Brandon Fuller

Run: Coyote Creek Trail (7.53 mi)

After a few solid margaritas last night, I turned in. My alarm was set for 6:30 AM. Ugh. Got up, put on my running gear (shorts!) and ran from my hotel to the building where my team works. 1.5 miles over there. Good warm-up. But it was cold. Sure, not below zero Colorado cold but the dew on the grass was frozen and they aren’t used to that here. Ted, my boss, showed up a little late for our scheduled run. Ted is one of my original running inspirations. He was the VP at our small start-up. Nearly always in running shorts and coming or going for a run. His PR is something like a 3:01 at Boston. He doesn’t run as much these days — seems to spend more time working and playing hockey. We talked the whole time about work and life. Good stuff. Kept the pace pretty light for me but that was cool. Hoping I gave him a decent workout. Years ago I would have been scared about running with him for he would punish me. We may do it again tomorrow.

We parted ways and I ran back to the hotel to quickly shower and drive back over for my first meeting starting in less than an hour. Got that done then we had a good all hands meeting about fun and confidential stuff. Good to be there in person once in a while. I tend to zone out during a lot of those big group meetings if we just do them on the phone. After that, a slightly different group of guys wanted to go to lunch. “Where to?”, they asked me. Uhh…can you guess? “Didn’t you go there yesterday?”, one said. I explained how this would be only the 2nd time in 2009 so that really isn’t breaking any records. So we went and ate. Animal style fries today!

Back to work after. Helped some folks out and then we had to head out to the reason I was in town — the Cisco TelePresence Graduation ceremony. The basic gist is that Cisco tries out a bunch of new technologies in the larger group I am apart of. Some do well. Some don’t. It is like our internal startup incubator. It has been covered in various business journals. Well, the ultimate goal is to grow these businesses into a billion dollar business so they can graduate and stand on their own. TelePresence has crossed that mark and has become the first graduate of this program. So we celebrated tonight. The big boss showed up — John Chambers in the flesh. A bit of a rock star of sorts. Everyone wants their picture with the big boss. It was a bit crazy so I wasn’t able to make it happen. No worries. Would have been a cool blog photo though. All attendees also received a little memento of the graduation — a new Flip HD camera. Not a bad gift but I already have a few!

After the party, a smaller group decided to go get some more real food. Brandon picks. Mexican. So they came up with a place I had never been to. Even Miss Luke Ma, Jia-Wei, came out to join us! She was in town from Australia on a break from school.

We spent a lot of time at dinner discussing which words in the English language sound cool and which do not. Grossest word: moist. Then we discussed technological innovations — such as the “crisping sleeve”, which is the device included with a Hot Pocket so you can cook it properly in the microwave. Genius.

Headed home tomorrow — in time to put the kids to bed and start building more red blood cells for Saturday’s showdown in the Springs.

I went 7.53 miles with an elevation gain of 904 feet in 01:01:53, which is an average pace of 08:13. View my GPS data.