Fundraising

I made some errors in fundraising. The first was not demanding the money in cash to get it doubled. I would be a lot further ahead by now. The second was charging too little for my bike services. I just didn't realize that people took such poor care of their bikes.

Anyway, I hit my minimum and even had enough to help out a team-mate that needed a hand making the minimum. I am not a minimum kinda guy though.

So, I am in Kansas last week for our national sales meeting at the new parent company. We are all supposed to give 5 minute speeches. I figured that would be a great time to hit up everyone for donations instead of the lame email and pestering I was going to do. I gave my speech, but lost it about 1/4 into it. I pulled it together and got about half of what I wanted to say out. Apparently it was enough. Including my personal contribution of $1000, I raised $4200. That will make a big difference to some people.

Now I am going to start to really up my activity in fundraising. I have some great ideas that I am going to start moving with.

800 Marker

This is old news, but it isn't on the blog, so I thought I would post it. I was supposed to do a 1000 meter swim marker (test), but decided to do another 800 on New Years Day to see how I did in comparison. I BLEW AWAY my old time. I was just a little over 19 minutes this time and swam the whole time continuously. It was a huge confidence booster.

Swimming has been improving since then. I have been able to do my workouts for the most part, which is new for me. I am wayyy behind, but I will catch up soon. We have our first race in a couple weeks, so we'll see how that goes for me.

I did have a "race" this past weekend, that cost me a weekend of swimming. We were supposed to do a 100m interval pretty hard. I ended up being in the same lane as Simon, the running coach, who is also a terrible swimmer. We ended up racing the whole thing against each other and I beat him by 1/4 inch at the end. The victory was sweet, but unfortunately, I pulled a back muscle and was told to stop swimming by my coach. I am going to give it a shot today and see what happens.