Learning From Other People’s Experiences

This morning, I chose to train with two professional triathletes. Through Nicole Gallagher of local coaching company, BPMSports I did a track running session with Belinda and Justin Granger. Belinda has won 14 Ironman triathlons and placed consistently high at the World Championships in Kona.

Justin coached us today including his wife. After an 800m test run (at even pace), I qualified for Group 2. This meant holding 1:30-1:35 for 400m, with 200m jogging for recovery, for 8 laps. Group 1 had to do 10 laps with a faster pace. I ran with Belinda and another two runners. The lady dropped out from the pace after one lap, and I stuck closely with Belinda and the chap for six laps before I dropped my pace to 1:39 for the last two laps. Justin gave me encouraging feedback, mainly to lean more forward. After the workout, the Grangers shared some useful tips including the fact that they enjoyed working with triathletes as the latter never seem to give up on the hard work. They may take a longer recovery set, but they complete the work. I was pleased with my effort although running at 6.15am was a challenge unto itself. Their recommendation for speed-work seemed daunting: aim for 20-25X400m in each session. Mirinda Carfrae did this to do well for her runs in both 70.3 and Ironman distance. If it is good enough for professionals and elite athletes, it may be worth considering seriously.

I enjoyed my training session with the pros and age-groupers, although I had to rush off to attend a Train-the-Trainers certification. As luck would have it, I sat next to a New Zealand trainer/consultant, Mike Matthews who did sub-12 hours Ironman races about 15 years ago. At his best, he ran 1:20 flat for half-marathons and about 3 hours for the full 42.195K. A former cross-country runner and barefoot runner, he recommended me the following menu:

1)    Run off-road/trail at least once a week, running fast uphill and including fartlek (speedplay).

2)    Avoid junk miles – endless miles with no purpose.

3)    Ride not more than four hours, with occasional fast bursts/intervals (1-2 minutes sprints with recovery spins).

4)    Do bricks: run off up to 60 minutes, after a reasonably hard bike session.

5)    Swims should include hypoxic breathing (anaerobic, holding of breaths).

With Ironman New Zealand confirmed, my second Ironman for 2012 may be some of these choices: IM Korea, IM Switzerland, and Norseman. The latter is an extreme 226K that expanded itself this year due to cold weather and cold water. Participants swam up to 4.8K and rode 200K (instead of the usual 180K) before heading for a marathon that includes hilly terrain. Malaysia’s Tee Boon Tiong (in blue long-sleeved sweater in photograph) completed his quest for personal Viking victory in about 20 hours.

Here are Macca’s thoughts about his recent ITU race and injury, and how his plans to qualify for the Olympics may be affected.

Leading With Experience

Does experience matter? Surely it does, provided you learn from your experience – mistakes included. Too often, older staff mistake years of work in the company as experience. Unfortunately, they do not equate; staff do fly under the radar and only do the necessary for years! Staff who have been retrenched tend to be resentful of younger staff, who join the company at higher and stringent entry levels. Being highly educated, skillful and tech-savvy, is the norm today for employment.

Re-hiring retired staff can be a useful approach, when these were your best performers. If you are able to download the tacit wisdom and experiences of valued staff, you may be able to transfer this body of knowledge across to the next generation of staff. Mentors, executive coaches and in-house trainers can found in both retired and retiring staff. To carelessly lose these staff would be to waste away years of valuable expertise and exposure. For example, you can rehire your top salespeople as a selling coach, so as to initiate new sales engineers into the industry. You benefit from marrying the ‘know-how’ with the ‘know-who’.

B K Liew was the coach for yesterday’s morning run session; this was second and final part of the series of free preparatory clinics for runners in the brand-new Marina21K Run (23 July). He has completed several Ironman triathlons, ran across the Gobi Desert, and done numerous ultra-marathons and adventure races – all in all, he is very experienced about taking on new physical adventures for solo or team expeditions. He covered in clear detail pre-race preparations, including how to train with periodisation. Periodisation is about cleverly training progressively to make incremental gains in one’s physical fitness. Essentially, you deliberately increase mileage and intensity, yet are mindful of periods of lower intensity, and time for rest and recovery. You cannot increase distance and intensity indefinitely without incurring injury and meeting a plateau in your performance.

Leadership Lessons: How do you retain talent within your company? How do you value experience? How do you recognize the mature worker? How do you engage your staff performance with periodisation? How often do you conduct face-to-face, one-on-one, conversations with your staff?

A Grand New Experience

Sunday – End of day 2 of workshop: Delightful students; all engineers with a penchant for learning.

Working on a new project in a new country is akin to scoring a new PB. First experiences are almost pure in nature. An experience reconfigures existing mindsets, perceptions, expectations and prejudices. Until you connect with a culture and its people, then all preconceived notions become irrelevant and useless.

Experiences are subjective; at least, how we interpret them is subjectively correct. There are no wrong experiences, only incomplete information and poor observations. The conditions of each experience leave it indelible mark cognitively, as a memory and its associated emotions. That is why bad experiences leave a bad taste in our mouths, and in our minds. Pleasant experience lead you consider reviving them, and coming back to the same place to renew your connections.

Working out in the gymnasium is a relatively fresh experience for me, since I rarely use apparatus other than my goggles, bicycle and running shoes. To use a stationary-bike with Internet access on its split screen was a treat. I was following the exploits of my friends doing the Twilight Run at the East Coast Park on Saturday evening. It was a ‘no-frills’, run as much for as long as you like training session, commencing 5pm till 9.00am the next day. Several friends of mine were still recovering from the physical challenge of the 1.9K swim, 90K ride, and 21 run.

Yesterday, evening I did a workout comprising of a double brick:

75 minutes of stationary-bike ride @ 130-135bpm and 85-90rpm

30 minutes treadmill running at 5 minute per kilometre and 3.0 incline

10 minutes static stretches; 2 sets each of circuit training: lateral raises (15 reps)/rotator cuff work (12 reps), 25 push-ups, 8-10 chin-ups

It took me a total of 2 hours to complete the whole lot. It was a great sensation to get off my behind, to engage in a serious workout after last Sunday’s half-Ironman triathlon race. After knocking down lots of water, I cooled down before I replenished my body with a buffet dinner.

I will be doing another marathon workout since I will be taking the red-eye flight home. Coach has prescribed me, Week 3 of my Boston Marathon program. I intend to hit another PB on a flat, cool course.

The Perception Principle Powers Positivism

Once upon a time, a potential client informed me: ‘Although you are, probably, the most suitable for this job, our senior management would prefer somebody older.’

I was denied the opportunity because of my youth. A few days ago on Facebook, my friend remarked about my abundance of grey hair when he saw a few of my racing shots. It seems, that years after that incident, that my Richard Gere head-of-karmic-returns has received more positive feedback. In turn, I have been accepted for the physical imperfection I possess. Perception is a form of reality. And, reality is both within and without.

If the silver population reflects wisdom, and we value it in our communities, then we should continue to hire skillful and capable staff. If tacit wisdom and experience matter, then we can farm it, and grow its potential. On the other hand, youth and youthfulness is not to be dismissed. We can be energised and rejuvenated by new and radical ideas.

Watching my older friends excel in their choice of sports and pastime makes me pleased. It motivates me, and I am stoked by it. I enjoy watching their progress. It is, as if, aging is regressed. They do get better with age. In sports, there will be days where we succeed in besting our times, and there are others where we miss the mark. As Bill Bowerman of Oregon/NIKE used to say: ‘The real purpose of running isn’t about winning a race. It is to test the limits of the human heart.’

Congratulations to all the age groupers for last weekend’s race – and to those who qualified for the Ironman 70.3 World Championships in Las Vegas in September. I will be off for an overseas teaching assignment today, and I hope to update you on a daily basis. This will be my 19^th country in my resume of overseas work, and I am looking forward to my work, and even a few short running sessions there.

Service Over!

When was the last time you experienced excellent service? Seriously. What has the last two decades yielded with the plethora of service training opportunities? We talk about service standards, moments of truth, customer satisfaction and excellence, yet we experience more disappointments than fulfillment.

Can you be excellent in service if you don’t excel in it? To excel in something is to want to be better at what you are good at. How many of our staff enjoy serving the customers? How good are they?

If staff disliked customers, how can they truly serve the customers? It would be hypocritical. It would be tantamount to giving lip, in lip service. Service should include values – both personal and professional; these are you personal touches, useful touches, and significant touches. Otherwise, the attempts to raise service levels become flaccid, confusing and lacklustre. Training harder does not make you a better runner if you lack the talent and the heart. It is about finding your forte and passion, and then running away with it.

Consider this: Instead of service excellence, focus on getting things right, and then doing the right things. Be effective before being efficient. Notch your service levels. Exceed yourself. Raise the bar of your competence. Create relationships of worth with your customers. Give them pleasant experiences they will remember fondly. Build on your capabilities. Create a sense of delivery. Create a sense of occasion.

How would you serve another? How would leaders serve their team? Which disservice would you eliminate from your approach?


On another note, here is my wish-list for sports-event organisers:
1) Ensure champion-chips/timing devices work as not getting a timing is a major disappointment.
2) Provide adequate nutrition at aid-stations; never run out of water and sports-drink.
3) Charge participants reasonably, if the race-kit is minimal; seek sponsors to defray your operating costs.
4) Provide reassurance that our sports equipment is well looked after.
5) A race t-shirt would make the event memorable. If you charge us for it, ensure that you have a wide variety of sizes.
6) Respect your sponsors and participants: We are an influential tribe.

Writing Your Lust-For-Life List

Inspired by Phil Keoghan (enduring and energetic host of realty-TV series, The Amazing Race), and his book No Opportunity Wasted – N.O.W. I wrote my ‘To-Do’ list a few years ago. So far, so good – I have achieved a few personal dreams and challenges. Some refer this as the Bucket List; meaning the things you want to do before you ‘kick the bucket’ and leave this Earth.

Interestingly, I have achieved a few of my dreams through recent achievements. Some of these things include: teaching in 18 countries; qualifying and competing in the Half-Ironman World Championships; completing 10 Ironman races (not the least, one); completing an ultra-marathon; being in the national top-2 percent in the marathon; getting actively involved in the Olympic Games (inaugural Youth Olympic Games).

Write your ‘wish list’. What is your lust for life? How do you orientate your life to your dreams? Which experiences would you enjoy? Who would be part of this exciting journey?

Get a journal book. Write down what matters to you. There are two lists:

1)    What I like to do for myself.

2)    What I like to do for others.

Fill it with your dreams, aspirations and hopes. You have to suspend your judgements, like ‘I cannot afford it!’, ‘I have no time!’ and ‘It is impossible!’ You will have to plan and earn these experiences and achievements, and we have to start somewhere. We’ll come back to this list soon and work on fleshing out the skeleton. Go on – build your list!

Your Customers’ Experiences Matter

‘The customer can fire anybody, including me.’ ~ SAM WALTON, Founder, Wal-Mart.

Upset a customer, and you lose a customer. Upset many customers, and risk losing your business.

Read about Virgin Group’s Sir Richard Branson blog about customer service here. By the way, the 60-year-old Chairman ran his first marathon this year in 5:02, mentored and accompanied by world-record holder, Tegla LaRoupe.

Internal customers are your colleagues. Your infernal customers can also be your colleagues. Most staff are skillful at playing dysfunctional dynamics – Blamer, Victim and Rescuers – the basis of office politics. This is an annoying and vicious cycle that propagates and perpetrates unhealthy propositions, wasteful energies, and negative emotional responses. These downfallen relationships sap us of our earthy goodness and humanity.

In the past year, you read it here about Branded Customer Experiences (BCE), a term suggested by Reeves Lim Leong of INGENS. About 16 years ago, Gary Yardley and Jan Kelly (co-creators of the Experience Orientated Management technology) predicted that in the future three things will truly matter: Relationships, Potential and Experiences. This also strongly applies to managers who wish to lead into a future of successful business, loyalty at work, and worthwhile employee experiences.

Consumer experiences matter, or they will continue to consider shopping online. We know who we are! Retailers should awake from the slumber of the last decade and focus on the sunrise of the next decade. This also applies to educational institutions, banking institutions, event organizers, hospitality, and airlines. With the capabilities afforded by Social Media 2.0 and Personal Branding, both positive and negative word-of-mouth influence can impact your fanciest, cleverest, copy-written advertisement. Give it time – you will be revealed!

Do your customers return to your bicycle shop to hang out because they enjoy the atmosphere?

Do you respond to online feedback and change the format of your races?

Do you consider a wider demographic that is more family-friendly?

Is your special deal really ‘special’ or a ploy?

Do the students you coach stay as students, and extend their invitation to their friends?

Does your recommendation and critique hold weight, or it is just a superficial judgement?

Are you representing your brands well?

Do your best staff stay?

Caveat emptor! Do more good. Be better!

Photo-credit: Richard Branson, courtesy of Virgin.com