This coming summer I’ll be racing BC Cups, Canada Cups and a few West Coast races proudly sporting a Steed Cycles jersey. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been on the bike, so I’m honored that Steed stepped up to offer their support. If you haven’t been by the shop yet, you should check it out:
Things are starting to get shredtastic out there on the shore. Dave Smith (@apeshape) & I banged out some great Seymoure runs with a friend from the coast on Saturday. The air was super cold and the dirt froze up solid making the runs fast and brittle. A few of the berms had been muddy before the frost and the ruts were frozen in place. If you were right on your line you were okay, but there wasn’t a lot of room for error.
Sunday we traded our coastal friend for an Aussie expat and moved the shuttle party over to the steeps on Cypress. I hadn’t ridden there in about a decade and was hoping for mellow conditions, but it was not to be. The trails had a nice little 2″ dusting of snow, just enough to obscure the patches of blue ice underneath. The first run down Wild Cherry/Roach Hit was pretty gnar if you were breaking trail.
After three shuttles or so we figured out where the ice was and got the corners dialed. Spring mud is going to be a piece of cake after these slick roots!
If you do an MBA you might experience being locked in a building and strapped to a chair for ~100 hours / week. Two things will likely result. #1 You’ll get smart, #2 You’ll get fat. I definitely gained weight and #1 is TBD.
So at the end of the year my girlfriend & I ran a half-marathon, and an XC running race in Victoria. Then Andre got me out riding mountain bikes again which is an all or nothing type of sport, so I dove back in. I set myself some ridiculous goals for the 2010 racing season and setup an obsessively detailed training plan:
The program is loosely based on The Cyclist’s Training Bible, which walks you through in painstaking detail how to organize, how to workout, and how to monitor & adjust your progress so that you achieve peak fitness in time for major races. Although the detail seems a bit over the top (the spreadsheet has 10 tabs), each workout has a purpose and moves you measurably closer to your goal. I’ve been following the plan for about 4 months and have cut about 43 seconds off my 5000m row & and am ~13% higher on average power output. My bike skills are still super sketchy.
For any of you back home who are interested in doing an MBA sometime soon, you should roll on down to the Pan Pacific this coming Thursday (november 6) and meet Bob from Babson. Bob is in Vancouver as part of the mba tour, talking about the program and meeting with potential students. Check it out!
Back in August I was approached by a local developer to expand WorkSpace into a building downtown. I looked extensively at the proposal, but ultimately turned it down. In the mean time though, I developed a good relationship with the company. They were still looking for a solution for the building, so I took on the job of project manager.
My objective was to take the 1950’s 5 storey building, which had gone through innumberable mickey mouse renovations over the years, and turn it into a series of big open contemporary spaces where people would want to work. The approach was to reveal the building’s slab structure, and frame it as a feature. I quickly hired David and Heather to develop a design for the units.Over the last ten months, the building has undergone extensive interior demolition, code, and infrastructure upgrades. The waffle slab (ish) ceiling revealed itself to be rich in texture. The concrete and aggregate had oozed through the forming in places, leaving an almost creepy appearance in its original grey color.
We started spraying the ceiling white, and putting in new washrooms. B+H carried a half inch reveal around the door jams and between the ceiling and drywall. The floor was ground down and given a fresh epoxy coat andfinally the heater grills were replaced with a new MDF design that really gave the space character.
Right now the office portion of the building is nearly complete, with lobby and entry work pending. The designs that have been developed for those areas are truly striking, but they’re still in the approval process so I can’t say much. Except for that they’ll make a landmark out of a building that 10 months ago was falling apart.
455Granville.wordpress.com
I’ve been considering business school for a long time now. It’s been in the mix among other things, a cycling carrer, a masters in architecture, and business itsef… but I’ve always hesitated. Last fall while trying to narrow things down, Dane recommended that I look into Babson College, and I immediately had the impression that this school was different. They are all about innovation and entrepreneurship, they say. So I submitted an application and went to Boston to visit.
The idea of an “MBA” sort of turned me off. I pictured a bunch of booksmart kids in a room studying statistics and prepping themselves for a career at the bank. Babson’s not like that. The people I met were totally down to earth, full of real world experience and looking to build on it with a practical education. Most of the students I talked to had already run their own business. There’s even a class that collaborates with students from RISD to come up with solutions to bring their design ideas to market. Whaaaaaat you wont get that at Queens!
With the exception of Stanford, there is no other MBA program that I would really want to partake in. The people at Babson sold me on the school, and got me excited about the MBA aswell. This Wednesday I’m packin’ up my gear and moving east!
Great post at Beyond Robson.
Now, as we approach the end of the monumental Podium Tower boom, it is becoming increasingly important that we incent land owners and developers to undertake these small restoration projects and reintroduce architectural diversity to the city. The Dal Grauer building is clearly overdue!
“Last year, more than $8,000,000,000 was wasted on these [gift certificates]. Not in the value spent, but in fees and breakage. When you give a card, if it doesn’t get used, someone ends up keeping your money, and it’s not the recipient. People spent more than eight billion dollars for nothing… buying a product that isn’t as good as cash.”
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/11/the-8-billion-s.html
