A few years ago, I started long distance running mostly for cardio fitness, with a goal of doing a marathon. One thing I didn’t expect was the amount of free thinking time that came with it. Training for a marathon involves a lot of long distance runs to build stamina, runs that go 2-3 hours easily. Coming up with a plan for a race is just as important as the training itself. Knowing what your fitness level is, your energy level, hydration, etc. are variables under your control. Race conditions like weather, crowds and the course are factors you have to learn to manage. The trick is optimizing the variables on race day and putting it all together. Marathons can be tricky because it’s hard to stay focused for so long. With enough experience, training and conditions, you can put mind over matter and push yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of.

I recently started doing triathlons to vary my training and work on swimming and biking, sports I had little experience in. In fact, when I was younger, I completely feared swimming to the point where I could go years without swimming and not miss it at all. I knew I’d have to learn to at least get comfortable with it if I was ever going to complete a triathlon.

One way to kick-start your training plan is to sign up for a race which forces you to train and come up with a “work back” schedule for training. While my experience is brief, I’ve learned a lot and believe you can apply some lessons from training back to your work:

Quickly assess your capabilities: One thing I soon realized is that in a lot of ways, training for a multisport event is like running a business; you have strengths to capitalize on, weaknesses to work on and a competitive field all doing the same thing. To be able to compete in triathlons, relying on one discipline to carry you just doesn’t cut it. The same thing is true in business — you need to come up with a strong product or service offering, make it competitive against others, market it successfully and learn how to make it better. If you’re deficient, figure out how to get good at it. Fast.

Get a coach: Sometimes you can go it alone, but most athletes do best when they have a 3rd party to guide and help push people to their best. Consultants can be this advisor, but be sure to clearly articulate your goals and learn to be realistic. If you exceed them, great but more often than not, getting a quantum leap in results requires a major commitment to do so.

Plan for worst case scenarios: I recently did a race in dreadful conditions: choppy open water, dumping rain, hilly courses. It’s easy to prepare for each individually, but also figure out what would happen if there is a “perfect storm” of challenges that seem to be conspiring against you. Don’t stress it, just figure out a game plan ahead of time and then execute against the plan.

Monitor and make adjustments: You can prepare all you want but sometimes life throws a wrench in the best laid plans. In racing, maybe you cramp up or get injured. Depending on the severity, you may or may not be able to continue but if you do, make the required adjustments to get yourself in the best possible position you can. In business, this can mean changing the way you compete such as how you market your offering or adjust it according to customer feedback.

Focus on details but don’t forget to look up to see the prize: It’s easy to obsess over details of your training, nutrition or equipment and yes, all of it does matter. At the same time, don’t neglect the simple things like listening to your body. At work, this means considering how the details relate to one another, how they interact and how they impact the business goals. Sometimes it’s best to keep things as simple as possible and ignore everything that doesn’t help you reach the finish line faster or in better shape.

There are probably 101 more lessons I could write up and I’m by no means an expert. But drawing on other experiences can take your career to places you didn’t know you wanted to go.

In the meantime, I’ve lost track of all the apps I have running to keep track of everyone. Let’s see what I typically have running in the background:

Trillian: Work and personal MSN, AIM, YIM
TweetDeck: Twitter, Facebook status updates
Yammer client: Work-related “yams”
MS Communicator: Work colleague IM’s

Whoa, talk about application overload. (Maybe this is why my computer is so slow.) But this doesn’t even cover Flickr or RSS feeds. I’ve been thinking that it’d be nice to have a SINGLE multi-platform (read Adobe Air) app that could rule them all and have an open architecture that could extend to future uses.

Fallon, the advertising agency, has come up with something close called Skimmer. They call it a “lifestreaming thing” and it’s a great effort at trying to consolidate your social life into a single app. Worth taking a look at if you’re looking to simplify your life.

The writers covered many of the issues that face the U.S. from the economy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, energy and so forth. What struck me though, was the final two paragraphs that simultaneously praised Obama’s use of technology and took a dig at blogs:

Mr. Obama rode to the White House partly on his savvy use of new technology, and he has a staff-written blog on his presidential Web site. Even so, he said he did not find blogs to be reliable, citing the economy as one example.

“Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs,” he said, “is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another — well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine.”

A few points of interpretations of this statement:

• The NY Times is trying to convey that it still has more journalistic integrity and accuracy. This is a fair point and not to be taken lightly. Journalists are held to a higher standard while bloggers generally are not. Yet, when it comes to influence, many bloggers enjoy broad audiences who may think the blogger has done a “good enough” job doing due diligence.
• I wonder how bloggers go about establishing credibility. Once a blogger has established a sizable audience, accuracy and validity seem to be assumed and taken for granted. Obama’s comments suggests bloggers need to apply more analytical rigor to their analyses and before he will be take them more seriously. If the problems the U.S. faces were really that straightforward as some bloggers illustrate, there would be straightforward answers. Clearly, this is not the case.
• Bloggers are not necessarily problem solvers. It’s kind of like how critics are not the creators or restaurant reviewers are not chefs. Unless a blogger has actually tried to fix some of these issues, he or she would understand the complex landmines on the road to any successful resolution. Talking the talk ain’t walking the walk.

Whether or not Obama’s right by ignoring the blogs isn’t the point. What he is asking for is legitimate analysis and thoughtful proposals. Those don’t come out of thin air or armchair CEO-ing. But I think it ought to begin with bloggers pledging to take a fair and honest approach and even some sort of oath or accreditation. Sure, people will balk and cry foul but this is a win-win for everyone. Readers get better content and bloggers get more credibility. In a future post, how a bloggers oath might play out.

A little lighter fare for this weekend. For people like me who are into their mobile devices, their selection of apps reveals a bit about their personality. I used to get excited to try out new apps, which come out daily. But now, figuring out what screen to put them on stresses me out!

There are now over 25,000 iPhone apps available in the iTunes Store but the iPhone has slots for 148 applications, or 9 screens full of apps. Even if you bought all 25,000 at a cost of US$71,442, many are pointless (Bubblewrap anyone?) And until Apple provides an easy way to manage them, except manually dragging icons around from screen to screen, I’ve become less inclined to experiment with potentially time-sucking apps. Of the 7 screens of apps I have, I’d say screen 2 is by far the most heavily used one. I think I use most of these everyday and some several times a day. My recent post on juggling priorities and availability of various applications on the iPhone help narrow things down to just the essentials above.

Looking at my most heavily used screen, the top row shows that I am a news junkie. Yup, guilty as charged. You might wonder why I have both the NY Times and USA Today apps  and for good reason. The NY Times app until very recently, was pretty crappy and unreliable so I used USA Today as it is much stabler and faster. Plus it has more sharing features, like sending URL’s to text messages or Twitter.

Row 2 tells you that I’m rather food-obsessed with 4 dining apps in the second row, but these are just the tip of the iceberg! I have a whole other screen chock-full of other food-related apps, including one specifically for espresso drinks! OK, enough about that.

The third row is where things get ultra practical — subway schedule/map, flight tracking tool, note taking app and weather. Row 4 is about socializing, from instant messaging to microblogging to full-on blogging. You know, gotta have various ways to kill time in airports, traffic or boring meetings. Not like that ever happens to you now, does it? Maybe I should use that time to figure out what applications to download next.

Email > Twitter > Facebook > Breakfast > RSS (on the go)

A few years ago, my email was the last thing I looked at before going to bed and the first thing I did when I woke up, often during breakfast. Fast forward to the present and now a bunch of “news” compete for my attention: email, RSS feeds, news sites, Twitter and Facebook updates and so on. Because the time-space continuum isn’t changing and I still need to rush out the door to work, there’s less and less time to cram all of this reading in.

As a result, the stuff that I actually read becomes shorter and shorter. While email is still my top priority as it probably is for many others, my priorities have shifted. I find I am more efficient when I compartmentalize my attention. It used to be that I’d login to Facebook on my computer but now, I simply scan status updates on my mobile. I used to catch up on RSS feeds through Google Reader, but now, I refresh them on the mobile and read them cached on the train to work. Most recently, I’m finding Twitter gaining in the attention competition. If one is judicious about who to follow, I believe it’s possible to get a timely pulse of what’s going on at a glance because the 140 character limit enforces efficiency and blends nicely with my morning caffeine spike. I am sure a couple of years from now, there will be something new that will shake things up.

What does your morning routine look like today?

Talk about a hot-button topic!

Highly influential bloggers pride themselves on building a following by being truthful and objective, increasingly rare qualities in a world of “advertorials” and non-branded sites that blur the line between honest to goodness content and marketing collateral. It’s fascinating how it is so divisive. As the social world gains momentum, we’re going to see more and more of it so I’d suggest getting comfortable with the idea.

It’s fair to assume that consumers appreciate it when authoritative voices are up front and disclose potentially relevant conflicts of interest as it takes the moral high ground. When you hear financial analysts talk about companies they cover, they are required to disclose if they or their families have any stock positions in these companies. It’s not so cut and dried though, because the financial relationship is the exact opposite — analysts may own stock that they pay for themselves. But if we look at an example closer to the web world, does anyone remember search engines pre-advertising and pre-AdSense? The digerati were up in arms when Google first introduced AdSense but then we realized that it worked because they were trying to help us by delivering contextualized relevance.

Jeremiah Owyang’s recent piece on sponsored conversations has caused a bit of a stir. Essentially, it’s compensating bloggers to write about your company. He is bang-on about how they need to be done “ethically and is sustainable for the long run” and that the topic is pretty controversial. How can it work?

• If bloggers disclose they are being compensated
• If bloggers are free to speak their minds

These rules seem designed to protect the bloggers’ reputations which is fair. But I’d like to see something like a Hippocratic Oath for bloggers who engage in sponsored conversations so that companies can have some peace of mind too. Specifically, I’d include the following:

• Bloggers must speak truthfully about their experience and not have a hidden agenda
• Bloggers must disclose if they have any relationships with competitors
• Bloggers must disclose if they own stock in the company or competitors

That’s about it. If I were a lawyer, I’d add hundreds of other conditions, but my job is to enable conversation and engagement, not put up roadblocks. I think this is a just a start, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below.