Vancouver Half Marathon

Heading out today with my good friends Mark & Kerrie to Vancouver BC for the Scotiabank Vancouver Half Marathon. We're driving to Seattle tonight, and will make our border crossing (and a stop at Duty Free for cheap alcohol, top shelf of course!) after the morning rush. 3 other friends, Vicky, Lisa, and Kelly, are driving up Friday afternoon, and will be staying with us in our rented condo just off the infamous Robson Street. We're going to party it up Friday night, take it easy on Saturday, and then the race is Sunday morning (7am-ouch). Partying and hot tubbing will commence soon after the race is finished, and then we will drive home Monday morning (probably make another Duty Free stop...)

My goal for the race is 90 minutes, which works out to a 6:50 per mile pace over the 13.1 miles. The course is fairly flat, so it's possible, but that's a long time to keep that pace, for me anyway. Some of our training runs I was able to knock out the last mile (on a 12 mile trail run) at 5:40 pace, so I am hopeful. Wish me luck!

New Job!

It's been a seriously strange couple of months...my big news: I snagged a new position in my company, GTS Services (now called just "GTS"). GTS is a software company located in Tigard, OR. I used to manage the Customer Care team. Borrrrring! The company started a new department called SEM/SEO, which is Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization, and I'm employee #2! What is SEM/SEO? Why, I'm so glad you asked! SEM is marketing a company's website so that they get more traffic. This is usually via Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, which are those "sponsored ads" you see when you search for something on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. I manage our PPC campaigns at the moment. The SEO part is more challenging. This involves changes to a website so that it comes up on a Google/Yahoo!/MSN Live search naturally (what they call "organic"), based on the users search terms. For instance, one of our customers, ProStars Auto Care, does windshield replacements. We would 'optimize' their website so that when someone who needs their car's windshield replaced types "windshield replacement" into Google, ProStars comes up on page 1 of the search engine results pages (SERPs). It's pretty cool stuff. I love to learn new things and this has presented quite the learning opportunity. I had no idea there was so much behind getting your website to show up on a search engine! I'm now looking forward to going to work every day, instead of dreading it. Well, at least after I wake up some.