On a positive note though, the program included for the first time
a significant wellness track with 24 sessions! At least these weren't going to
fill as it happened to the precious technical ones on Monday and Tuesday!
Group runs, yoga practices, kickboxing, both at dawn and
dusk, talks about nutrition, lifestyle and health, this was some serious stuff,
so much that we hired local companies to run this track. And then there was our
traditional albeit more confidential group expedition at Red Rock Canyon on
Wednesday morning, organized by Scott Knaffla, and with VP Cloud, David Lapp,
sponsoring the bus.
All this awareness on the benefits of wellness were particularly interesting to me as, among many hats, I'm also an IBM Wellbeing Champion to promote these themes within our own organization. Better have a sane mind and body to resist some of the current madness we are going through in many areas...
All this awareness on the benefits of wellness were particularly interesting to me as, among many hats, I'm also an IBM Wellbeing Champion to promote these themes within our own organization. Better have a sane mind and body to resist some of the current madness we are going through in many areas...
Anyway, such a perfect setting to get some good running this week,
if it wasn't for my back injury, dang! So long for making the best out of our
10th and ultimate conference in Vegas, before we move in 2019 to another crazy
place for such gathering, even closer to home, San Francisco! I look forward to
seeing how we are going to handle the challenge of avoiding the misses we had
this year in such a more cramped and urbanized environment.
Back to the title of this post, I did give it a try. Despite
another super short night (less than 5 hours), and still experiencing pain in
my back after 16 days, I woke up at 4:30 and jogged a mile on the strip to see
how my back was holding up. Well, it was so bad that I made it to the group
picture but decided not to hop on the bus. I could have of course walked over
there but didn't feel that was worth the risk of missing the presentation of
one of my clients, Nationwide.
Instead, I jogged from the MGM to Mandalay Bay to see what
the official conference group run was about, and was pleased to see a sizeable
group of participants, not counting 5 wellness staff members/contractors.
On my way to Mandalay Bay, I got such a chill, passing by the vantage point of the shooter who killed 58 and injured 851 (this Wikipedia page gives a flavor of the horror, even more chilling as we see the next generation taking the gun control debate to the street with March For Our Lives this weekend).
Speaking of terror, here are new additions to the Strip, I assume to prevent a car or truck to kill pedestrians on the sidewalk. Sad that we have to get there.
I left that other group while they were still in their
warm-up practice and thought I'd put another mile in to make it 5K since it was so
early. Instead, and marveling at the sun rise, I got on my 10-mile LAS airport
loop and, although every stride and step was hurting, both from the pounding on
the concrete and the muscle extension due to the rib cage expansion at each
breath, my legs were so eager to keep moving that I ended up completing the
whole loop for a total of 11 miles, oops! The back was super painful for the
next 2 hours but I was relieved that passed afterwards as I kept moving from
meetings to meeting throughout the day. See this cool 3D fly-over on Relive.cc:
Here is the shot I missed at Red Rock Canyon, the X edition
On Thursday, I completed that loop again in the evening
after my post-conference meetings, then again on Friday morning before joining
the Hybrid Cloud Architects meeting and flying back to SFO at the end of the
day.
Bottom line, the muscle hasn't fully healed yet and I hope
I'm not damaging it more with these runs, I think it's ok to solicit it this
way. At least it's a relief for my mind and mood to get running again, albeit
at much slower paces (respectively 9:03, 8:03 and 8:03 min/mile, that could be
worse, but the road to running 6 min/mile again at Boston in 3 weeks is going to be short
and steep, ouch!). Yet, given the circumstances, I'm quite happy to have logged
50 kilometers with these three back to back (pun intended again...) ultimate
runs. Life keeps being good when you push yourself beyond your comfort zone!
Looking forward to having the opportunity to show some of
our local trails to THINK 2019 participants in 11 months; leave a comment if
you are interested and not on Scott's exclusive list yet! So we don't just...
think, but act and run! What another rich week on all levels, business,
networking and fitness wise, let's turn all this to keeping making our planet
better and smarter! Hopefully confirming the next transformational exponential which Ginni Rometty and John Kelly described at the new Watson's law, in their respective keynotes. Basically, that we exponentially increase knowledge by learning from the exponential increase of data.
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1 comment:
Great writeup Jean, sorry I was not at Think to make the last Red Rock run but maybe I will be in SF next year! Will look for you at Boston!
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