Remember when I said that Brad can’t sing? Here’s the proof – a recording session in Jason’s studio for our I’m a VC video (Brad is wearing headphones with the music track piped in – all the better for us to clearly hear Brad himself in this outtake). Enjoy!

This is totally off topic, but every time I tell people this story they love it and say they’ve never heard of this idea before so I thought I’d post it here. I didn’t make this method up (I can’t remember who told me about it, but living in the cycling capital of the US – Boulder, CO – it could have been any one of a hundred different people). We taught our two daughters how to ride using this method when they were around 4 and will have one more shot at it in the near future with our 3 year old son. The idea behind this method is that kids know how to pedal (they’ve been doing that just fine with training wheels) – what you really need to work on is balance and the easies way to do that is to take away all the other distractions so they can just focus on that one thing. Once they have that down they’ll be good to go. Both of our girls learned to ride using the method below in a few hours start to finish (where finish = riding around the block for the next hour by themselves).

Bike prep – Take the bike your child has been riding and remove the training wheels. Now take the pedals off and lower the seat so your child’s feet can very comfortably touch the ground when they are seated on the bike (the bike shouldn’t have to lean over at all for them to do this and they should be able to sit on the seat and touch the ground flat-footed).

Find the right training ground – You’ll need to find a concrete (NOT GRASS!) area for your kids to practice. It should be straight, have no bumps or obstacles and be slightly inclined (very, very slightly). 50 feet should do it.

Learning balance – Starting on the uphill side of your training area, have your child push off on their own down the road. You shouldn’t need to run beside them and you should definitely not hold or touch the bike at all. Their balance will be off and they’ll need to use their feet often to keep upright, which will be easy to do with the bike configured with a low seat and w/o pedals to get in their way.

Repeat – It may take a few times, but your child should start getting the hang of this relatively quickly. As the frequency with which they need to put their feet down decreases, encourage them to lift their feet off the ground a bit more. As they get more comfortable with it you may want to slightly raise the seat so the act of lifting their feet off the ground doesn’t throw their balance off.

Ready for pedals? The step above may take a bit and, of course, you’ll want to be giving plenty of encouragement. Our daughters thought this was a blast (I think they thought it was funny to ride without pedals). We let them do it for a while – making sure they were completely comfortable with balancing their bike. Once your child gets the hang of it, put the pedals back on the bike, but keep the seat low so they’ll have no trouble getting a foot down in case they need to. In our case, our kids took off around the block the very first time they tried to ride with the pedals back on. In other cases you may want to run the incline a few times while they pedal so they have the hang of it.

The best part of this method is that neither my wife nor I ran behind a bike holding onto the seat a single time. Seriously – not once. The kids had fun and they felt a great sense of accomplishment learning to ride so quickly. Two years later they are trail riding (this is Colorado, mind you).

I spent the month of July up at our place in Granby, CO (just outside of Winter Park). My partner Brad has been a longtime fan of taking a month to work somewhere else, not travel and clear your head, but I’d never given it a try. And while I understand that not all jobs allow for this, I suspect that more people could do it (at least for a week or two) if they really wanted to.

Let me be clear that this wasn’t vacation. While I didn’t get on a plane for a month (which in and of itself felt like vacation), I was working full time – completely connected via email and phone. I actually intended to take a week of the month off, but with a number of financings closing and a Thursday full of board calls, my week off turned into about 2 days off instead. Other than those two days I was fully connected.

And the amazing thing about taking some time out of the office was how amazingly productive it was. I was completely caught up on email, totally connected to the happenings of the portfolio and my “to call” list shrunk down to zero. More importantly, I was able to spend a lot more time with my wife Greeley and our three kids (by far the biggest downside of my job is the time that it requires me to be away from my family).

While I recognize that time in the office is important I realized this summer that time out of the office is just as important. I’ll definitely be doing this again. And hopefully my pace of blogging will pick up this fall with some of the ideas bouncing around my head from July…

If you followed this blog last year, you know that my quest to hit United 1K status ended with a December 26th trip from Denver to Washington DC. I left the house around 7:00am that morning and returned home that evening at 6:00pm, happily tweeting about the 30 miles I had to spare. And while I never want to make 1K again (that’s just too many miles to fly – especially back and forth from Denver to the east and west coasts, and in particular considering that I probably had another 20k miles on other airlines last year as well) I was pretty pleased with my achievement.

Fast forward about two weeks. I’m on my way to CES in early January. My (United) flight has already been delayed by two hours. They’ve loaded the plane, allowed us to sit on the tarmac and then pulled us back off the plane to try to locate a new aircraft. I’m four hours into my travel day and I haven’t gone anywhere and it’s not clear that I’ll be getting out at all. I’m sitting in the gate area downloading email when I receive the following from “United Mileage Plus” with the subject line “My Mileage Plus — Your updated account balance, 2009 Error in Calculation”:

I’m already steaming about United because of the delay and here I find out that my little trip to DC was all for naught – I’m still 7,000 miles away from my 1K goal. And I had checked probably 3 times with United about my account balance (making sure all of my December flights were in the system, checking to see if there were any other ways for me to get the miles w/o having to take a vacation day trip, etc.). I can’t believe they had it wrong. I tweet about the note. I tell the people around me at the airport what just happened. But I decide to wait until I cool down to actually call United and tell them when I think about their “computer error”. I’m sure that I’ll talk my way back to 1K, but if I call them right now I’ll just end up yelling at them and likely won’t make any friends in customer service.

Eventually my flight takes off and as it turns out I land at about the same time as my partner Brad, so I send him an email to wait for me so we can ride to our hotel together. We sit down in the car and he turns to me to ask if I had called United yet. But with a curious smirk on his face. I tell him I hadn’t – that I was too mad at the time to do it but was planning to do so from the hotel. I guess he felt sorry for me after such a bad travel day, because he looked at me and said: “yah. that was actually me and pete” referring to Pete Sheinbaum, CEO of Mandelbrot Project (and email expert from his days running Daily Candy). Kelly Collins from Foundry had also been in on the act (she has my United creds so they could log in to get the exact mileage amounts). They had planned to tell me later, but he couldn’t let it go any further. I actually didn’t believe him. Of course it had never occurred to me that this was anything but legitimate. And as it slowly sunk in that I had been utterly and completely taken, I literally couldn’t stop laughing.

Brad, Pete and Kelly really really got me.

And I’m still plotting my revenge…

I travel a lot. It’s mostly to relatively fun places (New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc), but it’s pretty much all within the US. Living in Denver and traveling to the coasts makes it pretty difficult to rack up frequent flier miles (a round trip to New York is barely 3k miles). So while I feel like I’m constantly on the road (trying to change this habit for this year – more on that in a different post), I’m perennially falling just a little short of reaching 1K status (100,000 flight miles) on United.

So when I checked my account balance after my last scheduled business trip in December and found that I was only a few thousand miles short of 1K this year I felt compelled to remedy the situation. Even if it meant a pointless flight (United won’t allow you to purchase a flight to get miles – you actually have to make the trip). It’s a great example of what happens when you offer your best customers meaningful rewards (in United’s case better upgrades, shorter lines, priority boarding, etc; see a great post on this topic from Jim Keenan here). I spent about $600 and a day of my life flying from Denver to Washington, DC to earn just enough miles to hit 1K (I ended the trip with 100,030 flight miles in 2009). And I did it happily. Just to get the additional rewards offered by 1K.

Now I hope to never make 1K again (that’s a lot of miles and too many nights away) and at least one of my partners thinks I’m completely insane for doing what I did, but I’m extremely happy with the effort and the outcome.

Let’s hope United can get me where I’m going a little more reliably ontime this year…

My wife received an email this morning from AT&T that said in part:

Our systems have detected that you are transmitting a substantial amount of data while roaming in areas not directly served by AT&T. The Terms and Conditions of our data plans (including unlimited plans) provide an "off-net usage" allowance that is equal to the lesser of 24 megabytes or 20% of the megabytes included in your plan.

I was surprised by this, not only because I hadn’t completely read the terms and conditions (I subsequently did and it’s in there – they can go so far as to cancel my account if they don’t like my network usage – on net or off, voice or data) but mostly because our phones were registering that they were on the AT&T network in all of the places that we travel to regularly.

I called customer service and learned a few interesting facts: 1) despite the phone indicating it is on network, sometimes it isn’t (in our case the town where we spend many of our weekends turns out to not be on their network); 2) AT&T has a new policy of going after "abusers" of the system (the Ts&Cs aren’t new – their aggressive enforcement is); and 3) going after abusers means that if we continue to use off-net data services they will either cut of our data when we’re outside of AT&T’s coverage area or simply terminate our account.

I can’t be the only person to see the unbelievable irony in AT&T’s action. Not only do they have one of the lowest quality networks in existence, and a very limited network outside of the major metro areas, and aren’t actually identifying to customers when they are on network vs. off network (presumably to give the perception that their limited network is actually larger than it really is), and they are the exclusive seller of one of the most powerful (read: data consuming) smartphones, but now they are threatening to cut off our service for using our phones for what they were designed for. My wife summed it up perfectly (and I think reflects a sentiment that is widely held): "If they didn’t have the iPhone I would drop AT&T!"

Even more amusing was the fact that my call to customer service was terminated when the call was dropped (there are many many dead zones around Boulder). My wife joked that we should send AT&T a termination letter stating that we weren’t going to honor the contract because their network coverage was so poor.

I think AT&T is walking into a PR nightmare if they start shutting people off like this. It’s one thing to have a crappy network. It’s another to punish your customers for your shortcomings.

Last year was my first joining Walker on his annual “Colorado Hajj” trip riding from the state capital building in Downtown Denver to the top of Mt. Evans (a 14,000ft mountain west of town) and back. It’s a pretty insane ride, but extremely fun and the kind of challenge that once you’ve tried it, it’s hard not to crave doing it again. This year’s ride came significantly earlier in the season’s than last year, meaning that legs and lungs were that much less prepared for the massive undertaking. Last year, Walker and I did the ride alone, but this year we had a gang of 8 to make things more interesting (and provide better drafting during the early ride). To give you a sense for what we did, check out the ride elevation profile below. You’ll see we stopped at mile 100 on the way back – more on that below.

Here’s the chronology of the trip for those interested:

3:40am: Roll-out from Walkers house in Wash Park (just outside of Downtown Denver)

4:00am: Capital Building. We met up at the state capital building to officially hit the “5280 step” (the step leading up to the capital, pictured below, is officially one mile above sea level). Weather was surprisingly balmy – probably 65 degrees with almost no wind.

5:58am: Top of Lookout Mountain. Just outside of Golden we hit our first real climb up Lookout Mountain. Last year we rode Lookout just as the sun was rising. This year, riding so close to summer solstice, we were riding in the morning sunlight. The top of Lookout Mountain is fantastic – we followed a rolling road for a few miles with great vistas west to the divide before descending slightly to a quick ride along I-70.

From I-70 we took the frontage road that descends down to the river and then up and over Floyd Hill. We eventually ended up on the old highway 6, which is now a bike path that leads into Idaho Springs (the Scott Lancaster Memorial Path)

7:44am: Idaho Springs.  We stopped in Idaho Springs for a well earned breakfast burrito. From here it was to be about 30 miles – all uphill – to the top of Evans.

10:19: Echo Lake Lodge. 14 miles from the summit of Mt. Evans is the Echo Lake Loge and the fee station to the road up the mountain. We stopped at the Lodge for a refill of water (they couldn’t be nicer to cyclists at the lodge) and heard reports from the top of high winds and snow flurries. Still, undaunted, we layered up with clothing and figured we’d head up as far as we could.

The weather up wasn’t as bad as the reports had indicated and while cloudy and somewhat brisk, the riding was smooth and, for me, relatively comfortable despite my being the only person in the group not riding a triple or compact gear set-up (although I do run a 12-27 in back for a small amount of climbing relief). From Summit Lake we headed up the final 5 miles of steep climbing and switchbacks to the summit of the mountain.

1:32 Mt. Evans Summit! The time gaps here should give you some sense of the difficulty of the riding, but persistence is key on this trip and at just after 1:30 we topped out at on the Summit. The weather was starting to turn, but we had time for a nice shot by the trail sign (that’s me, Bo and Pat in the picture below).

With the weather quickly deteriorating (it was snowing when we took off from the summit) we started back down. By this time the snow was really falling and the roads were completely soaked. Unfortunately breaking caused my hands to freeze up and I spent most of the very fast ride down trying to keep my fingers from going completely numb (think ambient temperature in the 30′s and speeds of 35MPH through the rain). Towards the bottom it was actually enjoyable (after the feeling returned in my fingers and toes) but at the top I was seriously considering whether I could hitchhike down.

2:45  Back at Echo Lake Lodge. After about 45 minutes of the coldest, wettest descent of my life I was back at the Echo Lake Lodge. Fortunately the Lodge is heated and we warmed up with some lunch and hot beverages. The rain was really coming down now and we decided that we’d ride up and over Squaw Pass and down into Evergreen and then make a decision about whether to call in a ride.

The ride down from the top of Squaw Pass (which wasn’t a very long ascent, although my legs were not happy with me at the time) was extremely fast and extremely fun. In hindsight I might have backed off a bit given the rain but I was very focused on hitting Evergreen and meeting up with the sag wagon we had called in to come pick us up.

4:45 Evergreen. Definitely worse for rain ware but happy to be off the bike, we called it quits in Evergreen and grabbed a ride back into Denver.

The final ride stats according to the Garmin GPS that we had along were as follows:

Mileage: 100.48

Time: 9:42hrs

Total Elevation Gain: 13,203

Max Elevation: 14,179

And despite the cold and rain, we’ll all be doing it again next year. Care to join?

The last couple of months have been tuff ones for me. I’ve felt constantly behind (thus the lack of blogging consistency) and most days consisted of running from one meeting to the next (typically 10 minutes behind). This has contributed to my feeling both burned out and feeling that I was letting too many things fall through the cracks.  This was evidenced by 1) my inbox growing most days, not shrinking; 2) waking up at 5am to try to work on #1; 3) an over-reliance on multitasking (walking to a meeting, on the phone while responding to email); 4) my wife never being able to reach me during the day; and 5) generally feeling stressed and off-balance.

My week off for Thanksgiving definitely helped clear my head. But now I’m back to my old pattern (I’m writing this on a flight to NY where I’m running around from breakfast through dinner for two days and then catching the late flight home in time to get back for another set of meetings).  I was talking about this with Greeley the other day and we came up with some ideas for how to break this cycle.  I’d love to hear from others on how they do this as well. Here are a few key ones I’m going to work on in 2009

1) Take fewer meetings. Duh. Obvious, I know, but clearly the #1 thing I can do to clear space on my schedule. I make this resolution ever six months or so and get better for a few months before faltering. In 2009 I’m going to guard my schedule more diligently and push back on meetings that just fill space.

2) Schedule email time. This may sound crazy, but I’m blocking off time every morning next year (that I’m not traveling, that is…) for e-mail, phone calls, research and the like.  With rare exceptions, no meetings in 2009 until 10:00am.  Rather than starting my day running around, I’d like some solid time to get work done and start my days getting ahead rather than behind and feeling like I constantly need to catch up.

3) Take more vacations. I mentioned this in my post about going off-grid – I did a crappy job of taking time off in 2008.  The lack of time to recharge definitely weighed on me towards the end of the year.  Not so in 2009 – we’ve already planned our spring break vacation and are working on several others blocks of time to take off.

4) Work out more.  This may not seem like a good plan for time management, but for about a month this summer I got into a great pattern of riding my bike up Flagstaff mountain (a "hill" near the office) several times a week.  Not only did I feel great exercising consistently, but was a consistent time to just clear my head.

Thoughts?

Micah has recruited a number of Colorado bloggers to promote the 2008 DonorsChoose Bloggers Challenge.  There are some great (and well deserving) projects up – you can take a look at them by checking out the widget on my blog (scroll down a bit to find it) or head directly to the DonorsChoose website. Be generous!

Long overdue, but here’s an account of my recent bike ride from Denver to the top of Mt. Evans (elevation 14,264 ft) and back.

First some quick technical and summary data in case you’ve found this post looking to do a similar ride. I ride a lightspeed titanium bike with a standard front crankset (39/53) and a slightly climbing friendly rear cassette (13/27). The ride up took us 7 1/2 hour (ride time) and covered some 10,000 feet of climbing over 72 miles. While that’s a lot of climbing, the gradient actually didn’t kick up much past about 8% (and for most of the climb from Idaho Springs was more like 6%). My training had been pretty modest – I ride about 50 miles a week, including a hill ride at least every other week – and this ride was probably about 2 times the length (and difficulty) of any other ride I had attempted (which is to say that if I can slog it up – you probably can too).  I twittered my entire ride up, which turned out to be great way to keep my wife and friends informed of our progress while on route. The ride profile (until the battery on the GPS went dead) looked like this:

Below, for those that care to read on, are more details and some pictures of the ride. I rode with a friend – Walker Fenton – who has been making an annual tradition out of this trip for the last few years (and who planned the route for us).

4:00am, Denver: Rolled out of Wash Park and through downtown Denver, stopping at the "mile high" step at the state capital (I’m sitting on the step in the picture below). Temperature was a pretty comfortable 60 degrees, although the ground was still pretty wet from the torrential downpour the night before.

5:47, Lookout Mountain: We had made the trek out of Denver and were at the top of Lookout mountain by sunrise -some 20 miles of mostly flat riding in at this point.  We definitely had some strange looks from the few groups of people who appeared to be ending their night out drinking by watching the sun come up over Denver.

Our route took us over Lookout mountain and up through Genesee. For the most part we stayed off of the major highways, however the small exception was a few unpleasant miles on I-70 from the Buffalo Overlook to Evergreen Parkway (which thankfully only took a few minutes).  From there we took the frontage road over Floyd Hill and down to Kermit’s where we hopped onto the old HW 6 (which is now a bike path) which took us all the way to Idaho Springs.

7:42, Idaho Springs: By breakfast we were 40 miles in and had reached Idaho Springs where we stopped for some coffee and a burrito. From here it was to be about 30 miles straight up to the top of Mt. Evans.

The road out of Idaho Springs isn’t particularly steep, but it climbs steadily uphill some 15 miles to the fee station for the Mt. Evans road.

10:06, Mt. Evans Road Fee station: Turns out that even on a bike you have to pay to get to the top of Mt. Evans ($3 for each of us). It was pretty amusing to wait in the line of cars to pay to get to the top part of the road.

11:51, Summit Lake: It’s 9 miles from the fee station to Summit Lake and for me these were the longest miles of the trip (and as you can tell from the time gap, we stopped several times, including a long snack break, on the way up).  The grade wasn’t that steep (probably about 6%) but with some 60 miles on my legs and over 5 hours in the saddle, it seemed interminable at times.  My body felt off and I found it really hard to keep my energy up (I was eating on the entire ride at least every 30 minutes – but at this part of the ride it wasn’t providing the boost I was looking for).  Making it up to Summit Lake I was elated that I was almost at the top, but a little fearful for the 5 hardest miles of the trip. I’m pretty tired in this picture taken at the lake (in case you can’t tell!)

I was wrong about those last 5 miles.  For me, at least, the increase in grade actually made the riding easier.  The views were spectacular – at times it felt like we were riding to the top of the world (see the picture below).  With the steeper gradient came more frequent switchbacks and the air at 14,000ft is noticeably thinner when you’re peddling along.  My body perked up and I was keeping up a great rhythm.  I think the storm that appeared to be rolling in pushed us a little harder as well.

12:51: Summit at last!:  What a great feeling as we rode through the parking lot, literally to the end of the road. We were 7 1/2 hours of riding time into our ride (about 9 hours total elapsed time with stops and food breaks). The odometer read 72 miles and we were about 9,000 ft higher than when we started out that morning.

1:33, off the summit: We literally flew down the Evans road (trying to avoid getting stuck up high when the storm hit).  I like going downhill and you can really burn down the straights (thanks to some new break pads which quickly slowed me down as I hit the switchbacks).  At the fee station we turned right and headed up and over Squaw Pass (just couldn’t resist some more climbing).  Just as we crested the top of Squaw the skies opened up and we were hit by a classic Colorado rain and hail storm.  With the hail pelting us and pretty much soaked to the bone, we negotiated down the back side of the pass (trying to strike that elusive balance between going fast enough to make it down quickly, but not so fast that the hail pelting us in the face was going to do serious damage).  I wish we had taken the camera out during the storm, but we were just too focused on getting out of the rain and cold.  Eventually we managed to move past the weather and by 3:40 had made it to the relative dry ground of Evergreen.

4:19, Morrison: For us, Morrison was the end of the line.  With the storm bearing down on us again and the prospect of 20 more uncomfortable miles on wet city streets back into downtown we decided to call in the sag wagon (Walker’s wife Michelle) for a rescue. 

Final Ride Stats: 122 miles; somewhere around 12k of climbing; 10 hrs ride time; 12 1/2 hours elapsed time.  It was an amazing ride – I’m looking forward to next year’s already!