Friday, February 27, 2009

Long week, sad times

Well this was a week of allot of long days , and the resulting missed workouts. I am now at a stage in my plan that I am in two workouts a day mostly. My morning workouts are the only ones I have been able to complete. Each day this week has been consumed from the start of the day to 6:30-7PM non stop, without break. It was a special project to investigate some funny happenings at my company, that are of interest to senior management. Its been a truly interesting project, so I cant complain on that end, but man these days have been sooo long. So you understand I have a two hour commute to work, and 2 hours back. So when I leave at 6:30 I will not get home until 8:30PM at earliest. At which point by the time I settle down and get out of work clothes I cannot be ready to workout until 9 - 9:30, if it happens to be a swim, well the local pool is already closed. If it’s a run I can do that but have to run slowly due to the cracks and potholes created by the brutal winter ice, that I cannot see in the dark. So the only regular option is trainer work, and slow runs.

Of course that is assuming I can get right to working out, I do have a home and have to say Hi to the fam, walk the dogs, oh yeah..eat. So when I have these late days it really throws off my training.

To make matters worse I am going to be in Holland next week for business, so that takes out any swim workouts and cycling. Hotel gyms have at most stationary bikes, that I find do not really help. So what do I do? Suck it up and make it a run focus week. I will be shooting for a 40-50 mile week. Its also a great time to focus on core (grrrrr). So its not really a total loss, but it does keep me from being able to have a very focused training plan.

Now a funny ( or in hindsight not so funny) thing happened this week at work, that I think really shows the condition of the economy and its effect on people. As is well known there are quite a lot of layoffs going around. I think most people I know (including myself) know of someone (or two) who has been layed off. And I work for a bank, which has been hit possibly worse than most other industries.

Well last week the head of operations wanted to have an off site meeting for all of his direct reports and Their direct reports. In total about 30-40 people. The purpose was to motivate and discuss the way forward.

He had contacted HR to set this up. However since he did not know exactly what he was going to say HR could not provide too much info. So HR sent out an email and invitation to all of these folks stating that the COO wanted to have an offsite to discuss “the future”. Thats all.

Seems innocent enough, except it apparently did not go down that way. The woman in HR told me that right after sending out that invitation, she had no less than 6 people come into her office to ask her if they were going to get lay offs! It seems that these folks just assumed that this offsite about “the future” was a way to do a mass layoff of middle management, and to do it so that these people would be outside of the office.

At first this seemed like the most absurd idea and kind of funny in a way, but then I realized these people are truly panicked about their future and their job outlook. So much so that any activity outside the normal, even well meaning ones, is being interpreted as potentially disastrous news.

Just a year ago any mention of the future was viewed as hopeful and something to look forward too. I feel sad to know that so many people that I know are going to work everyday waiting for the axe to fall, terrified of the future. For me personally this is as big an indicator that these times are pretty bad than anything else I have seen. There will always be layoffs, but when people in such large numbers are losing not only jobs but also hope, then really how do you move forward.?

For me I still have not lost hope, I mean lets face it I do have more severe things to worry about like about my missed swim workouts :), and how this will impact my totally awesome ROYAL ASS wooping I will be laying down at IMLP!

Thank God for Triathlon

2 comments:

Samantha said...

I also work for a bank, in Treasury Services, and know exactly what you mean. Thank god for Tri indeed!

(Is it weird that we both capitalized Tri and not God, haha)

Ski Dad said...

You know I did not even think of the capitalization thing lol

To be proper I better fix that, don't need any bad karma