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Last year on December 1st, 2006 I posted this.  I thought I’d give a little update on where  I’ve come in the last year.  I still run with my Nike+ Ipod, and highly recommend it to anyone else who’s a runner or might want to be.  I was given the Ipod as a gift so all I had to buy was the $30 Nike+ sport kit, and a $10 arm band, which I bought at Walmart.  The Nike+ Ipod has help me be consistent with my running.  I like tech stuff and I like statistics and charts so we’re a good match.

(side note: I bought a neoprene pouch to hold the sensor on my shoe, but it only latest about five months.  Material became so worn that I lost the sensor in May of this year while walking around the Wild Animal Park.  I didn’t want to spend another $30 for a new Nike+ Sport Kit, but after two months my running had really dropped off so I finally broke down and bought another Nike+ sport kit.  I wish I hadn’t waited so long.  And now my sensor is attached to my shoe via clear packing tape.  There is no way I’ll lose this one.)

After an 8-year stretch of not exercising I start running last year with very Kaizen attitude: 10 minutes, three times a week.  I ran pretty slow too.  That might seem laughably easy (it wasn’t), and more than one person did laugh out loud when I told them what I was doing because they thought I had to be joking.  The truth is that if you haven’t ran in 8 years then 10 minutes can seem like a very long time.  However, it was doable for me at the time, and that was the point.  FYI if running isn’t something you can or want to do the Nike+ Ipod system can work for walking too. 

In August of this year I did my first triathlon (sprint distance).  Again, my goals were very Kaizen: finish the race and don’t walk the bike (it was a hilly course).  I accomplished those goals and had a lot of fun so I did a few more.  I would love to do a race every weekend, but the cost adds up so I have to pick and chose the races I most want to do.

Last month, on November 3rd, I did an all-day event with some friends that we called “Beach to Baldy.”  Can you guess what we did?  We started down at the water in Newport Beach, rode our bikes to Mt. Baldy (the highest peak in Los Angeles) until we couldn’t ride anymore, and hiked the rest of the way to the summit.  We traversed 70 miles, and 10,064 vertical feet.   The trip took me just under 17 hours from start to finish. 

So what’s on the horizon for 2008?  There are a lot of fun things I’d like to try but I am going to keep it Kaizen as I make incremental and sustainable improvements.  Of course, I’ll punctuate those with a few events that will stretch me like the triathlons and B-2-B events I did this year.