off
Thursday: -80 minutes running w/ stretching and situps & pushups
Friday: -35 minutes running w/ stretching and situps & pushups
Saturday: -35 minutes running w/ stretching and situps & pushups
Sunday: -off
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