Race Report: Aluminum Man Triathlon

Last Updated on Monday, 11 September 2006 03:18 Written by Steve Monday, 11 September 2006 03:18

Aluminum Man is a small triathlon on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge. I survived, finishing my first Olympic distance triathlon in 2:54:25. It was a lot of fun, and also the hardest thing I’ve done in a while!

You may know the Columbia river Gorge for it’s world class wind surfing. Turns out, it’s pretty windy there, and was at 9 am when the race started. The swim was a weird one. It was my first running start from the beach, er, mud flat. It must have been a funny sight to see 50 men running off for 100 meters in knee deep water, wondering when the swimming would begin. Finally it did, and we all had fun in the wind blown waters of the river. As I overheard one participant in the swim to bike transition, “I don’t have to worry about hydration after that swim!” I didn’t have much problem with the chop, but I guess a couple folks really had a hard time. The hardes thing for me was finding the bouys in the waves and with the final bouy right into the rising sun. I found it when I was 6 feet from it…

After 18 minutes in the water, the exit from the river was nothing like the entrance, and I moved on to the bike. This was probably the most fun 30 minutes of the triathlon. It was fun to be on the bike and riding downwind, up into the table lands above the gorge. It was gorgeious scenery–rolling hills, basalt columns, old abandoned farm buildings among amber grasses. I was having such a great time I even passed some folks, the whole time trying to hold back for the wall that I knew would come sooner of later.

At about 18 miles I began to tire. At 20 miles, we started the descent from the table lands and the crew I was riding with showed me why they all had aero setups–they blasted downhill, into the wind, leaving me on my touring bike to pedal harder down he hill than I had going up it.

After an hour and thirty minutes in the saddle (which seemed like 3) I made my way to the transition and actually had the thought, “I could stop now…”

But I didn’t, and made a quick transition to the run. the run was a 10K, which was really the longest run I’d done in months, so I knew it was going to be pretty hard. And it was. Luckily it started into the wind. I kept the cadence up and just kept it moving to the turnaround point. It’s amazing how far that seems sometimes…

On the return, I found myself slowing as my heart rate remained constant, which I figured was not a great sign. I was passed a couple times in the run, mostly by the top women, and had no hope of staying with any of them. But 1 mile from the finish I was passed by a guy that I decided to stay with and that helped me get through the last mile.

I finished 22nd among the 50 men, 4th in my age group of 11, which is where I love to be, just above average. Here’s the most unbelievable stat of the day–I was in 13th place coming out of the water. I don’t consider myself a swimmer, but I guess the Total Immersion DVD has been working. If you are interested in being a better swimmer, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The recovery has been pretty easy. My knees were sore, but better now a couple days later. I drank about 2 gallons of recovery drink, and I think that helped. I’ll do another one. Maybe next year I’ll even do a couple…

Interaction Tracking in CRM

Last Updated on Thursday, 7 September 2006 11:03 Written by Steve Thursday, 7 September 2006 08:29

One key use of CRM is the tracking of your interactions with constituents. Even if you don’t have a CRM system, you probably track your constituent interactions in a bunch of places: Outlook, in your head, on paper, etc. A good CRM system lets you easily track those interactions. Easily is the key word in that sentence.

If your CRM system makes it hard to record your interactions with constituents, it just ain’t gonna happen. Interactions are so frequent that even small hurdles to tracking them will stop all but the most committed users. Bad UI for entering interactions, slow servers, and lack of integration with Outlook are all hurdles that will derail your efforts. And if your users are tracking the key interactions, you aren’t getting a full picture of your touches, and then you can’t trust your CRM to have the complete picture.

The chart above shows the interactions that we’ve recorded in our CRM each week for the last couple months. You can tell by the sheer quantity that the hurdles are pretty low to getting these touches recorded–in middle of summer we’re recording just under 80 interactions a week.

We’re creating a very detailed picture of our interactions with our constituents, one that all users have access to. This institutional memory can be used as background when prospecting major donors, working with our consulting customers, and should the case arise, bringing new folks up to speed after staff turnover. If the costs of tracking these interactions are low, there’s a clear upside to doing it.

Ideas at Salesforce.com

Last Updated on Wednesday, 6 September 2006 09:31 Written by Steve Wednesday, 6 September 2006 08:12

Salesforce.com has just put up a site at ideas.salesforce.com where they’ll be trotting out features of their new release and allowing the great unwashed to vote on them. Should be a nice buzz generator for their Winter 07 release, which they have officially touted as the “biggest API release ever” for the company.

The site is a simple voting app where they give you a brief description of the new feature and allow you to vote for it. You can also leave comments.

Best thing about it is that we’ll all get a sneak peak into what’s changing. Subscribe to the feed of new features so you’ll know about additions to the site.

Looks like they will be adding “Suggest a Feature” functionality in the future. Currently we all suggest features via bug requests or conversations with sf.com folks we know personally. It would be nice to have some visibility into which features are very popular among the Salesforce.com user base.