Running, Biking, Firefighting & other challenges: Baltimore

For last three days Annette and I have been in Baltimore on a business trip. I love traveling and I hate traveling. I really like seeing new places and being on the go, but on the other side I really hate all the time I lose having to wait. You have to wait at the airport, at restaurants, etc and it just seems you always have something to wait on. Being in a two day meeting is like waiting too. Even though the subjects may be good, it still wears on you.

We did have a good two days worth of meetings, learned a lot and met some new people and best of all developed new friendships. We stayed at the Rennisonce Hotel on the inner harbor which was very nice. At $200+ a night it should be! Luckily this was a business expense. It was funny, we were sitting at lunch on Thursday and the General Manager of one of the companies from California named Marc was talking and he said something about his race a couple weeks ago. So I had to ask him what kind of race. He said it was a sprint triathlon so the conversation was on from there. Evidently he is a big time off road exterra racer and is ranked really high up. It was cool to have something besides work things to talk about. Then, I found out that Steven, one of the CFO's from another company in Minnesota was also a runner. And his boss Joann was there and she was a runner also. How cool. We all talked about running and now Annette really had something to talk about. There was a short talk about we should all run while we were here but we never finalized anything. I figured that after dinner that night we wouldn't want to run.

This was the U.S.S. Constitution, looked pretty cool at night

Dinner was at a Brazilian Steakhouse called Fogo de Chao compliments of BASF. All the meat you can eat and then some. They keep bringing it out till you say no more. It was awesome! I probably got a protein overdose. A glass of wine, a capridinia and some of the best Keylime Pie ever I was stuffed. This was not good for marathon training! Afterwards a few of us went to one of the really nice bar/lounges in the hotel. It ended up being the same group from lunch so running ended up being a big topic of discussion. Ater a couple moheitos, we made a running date of 6am to run around the inner harbor. Joann couldn't run because she didn't bring her running shoes but Marc and Steven were in. Annette and I had planned on running at least one day anyway so running with new business friends was a plus.

This was a view of the inner harbor from a restaurant we ate at

We made the 6am meet, how I don't know. After all that meat and a few drinks I really didn't feel like a 20 miler but I figured Marc and Steven would take it easy and we only had 30 minutes to run anyway so the most might be a 5k. When we got down to the lobby they were there ready to go in their running clothes. We took off into the darkness of the city. Well, it was dark outside but the city was lit up really good. We were just across the street from the harbor so we headed out around it. This is a really cool place to run and you see people running here all day. Steven led, and took us all around the pier and across a couple small bridges. It was hard to keep up with these guys. I guess all the food and we had some really bad humidity too. We were all just out, running through the city along the harbor and it was so cool! No one was out, we saw a few runners though but not many. When we started up into the city and it started getting darker we figured we better turn around and head back. We never could get a signal on our garmins so I didn't get a good mileage but I did get to map it out so I think we ran about two miles. It was fast, hard and made for a good workout. After a Starbucks and a shower, Annette and I both felt like taking on the world. Well, at least another day of meetings anyway.

This was a statue of something. We ran past this on Friday morning.
Thats Annette next to the fountain.

Not much to add other than Friday was another 8-5 day of meetings. Afterwards several of us went out to dinner which was fun. We spent a little time afterwards with Steven and his wife before everyone said good byes as most had early flights out.

This was another photo of the Inner Harbor area.
There are restaurants and shops all around the piers.

You just never know where you will meet other runners. And having something in common besides business makes for really good conversation and friendship. This was the case here.

On Saturday Annette and I walked the harbor, did a little shopping and ate again before flying back home. We are running again early Sunday morning so hopefully I still can. I am scared to even look at the scales. Lucky for me all I have to do is about 14 miles.