So I’ve been in Beijing for 2.5 days now and am absolutely loving it. I’m staying at the hotel on Beijing Sports University. The university itself is NOTHING like anything in the U.S. It’s actually like a sports factory…producing the best coaches and athletes for China using every possible resource available. Since discussion of that is better suited to ELITETRACK, I’ll post laster today about the university itself, the facility and the great coaches and administrators I’ve met. So far the trip has been amazing. My hosts are great and I’m enjoying everything about it. The totalitarianism and overbearing government control that is so commonly mentioned in the West about China and its sports programs is no where to be found. I kinda feel like a kid in a candy store here. The only things I can relate to it is when I was 24 and took my first USATF funded trip to help out with elite shot putters at a meet at Stanford. I thought that was the most amazing thing in the world at the time to be paid to work with elite athletes. I remember being SOOO excited to be traveling across the country to do that excited to be getting paid to do something I would have gladly done for free at the time. Within a couple months though I was doing that on a very regular basis and while I still enjoyed every moment of it it had lost it’s wonderment. Now that feeling is back.

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I’m actually writing this blog somewhere over the pacific (I’m posting it now I’ve arrived). I’m on my way to Beijing to give a biomechanics lecture at the Beijing Sports University on some of the research I’ve done. I figured that the 13.5 hour flight would give me a nice opportunity to catch up on the blogging that I’ve been neglecting for the past 10 days or so. As many readers know, I have this blog as well as my blog on ELITETRACK and my microblog on twitter. Of the three, my twitter account is really the only one that has seen any action over the past week or so. When things get really busy for me and I have to really crack down on prioritizing things, blogging and posting on the forums at ELITETRACK typically get cut out. With ELITETRACK I hate to do it because the site is my baby. I love learning from others on there and giving back. With this site though it actually becomes a little ironic. Ironic in that the times that I have the most to blog about I often have the least time to blog. The last couple days have been a bit of a whirlwind. After getting back from a 5 day trip to Baton Rouge for my graduation and a business related meeting, I had 4 days to catch up with life and prepare for another trip- first to Orlando for 2 days where I gave 8 hours of lectures in a 24 hour span; then from Orlando to Beijing for a week where I’m giving the presentation I mentioned previously and attending a short symposium. Between preparing for these speaking engagements, packing and unpacking my bags, continuing what’s seeming like a never-ending quest for a property for HPC and running the day to day operations of HPC

I had to put many of the things that I love to do on the backburner. Even sleep got put on the back burner…because of early flight departure times and lecture times I was stuck with 3 consecutive nights at 4 hours of sleep…too little even for me. I’m hoping that this trip to Beijing can be rewarding for networking, business opportunities, and getting in a little R&R.

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My last blog post was about how things seem to go in cycles. Well today, I had another experience of this happening. 4 months ago I moved to Cary, NC from NY (by way of a short stop in OH) with the idea that I’d be moving in to what is at the time a mega fitness facility to manage their rebranding from a failing fitness center to a high-level sport performance center. After an unexpected change of operational control of the facility that put me in a holding pattern for a long time and then seemingly nixed the entire collaboration went through I started to look to go out on my own. It had always been my original plan to open up my own stand-alone location but when the proposal for collaboration came from the mega facility four months ago it seemed like a great opportunity and I jumped at it. So when the collaboration seemingly fell through it didn’t bother me so much as knowing it had wasted my time. Well this morning, I actually had a meeting with the new management team and a potential collaboration might still be in the works. Same meetings, same location, different people. Funny how that works.

I’m not sure how this will play out and I’m moving much more cautiously this time so I don’t end up holding out for promises that will never come to fruition. The one thing I do know for certain is that I’ll be in a place come hell or high water by the middle of June. My equipment has started coming in so the only thing holding me back now is an actual physical address. I work well when dealing with deadlines and this self-imposed mid June deadline should be no different.

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Almost 5 years ago I had a client who eventually became an intern for my company. In the process he became a friend. He eventually followed me to LSU to pursue his college education. That was four years ago. He arrived on campus around the same time I left campus to take a job at the United States Military Academy at West Point. At the time I left he was an incoming freshman with big hopes of following in my footsteps and I was an ABD doctoral candidate and young coach who mistakenly thought that it would be easy to finish my dissertation while coaching D1 track and building my company. Over the previous 4 years we’d stayed in touch and crossed paths on a couple occasions. This past weekend we graduated together. He with a double major BS degree and heading to Yale for graduate studies and me with a long-overdue PhD and preparing to open doors on my business’s first real center. We met for dinner the night before graduation and in an odd twist of fate I was actually seated directly in front of him during the ceremony. It’s funny how cyclic life can be sometimes.

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The last 2 weeks I’ve devoted much of my time to nailing down a place to set up my training facility for my business. I’ve got about a 7 mile radius that I’m looking in that encompasses most of Cary, NC and some of Morrisville and Apex, NC. I’ve scoured craigslist, loopnet and all the individual commercial real estate web sites; done countless 3 hour long exploration drives, and taken about 2 dozen property tours. I have a definite price point I need to hit and specific requirements both for the property itself and to a lesser extent the specific location. After much looking I think I’ve finally found the right spot. It’s 2,500 sqft and was formerly a kids gym. It’s located in a high-end part of Cary (officially one of the best places in the world to live and work). The best part is that because the previous tenant ditched their lease, the property needs no up-fit because it was previously set up as a gym, and the fact that the economy is still in the toilet means if I go forward and take the property it will be a very good value. It literally will just need some paint and it’ll be ready to go. It’s on a road that gets great traffic counts and the property is only a couple years old so everything is in great condition. On top of that, it’s only about a half mile away from where I live in Cary and it’s about 2 miles away from the track that I think we’ll be training at. The only negatives is that I was hoping to find an area where I could set up a 70-80m track to do some sprinting on-site but this probably won’t be possible at this place. There is a nice paved hill with a really mild incline though, and that will allow us to do lots of uphill and downhill sprint work. The other drawback is that it’s a little more than I wanted to spend. I addressed this though by proposing an increasing lease payment that started VERY low and went up incrementally each month over the first 13 months and then 3% per year over the next 2 years. Even by the 3rd year it is less than they had asked for. This type of plan allows me to get in to a nice training facility and build a client base without worrying about getting swamped by huge up front lease payments when I don’t have a client base to support it. My first year’s lease rate actually averages out to a little less than what I was actually budgeting for a facility. The last 3 months of that first year are above my initial budget but the average is still lower. For years 2 and 3, the lease payment is slightly higher than I was wanting but the property and location is MUCH nicer than I was thinking I could afford. And as Seth Godin points out, value (benefit / price) is more often a better indicator than pricepoint alone. I’m taking the weekend to think about it but I’m leaning toward signing the lease early next week. If and when I do, it will be a nice relief because I’ll be able to finally have a place to call home for the business and can actually get down to day to day operations. For the last couple months I’ve basically been operating a virtual business but now all my training equipment is ordered and either here, on its way or being custom made I’m excited to get rockin and rollin’.

If you know me, read this blog, or follow me on twitter you know that I’m a night owl and have some serious issues with insomnia. Normally I don’t care..especially since I work on my own hours and it hasn’t really hurt me. In fact, in many regards it’s made me more productive. I don’t need much sleep and it allows me to get a lot more done than many of my counterparts. It essentially gives me a 2nd work day. I’m not like many Americans who delude themselves about how much sleep they need. I DO get enough 90% of the time. It just so happens that for me enough is not very much. You see, normally I try to go to bed around 3 and 4am. I could stay awake longer with no problem but that’s around the time I’m first able to fall asleep. I then wake up around 9 or 9:30 without an alarm, wakeup call, or nudge to the side. The fact that I wake up fresh, without an alarm, and don’t feel tired throughout the day is what assures me I’m getting enough sleep. I generally don’t take caffeine after mid-day and when I do it doesn’t change anything anyhow. It likewise doesn’t change my sleep patterns at all if I don’t have ANY caffeine for the day. I exercise, eat well, and do all the other things that should promote good sleep habits. It just so happens that I’m a night owl. My dad is and so is my sister so there’s clearly some genetic component to it. As I said, I actually kinda like it. In fact, around 10:30 pm is when I become MOST productive. My brain kicks in to overdrive and I can write, think and code better during my ’2nd work day’ than I ever can during ‘normal business hours.’

The only time my insomnia becomes a problem is when I’m forced to wake up early or when I can’t fall asleep at all. The latter problem became an issue late last week. I had several consecutive days where I couldn’t fall asleep before 5-6am. Obviously this can become a problem if you want to function with the rest of society. I knew I needed to get back to my ‘normal’ 3:30 am bed time before things started getting worse. I had tried most of the usual recommendations and none worked so I turned to my last resort…melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone that is naturally produced by the body that regulates the sleep-wake cycle. I’ve used it in the past with mixed results. It helps me get to sleep earlier but it forces me to sleep more than I otherwise would and when I wake up I don’t feel nearly as fresh as I would if I hadn’t taken it at all. So I end up sleeping more but feeling less fresh. Kinda strange. On top of that I tend to get weird dreams. Freaky dreams. I never dream without melatonin (more accurately, I never remember my dreams when I don’t take melatonin). For these reasons, I really don’t like to take melatonin unless there are some special circumstances.

Given the problems I was having last week though, I decided I’d try a couple consecutive nights on melatonin to help ‘reboot’ the time I’d go to sleep. I wanted to see if I could get my bed time to 2am or at least back to my ‘normal’ 3:30 am. Initially it worked. on nights 1 & 2 I hit the sack at 3am. Problem is, I slept longer than normal (waking up at 10) but still felt groggy when I woke up. It felt like my head was in a fog. Oddly, I also felt tired during the day and had to take 2 naps over those days…something I’d never normally do. Unsatisfied with the effects, I figured I’d try a half dose so I cut my pill in half for night 3. Outcome…even worse. The following day I took an unintentional 90 minute nap during the day and then at night I accidentally fell asleep at 10pm. I can actually do this almost every night but I know better. Whenever I do, I end up waking up a couple hours later and can’t get back to sleep at all. It ends up screwing me up even worse. Last night was no different. I woke up at 1:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep until 5:40 or so. I then proceeded to sleep until almost noon. So basically I had just wasted 3 days in a melatonin-induced mental fog during the day only to return to a bed time that was actually WORSE than if I had taken melatonin in the first place.

Take home lesson…be careful screwing with your physiology even if it’s kinda screwy to begin with.

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One of the clients for my company is a large group run by a bunch of highly irrational, ill-informed people. Needless to say they can be a bear to deal with some times. While I’ve by no means mastered the art of dealing with such clients here are some pointers from what I’ve learned so far. In most cases, they’ll carry over to dealings with irrational people in general.

1. Don’t expect there decisions to be made based on sound logic
   . They are passionate, tend to make rash decisions, and reasoning will often not work. Don’t be shocked when this happens and don’t get flustered when they fail to let facts get in the way of their decisions. If you’re aware that this is the likely process of dealing with these types of people you’ll be better able to handle when it does.
2. Everyone feels the need to feel important (even though they are likely not). To placate this, allow them to feel as if they’ve won. For example, plant an idea and then let them take credit for it. Only do this for the little things though otherwise you’ll end up being a whipping boy.
3. Document everything. That way, when one or more members of the bureaucracy tries to be important by providing irrelevant or misinformed input, you have proof that their ‘constructive criticisms’ were unwarranted or contrary to previous instructions.