Long day

I got out of bed at 6:15 this morning, pre-empting my alarm clock by twenty minutes. Maybe I was just excited to be trying out my new shoes.

When changing to barefoot running shoes, people are advised to take things easy and not subject their body to a whole different exercise load. With that in mind, I jogged a gentle, flat half kilometre on the street outside the Hilton, then returned to panic and pack my suitcase.

It was definitely strange running in shoes with no heel cushioning; I was very much aware of running on the balls of my feet, rather than "normally" although before this, I would have sworn blind that I didn't run with my heels striking first. 500 metres is not enough to make a good assessment of these shoes, but I'm not going to do anything daft when I've got a marathon to train for. Another 100 metres on the run every week, once a week, will be enough for now.

I get the feeling they'd be more suited to a soft, loamy trail than to concrete; a shame, then, that I depart Bellevue at the end of the week for Singapore. Still, I've got another run around the blueberry farm scheduled for tomorrow morning.

Getting up this early meant the rest of the day was something of a struggle. I managed to fit everything into my suitcase, after a lot of swearing and huffing, then walked to work with a backpack full of laptops and a teddy bear in my hand.

Having travelled all this way, I was aghast to find I wasn't the sleepiest person in the room. One of my colleagues shut her eyes part way through one meeting, and she hadn't even left the state this weekend. I think she'd had an early morning workout, which explained her dip in energy, but she'd also had to drive to work - does the coffee dosage need to be increased out here?

I trundled through the day, trying to show off my new tools and being subverted by capital letters. Yes, 'my' isn't the same as 'MY', and you'll do well to remember this before an important demonstration of technology. The rest of the day was mostly meetings, until we departed for dinner, at a gastropub in Seattle.

The food was terrific; I had a green, gin based cocktail called Pushing Daisies (a little morbid?) then pea soup, both of which coordinated with my green suit and shirt, and finally an amazing tagliatelle with foamed parmesan (I love a good colloid) and a poached duck's egg. Lovely. Back to the hotel by 8:30, a quick Stakhanovite assault on my inbox, and now I'm ready for bed and an early morning run. And an earlier morning call home...