This week

Life

Highlight of the last week: getting away for a two day wedding/retreat with Jo, leaving the kids at home to fend for themselves. It was a lovely weekend in Flowerdale, where we relaxed, chatted to friends and just generally drank far too much. And when we got home the house wasn’t on fire, so that was good.

Training

Shit is about to get real. After a few months of “base” training (building aerobic endurance) I now need to start ramping up the intensity. And this means… intervals! Yay. I kicked it off on Monday with cruise intervals on the way home from work (4x ~10 minute blocks of at or near threshold), then hill repeats on Yarra St yesterday morning. For those unfamiliar, Yarra St is an (in)famous little street in Kew off the Boulevard that offers about 90 seconds of climbing at over 15%. Great for developing strength/force. But ouch.

My foot problems (plantar fasciitis) are showing no signs of improvement, so still no running and limited walking. Which is enormously frustrating, and annoyingly painful day to day. At least my leg isn’t falling off I suppose.

Work

Getting back into the swing of it now! A concerted effort to focus on writing a couple of important (internal) blog posts last week paid off. It took literally all day to write two ~750 word articles, but I’m really pleased with the result. I’m still amazed by how long this takes, but as Rands discusses here{.markup–anchor .markup–p-anchor data-href=“http://randsinrepose.com/archives/one-thing/" rel=“noopener” target="_blank”} it’s not the writing that takes time, it’s the research and thinking that goes into it.

The final simplicity of the two spreadsheets and the clarity of guidance on how to use those tools was the result of asking and answering thousands of small questions for myself, finding and cleaning the data, and ultimately designing a tool useful not only for me, but anyone who wanted to understand our headcount and budget plans.

There is a pretty clear analogy here with software development: typing the code into the computer is not the bottleneck. But it’s surprising how many people in our industry seem to think that is the most important part of their job.