My First Triathlon

Preparation

So a few months ago, some guys in my neighborhood heard I did some recreational running on the side and they invited me to train with them for a half triathlon. Sure, I said, with the thought that once I figured out the swimming part and put some hours on my bike it shouldn't be too much trouble.

For the next few weeks I concentrated mostly on swimming. While I'm not exactly a non-swimmer, my technique is basically "dog paddle", "frog kick", or "float on your back". One of the guys taught us all the basics of "the crawl" one night, then I got some further tips from the lifeguards at the local pool who were watching our group with bemused interest.

I managed to keep up with my running for the most part, averaging around 4-6 miles a couple of times a week. Mostly. Some weeks I was busy and didn't end up doing any training, but I felt that since it was only a 5k (about 3 miles) that I'd be alright.

For the bike? Well, I have an old mountain bike that's seen better days. I took it on one trip up to a local canyon and back and discovered that the back rim was so bent that it was hitting the brakes every time it went around. It went in for a tune-up, but I never did any more training on it.

Race Time

The night before the race we all gathered in some condos up in Midway, and my wife made a fantastic spaghetti dinner with pesto and a red sauce. I put some oatmeal in the crock pot for breakfast, then we all turned in early. Some of us managed to sleep a bit, but there were a lot of pre-race jitters. I got up at 6:30 the next day and had breakfast with everyone; it was fun to see each person's pre-race rituals. Well, the experienced racers.... I just had a good breakfast and packed some chia seeds in my bike's water bottle.

Driving up the mountains to the course was frigid in my topless Jeep, and Reese and I kept commenting to each other about what a lovely temperature the lake was going to be. At that point we were both pretty sure we were going to drown in the first five minutes. We parked in a small town about 2 miles away (and uphill) from the course, then rode our bikes down to pick up our race packets and get our bodies marked. From there, we went to the transition area and dropped off our equipment.

Then, we waited.

The race didn't start for another hour, so we had plenty of time to mill about and get anxious. Several people were in their wetsuits and swimming around in the lake to get "warmed up". I couldn't stand the anticipation any more, so I dipped my toes in the water to see how bad it was. Imagine my pleasant surprise when the water was warm!! Not quite like a swimming pool, but certainly not bad at all.

After spreading the word to my friends, I could finally relax and wait for my group to begin.

Swimming

A few minutes before my group began, I changed into my swimming attire. Ouf... women and children hid their eyes in terror and shame as I took off my shorts to reveal The Yellow Speedo. Yes. I own a yellow speedo. Long story, and while the story behind it is hilarious, it's not going to be covered in this blog post. After a few minutes of catching embarassed looks and snickers from the spectators, I couldn't wait to get into the water! I was in that lake pretty much as soon as they would let me go.

While there, I met a few others who didn't have wet suits, but I think there were only 3 or 4 out of the group of about 25. As we lined up at the starting gate, I noticed something funny... the Olympic-distance competitors that started before us were all vying for a place in the front of the line. The "sprint" distance athletes, me included, were hanging back waiting for somebody, anybody, to take the lead position. Apparently we were all VERY confident in our swimming abilities! :-P

The swim was a great taste and foreshadowing for the rest of the race-- it gave me time to get used to people passing me. About 2/3 of the way through, Steve (who started in the group 5 minutes behind mine) blazed past me. I exited the water disoriented and fatigued, but got on my bike quickly and headed out on the road.

Biking

I knew ahead of time that taking a mountain bike to a road race was like bringing a knife to a gun fight. People from the groups behind me kept zipping past on their $2k+ road bikes while I pedaled steadily on with my trusty behemoth. It was still fun because the people passing me were giving nice words of encouragement. One guy said "You're REALLY tough!", and that made me feel good. After the race I realized that I probably was doing pretty good for a mountain bike.

When we reached the big down-hill part of the course, there was a shining moment of joy for me. I passed a road bike! Mine had just had a professional tune-up the night before, so when I tucked into a coasting position the speed was pretty incredible.

Running

Back at the transition area, I shucked the shoes and socks and went barefoot for the run. My wife had asked me to take my Vibrams with me as an insurance policy, but I went ahead and decided to go barefoot.

Men, listen to your wives.

They are always right.

The first part of the road was normal asphalt. No real problem, but fatigue from the previous two events was incredibly present. Next was freshly-paved asphalt. This was something I was NOT expecting! It was like running on small gravel, which is about my least favorite surface. Whenever I come across that stuff on my runs I jump over to the bushes until it's past. Not here... a full mile of the stuff. The pain and fatigue added up, and I ended up walking most of the section.

When I got to the main road and back to normal ashpalt I breathed a huge sigh of relief. There was some small gravel on the shoulder where we were running, but I cheated a bit and ran in the actual lane. At this point my feet hurt like crazy, but I was at least able to jog it.

Then came the downhill. The death knell. It was a segment of unpaved road covered in medium-sized river rocks. My feet had been tenderized by the sharp asphalt; now they were pummelled by the rocks at every step. Mentally, it was all I could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Slowly, step by step, I edged my way down the hill. It KILLED. I haven't been in that much pain in years!

At the bottom, I cheated to the side and went through the weeds rather than attempt the jagged shale. By this point nearly everyone who saw me was asking if I was alright or if I needed help. "Yes" and "no" were my answers. Reversed would have been pretty accurate. Now the trail was a normal hiking path with stones and gravel strewn about. I'd done a mile or two on similar terrain the week before, and while it was painful it wasn't too bad. Of course, my feet hadn't spent the hour before being tenderized.

By this point it was painful just to stand, but I still had a mile or so of trail. I walked. Slowly. Painfully.

Keep in mind...

Let's take a break from my race for a moment, and remember my dear wife who was there supporting me. I came in later on the swim, but not too bad. Then I was maybe 15 minutes longer on the bike than everyone else, but whatever. Now, every other racer in my group and all my friends had finished. They waited twenty minutes more, and I still wasn't there. Another twenty minutes, no sign. Again, and she was panicking that she'd be accompanying my corpse to the hospital. She asked other racers if they'd seen the barefoot guy, and one of them had. "He's in agony, but he's coming." Remember folks, my agony was of my own choosing. Her trauma was the result of someone else's bad decision. If you feel any sympathy toward my plight, please direct it her way instead of giving it to dumb arrogant me.

Back to the trail

At the end of the trail I could hear the announcer calling out everyone as they crossed the finish line. Almost there! Just a bridge to cross, and it should be over!!

The bridge. It was wood and metal, and if you remember back to your childhood when you used to go barefoot, surfaces like that are WAY hotter than asphalt. Bruised and beaten, now my feet burned with each step. On the other side of the bridge was... more wood. It was a catwalk of sorts over a nature preserve area. Beautiful, but it was more of the same material. I tried going faster, but the wood was covered in splinters that I had to work around gingerly. Occasionally one would slip through and I'd jump back with a 1/4" shard of bridge piercing my foot.

Finally, mercifully, the catwalk ended and I was on a paved sidewalk. The finish was on blissfully cool grass, and I broke into a sprint with whatever was left in me. I leaped across the finish line, then nearly collapsed into a heap of emotional and physical wreckage as I saw the relief and trauma in my poor wife's face. Swim- 23:08; Bike- 1:05:17; Run- 1:19:32

I'd completed my first triathlon. No wetsuit, no road bike, no shoes. I'd said from the outset that since I wasn't going to finish first I might as well finish hard. This was hard.

Epilogue

As I write this, it's been pleasantly surprising at how well my body has recovered. After some water and a couple apples at the finish line, I jogged back to the transition area to collect my gear. The bike ride back up the hill to the town was difficult, but manageable. It took a couple of days before I didn't wince on hard surfaces, but there's not a scratch or bruise to be seen on my feet.

Hey, there's a half-marathon coming up in October. Anyone else up for it?

How I Became a Delegate for the Utah Republican Convention

The other day we came home to a note attached to our door, which is not an unusual event. The unusual thing was that nothing was being sold! It was a reminder that the the neighborhood caucuses for the Utah Republican Party were coming up, and that we should go participate in our precinct. We'd never attended one before, so it sounded interesting!

The day came, and thanks to Outlook I got a reminder. We had to reschedule some things and shuffle priorities, but managed to make it to the caucus. From my understanding, this is the first time in our area that the neighborhood caucuses were held in a large group of precincts instead of each precinct meeting individually.

The process was pretty straightforward... find your precinct on the map if you couldn't remember what your paper said, check in at the respective desk, then take a seat in the high school auditorium where the kick-off was. We sat next to some very neighborly folk who were nice to chat with as everyone waited. And waited. And waited.... The registration was going overtime, and pretty soon people were sitting on the floor and standing on the sides of the room. This was BY FAR the largest caucus meeting they've had, and they were still registering people when the kickoff finally started a half hour late.

It started with a Pledge of Allegiance, which was a really neat experience. You do it in elementary school and occasionally at sporting events, but this was a solid mass of active citizens kicking off the selection process for who will be on the ballot this year. The conviction reverberating through the auditorium was quite an experience!

Some more administrative stuff, then they read the Utah Republican Party Platform. The guy reading it was doing his best at a dramatic interpretation, and the people listening were doing their best at cheering for the points they felt were of primary concern. Sometimes we agreed and cheered along with the crowd, sometimes we disagreed and kind of rolled our eyes at the fanatics around us. Lesson of the day is, you'll never find a political party or politician you agree 100% with unless it's you running as an independent. No matter, the experience was still great!

We broke out into precincts, and our group found a corner of the open cafeteria to huddle around, straining to hear at times because of the din around us. We elected our chairs and vote counters, then began the process of nominating and running for the positions of county and state delegates.

If you're unfamiliar with the process, the gist is this: Somebody has to decide who will represent the party during the election in November. The caucuses are where neighborhoods get together and choose delegates that will represent them at the convention. Once there, the delegates vote to determine who will be on the ballot in November. If no firm decision is reached (60% in the case of the Utah Republican party), the top two candidates will be in a run-off election in the spring.

In a state like Utah that's predominantly Republican, it's often the case that the person the delegates choose will end up winning the election. For a long time I've voted one way or another, bemoaning the fact that I didn't agree entirely with any of the candidates. So, when the opportunity came up to jump into the race for county delegate (for choosing the candidate in the state election), I jumped in.

Our precinct is on the large size, apparently, and we needed to elect 7 county delegates. Given the size of our group it was a stretch to find enough volunteers! 7 did, though, and we were all voted in by acclamation. In other words, everybody said, "Okay!" and that was that.

Electing the state delegates was another matter entirely! There were 5 positions available, and about 10 people who put their hat in the ring. Each of us went down to give a short "campaign speech", and then the voting took place. It wasn't a matter of taking the top 5 vote-getters and shipping them out the door, though. Every position had to be filled independently, meaning that we had to find a 51% agreement 5 times. With such a plurality of candidates, it could have taken forever! There was a catch, though-- each candidate could withdraw their name for a particular seat.

It took the candidates a minute to figure this out, but we discovered that if you weren't in the top 3 vote getters after the first round it was pretty useless to keep your name in the game. So after each initial round, several candidates would drop out and the second vote would take place. If there still wasn't a majority decision, the 3rd-place candidate would drop out for the last vote. We used a ton of paper slips, but eventually got all of the delegates elected.

In case you're wondering, I was the last to be elected. The last position was pretty hotly contested since nobody really wanted to drop out at that point, but after 3 or 4 rounds of voting I won. Thanks, neighbors! I'll try my best to get informed on everything and keep you posted on what I find.

Types of Business Owners

These are just my personal observations... nothing scientific yet.

The Accidental Entrepreneur

This is the person who started out with no intention of being a business person. It's the guy who starts doing side jobs in the evening, then finds that he can support himself by finding his own work. Or maybe it's the hobbyist who finds a market for their end product. My wife is experimenting with this a bit right now as she's discovering that she can charge people for decorating their parties.

These types of businesses start out as hobbies, and evolve into providing a (hopefully) reliable income that pays better than what they were making at their day job. Entrepreneurs in this category may lack formal education or training, but with ambition, hard work, and a fair bit of luck they can have a decent career doing what they love on their own terms.

The Delegator

As a business grows beyond the owner/operator model, there starts to be too much work for one person to do. Family and friends help a lot in the early stages, but eventually the owner starts hiring real employees. Now the job of the owner shifts from being an excellent tradesman (plus marketer, plus customer service, plus everything else...) to being a manager.

Managing is a useful skill in its own right. Indeed, it's an empowering force for any organization to have good management. A good manager is able to see what the terrain ahead looks like, then match those challenges to the skill sets of the available resources (employees).

I think this stage is what begins to separate the casual business owner from one that's driven to grow. The business can be largely self-sufficient now. It's possible to sit back and let things run, and skim off a passive income from the fruits of others' labor. On the other hand, the manager / owner could continue devoting attention to finding new ways to compete.

The Investor

Unlike the other two types, this guy has cash to burn. It might all be leveraged, but don't hate them for it! Investors have a lot of other things going on, so they're not going to take the hands-on approach unless they absolutely have to. Instead, they want to hire good managers to watch over their investment and make sure it grows.

Good management is like a central nervous system. It takes in huge amounts of data coming from all parts of the organi(zation/sm) and makes decisions optimal for survival and success. Just like a central nervous system, it requires overhead. Obscene amounts overhead. (See "Burn Calories By Thinking") In biology it's calories; in business it's cash. Assuming the Investor is able to find the right brain to run the business, this hands-off approach can be an effective way to gain assets passively. [edit: Kind of like beekeeping! You buy the hive, then skim off the honey that your workers produce. But you have to have a good productive queen.]

In other news...

Yep, I'm back blogging. I've re-calibrated my goals, since the consulting projects I'm behind on need to have a higher priority. My list of ideas is getting longer, but it's tough to write them out because I know I'm not even close to an expert in any of these areas. I have my thoughts and opinions, but there's no research and hardly any references to back it up.

Does it matter? In reading through various blogs there seems to be a "diary" theme. This happened, that happened, and the facts are indisputable. Since I really don't do all that much, I'm playing the arm-chair pontificator. This project has changed the way I read-- now I'm trying to keep track of where I hear various ideas so that I can attribute the sources that influence my opinions.

It'll be an adventure to see how this blogging experiment warps my perceptions going forward!

How I Became a Barefoot Runner

Barefoot running has been in the news a lot lately, and since I'm a barefoot runner, I field a lot of questions about it. Today there was a discussion on my favorite social news site, and I chimed in with a comment about Vibram shoes. One person wanted more details, so I wrote a big long post about it. As I wrote my characteristically verbose reply, I thought it would be a great blog entry. So here it is! (And here's the original context if you're curious.)

"I have seen this claim repeated ad-nauseum. Do you have any proof that Vibram's actually are just as healthy as barefoot running? Their website says it over and over but without any proof; they don't even have a video of someone running on a treadmill with them? If they make all these claims that vibrams are equivalent to barefoot running, why have they not proven it? It seems like a huge bait and switch - running barefoot or wearing minimal thinner-sole traditional running shoes have advantages, but no where have I seen concrete evidence that vibrams work as well as either. I have never heard of any runner using these long-term, or putting any sort of significant mileage on them. So I ask you, how often do you run in a given week? What sort of mileage have you put on your vibrams? How long have you been consistently running on them? How quickly do the soles break down? What injuries did you have before? What injuries have you had since? Why are vibrams any more effective than thin soled running shoes you have tried? Don't talk to me about "how you feel so much more connected" or whatever, I'm talking about tangible evidence. A thin-soled cheap running shoe, which has been shown to be beneficial through studies are usually a lot cheaper than than the $75 to $100 Vibram wants me to spend on their currently untested shoe. Furthermore, how fit were you before you started the vibram running regimen... Vibram's website says it's not problem that your feet hurt at first, no doubt because people do not immediately change their running style... Vibram's website doesn't give tips for fixing the stride, or how long you need to adjust before running, or how to avoid injury. From your experience can you please give some anecdotes?"

Wow. No pressure, eh? First off, I'm not much of a runner. I do it very casually, just a few times a month. For that reason, I probably won't be able to provide you with the empirical evidence you want. That being said, I do have some experience with leg injuries and how barefoot running (and running with Vibrams) affects those.

Injuries

Here's my story... when I was 12, I was involved in a car incident where the tibia in my right ankle was ground off on the pavement. I spent the next few years in and out of surgery with various splints and braces on my leg to prevent my ankle from popping out of socket.

A couple years later I was into hiking and camping, and was helping out on a biology study in the wilderness. There's no sensation of hot or cold in my ankle anymore, so I didn't notice that I'd spent the entire day with my ankle pressed up against the engine block. Oops! 3rd degree burn, more surgery.

A couple years after that, I tried running for the first time. I didn't really like it, but I was trying out for the Rugby team at my high school. Didn't make it-- couldn't handle all the running!

I made the mistake of trying out for the cheerleading squad. Yes, there were male cheerleaders at my school. No, I didn't make the squad. I went down into the splits without warming up and shredded my right hamstring in front of the whole school during an assembly. My calf muscle was black and blue for weeks from the blood that seeped down from the injury. More physical therapy.

I spent two years after high school doing religious service, and during that time I put a lot of miles on my shoes. Toward the end, I developed severe pain in my right foot; it felt like a weird "clicking" in my 3rd and 4th toes on every step. The podiatrist made an insert. It did pretty much nothing.

Fast-forward about 5 years. I'd been fairly sedentary, so there were no new injuries and no aggravation of old ones. I felt a strong urge to start running, so I slogged out a mile or two 3x per week. Within short order, the heel of my right foot had started hurting. Stabbing pain in every step that made it difficult to walk, let alone run!

Prognosis

I went to a sports medicine doctor to see what I could do about the pain. He looked at my massively scarred ankle, took some x-rays, and said there was basically nothing he could do about it. Without an important part of my tibia and missing one of my tendons, it was a miracle I was standing on two feet, let alone walking. He wasn't about to dive into any treatment program with all that was wrong already.

I was on my own.

Changing my walk

Through one source or another I came across an article on fox walking that piqued my curiosity. Basically it's the toe-heel motion that's been in the news lately. It brought out my life-hacker tendencies, so I decided to try it out.

Learning to fox-walk is hard. I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak in less time than it took me to convert to fox-walking. Every step was a conscious effort. Each day was a new round of trying to not look like a complete idiot while putting one foot in front of the other. It sucked, but my heel pain had gone away almost completely after just the first few days.

Maybe my heel pain was gone now? I'd try "cow-walking" (what fox-walkers call the "normal" gait of everyone else) every now and then to see what happened. Heel pain returned within a few steps. Back to fox walking, and the pain was gone! Okay, so it wasn't that the problem had just gone away. My biomechanical change had actually fixed something!

During this transition period I pretty much stopped running. My calf muscles were screaming from just walking, so I didn't want to jinx things and overdo it. There were no additions to my fitness routine to compensate for this. I went to the office, coded in a beanbag for 8 hours, went home. Maybe a walk around the neighborhood, but nothing that anyone would consider a workout.

After a few months of this I started running again. Where before I was struggling to pound out 2 miles, now I could run 3-4 without much trouble. Within a couple of weeks I was running as far as I felt (maybe up to 5 miles?) before boredom set in and I'd go home.

Going barefoot

Our yard is fairly small, so a gas lawnmower was a ridiculous idea. Instead, we opted for a hand-pushed reel mower that does the job just fine. I like the feel of grass on my feet, and since the reel mower wasn't about to chop my toes off I was free to mow the lawn barefoot for the first time in my life. There were a couple of single mothers in the neighborhood that needed their lawns mown too, so I started doing theirs as part of my exercise.

Even going on soft lawns in my bare feet, there were sticks and weeds that were prickly and uncomfortable. But as time went on, my feet toughened up and I didn't mind it so much. I would even purposely walk on bark mulch to see if I could adapt to rougher terrain. That summer I transitioned into going barefoot whenever I could.

I'd actually gone barefoot one summer many years back when I hung out with a girl who was here studying from Zimbabwe. It was great fun, except for the time when I got kicked out IHOP. Social conventions got the best of me and I'd gone back to shoes. Now, I was rediscovering it all again with the added perspective of what it's like to fox-walk in shoes v. bare feet.

In bare feet, your body naturally transitions to fox-walking. I won't go into the details, since there have been plenty of studies in the news lately. What I discovered this time around is that, while you can produce the same movements in shoes, it's infinitely easier without them.

The tactile feedback from your toes lets you know when your foot hits the ground. With shoes on, everything is "muffled". It's hard to describe, but that's the best word I can think of. In shoes your foot is almost always in contact with a flat surface, and the only thing you can feel for is the pressure difference when your shoe contacts the ground. Without shoes, it comes naturally. It just does.

Vibrams

For the past couple of years I've gone barefoot whenever possible during the summer months. I don't run regularly, but when I do go out I go as far as I like and then come home. No shin splints. No heel pain. The limiting factor is pretty much how developed my calluses have come along that season. I enjoy running now, even if I don't get out and do it more than a few times a month. It's a pleasure every time I go out, and I always wonder why I don't do it more. Maybe this year I will.

My wife is a saint. She puts up with me and my eccentricities with nothing but love and patience. But last summer I went into the office one day during a break (I teach computer science) without shoes, and she was mortified. She made me promise to never do it again! About this time I read Born to Run (the book that's been responsible for all the hype), and had really enjoyed Barefoot Ted's appearance in the book. I really wanted to get a pair of DIY huaraches, but she didn't like the idea of me running around trying to look like a Roman. That, and I really couldn't wear those into work either.

Ted is, as far as I know, the first athlete to be sponsored by Vibram. He runs ultramarathons in Vibram Fivefingers. They look a little funky, but the KSO model has a mesh over the top that makes it look like they're a legitimate piece of footwear. We decided that these were the shoes for me.

We went to a running store to find the right pair, and I've loved them from the moment I put them on.

It's not exactly the same as barefoot, but it's a lot closer than any pair of ratty old tennis shoes or even sandals that I've worn before. The individual toe articulation makes a huge difference in being able to sense the terrain you're on. The soles are protective, but I can feel every piece of gravel under foot. Instead of "muffled", I'd say it's "softened".

The big thing for me is that I can wear them into work. My colleagues have been bemused. The students I teach are a bit bewildered at the nut-job teaching C#. Overall, the reaction has been positive with a large dose of "Whaaaaat?"

There is a down side to them. They smell. No, they stink. The stench from wearing those things will knock out a water buffalo at fifty paces. You can put them through with the rest of the laundry, but the next day they'll be back. It comes from not being able to wear regular socks and having your toes marinating in their own individually-wrapped bacterial incubators.

Just yesterday I ordered 7 pair of toe socks to cut down the smell. I can't describe how excited I am for them to arrive! I've been wearing regular shoes for the past week and it truly has been an I'm-not-kidding-this-is-tramuatizing experience! I miss my shoes!! I go barefoot at home and wear my Vibrams to the gym (where they require closed-toed shoes). Then every morning when I have to go to my closet and encase my feet in size-14 coffins it makes me sad and I die a little inside.

Wrap-up

I don't have enough empirical evidence for your questions about Vibrams. I love going barefoot, but it's simply not possible in our society and my climate. I've never tried the Nike Free shoes, or any other kind of minimalist footwear. I have had cheap shoes that were thin-soled by virtue of owning them for 10 years. Running in those is preferable by far to the expensive running shoes I bought after I started fox-walking. My Vibrams? Hands-down, my favorite footwear of all time.

In shoes I still fox-run with the same toe-heel motion as when I go barefoot, but it feels like I'm slogging through molasses. The form never feels quite right. I do it anyways because it prevents my heel pain. It still comes up when I cow-walk, in case you're wondering... tested it out recently. Contrast that with the Vibrams, where I feel light. It feels barefoot. I feel like I want to run more and jump over things. It embarrasses people when I do jump over random things like chairs in the hallway. These things make me happy. :-)

Hope my perspective helps.

Great Music: Regina Spektor

Yeah. I'm a day late again. I have to do a post tonight and another one tomorrow, so you can guess which one is getting the short end of the proverbial stick.

My wife and I are wide awake at 12:30, and came across a new YouTube music discovery system like Pandora except with videos. One of our all-time favorite artists is Regina Spektor, so we tried looking her up. I haven't seen at least half of the videos there!

For the unindoctrinated, she's a Russian-born New Yorker that's been described as a jazzy "anti-folk" singer and pianist. Her melodies and lyrics are a uniquely eclectic mix of whimsy, quirk, macabre, and elegance. I have no idea how she pulls off those incredibly expressive vocals.

For the curious among the audience (shout-out to my brother and his family, my very first subscribers!), here are some of my picks from her collection.

• Fidelity
• Us
• Samson
• Eet
• On The Radio
• Blue Lips
• Music Box (this was the first song of hers we heard-- a fragment in a TV commercial)
• Uh-merica
• The Call (used in the end credits for The Chronicles of Narnia)
• Rejazz

There are lots more, but it's probably bed time. Another post (hopefully) tomorrow!

The Soap Business - Running the Numbers

So this is the post that I really wanted to do for last Saturday, but I hope you enjoyed the back story.

A Great Opportunity

While we were preparing to make lots of soap, we went by Scentsations, a local store that has tons of things that smell good. As we were smelling all the fragrance blends they had on hand, the owners heard we were making our own soap and wanted to know more about it. Turns out, their soaps are very expensive French bars that are a real pain to import. Over the course of discussion they said it would be great to have a local company supplying them since their clientèle are the type to go gaga over locally made artisan souvenirs.

That got our entrepreneurial minds rolling! Surely there's enough profit margin to make a fabulous living off of mixing hazardous chemicals in your own kitchen.

Preliminary Research

Our first stop was an Etsy search for handmade soaps. This told us that a bar of soap is, on average:

• $5.50 on the retail market
• 150 grams

From searching various soap making hobby sites, a very popular recipe is composed of:

• 40% olive oil
• 40% coconut oil
• 20% palm oil

We used mostly lard in our recipe, but the artisan soaps tend to shy away from animal fats because labeling their product as "vegan" is a nice buzz-word that helps establish why you're paying an extra quarter for your morning shower.

Run the Numbers

Once we had a bar size and a recipe we could reverse-engineer how much of each kind of oil is used in a bar, and therefore the cost of raw materials. After shopping around industrial suppliers online, we found that we could average $0.74 per bar. Selling them wholesale to Scentsations or another retailer, the bar would go for $2.63.

$2.63 (wholesale) - $0.74 (materials) = $1.88 per bar

We set an income goal of $1,000 per month, which is a nice cushion in the budget if it's coming from a hobby business. In order to reach that goal, it would take 531 bars of soap every month. Each batch we made would yield 30 bars,so even pumping out a batch of soap every other day, we'd still be making less than our goal!

But you forgot...

Remember that this is still looking at just the cost of materials. To do a real analysis you would also include:

• labor
• warehousing space
• equipment
• energy costs
• labor
• packaging
• office overhead (phone, envelopes, computer time)
• shrinkage (bad batch of soap, loss, theft by your own bathrooms)
• advertising
• labor
• etc.

Now do you see why hand-crafted soap is most often sold at farmers markets? The profit per bar jumps up to $4.51 and the bars sold per month drops to 222.

It's still an unholy amount of soap for one person to sell in a month.

Disclaimer

These numbers are very much the "arm-chair quarterback" estimates coming from wild guesses. I'd love to hear from somebody who's actually in the soap making business to confirm or deny.

The Soap Business - Story

How it came about

For this past Christmas, we wanted to do a home-made gift that was small, not too expensive, and had a nice personal touch. It was decided that it was time to break out the old soap-making supplies and make a whole bunch of soap!

A bit of background... my parents have a friend who makes soap, and she taught my dad a few tricks back in 1999 or so. The first time my dad and I made soap together was on a construction trip in a motel room. Between the jars of crystal lye, the giant pots and beakers and such, the gallons of oil, and the horrific smells coming out of the room I have to look back in shock that we didn't get kicked out for making a meth lab!

We made a half dozen batches or so, but never really got our technique perfected. There were lots of books, but everything we read was geared toward the super high-end artisan soaps with oils, butters, botanicals, and everything to make your skin feel like it's being prepped to be deep-fried for a side dish in a six-course meal. Our simplified recipes worked just fine, thank you very much! The final recipe settled somewhere around 50% olive oil, 30% coconut oil, and 20% palm oil.

New age, new tools!

Fast-forward a decade, and the amount of information available to the experimental soap maker is nearly overwhelming! Where before we had to debate when we were at trace, now you just go to YouTube and watch endless examples. How awesome is that?! We fired up the equipment and tried the old recipe and... it was soap! But it didn't have the right texture. The lather was alright, but not really comparable to a commercial bar. It was soft, too, feeling mushy in the hand.

So, it was time to find a new recipe.... We found a lye calculator that had a lot of great tips on what qualities the various oils impart to the finished product. After playing with the numbers for a few hours, I came up with what I thought was a good balance. Firing up the equipment again, the water in the recipe was replaced with goat milk to give it a nice (and inexpensive) scent. The benefit of hot-process soap making is that you can cut and use the bars within a day, so we were able to test it out almost immediately. The end result was a nice bar with a smooth and bubbly lather. Success!

Getting it out the door

In the end we made up four kinds of soap: goat milk, fig leaf and Italian bergamot, lemon verbena and acai berry, and "invigorating mint blend". We used cardboard boxes and tubes lined with freezer paper as molds, and I built a jig to help us cut the bars evenly.

My wife made bath salts, and her sister made salve and lip balm. Together they cut out and decorated name tags for all the items. There was a big night of putting together the packages with my wife and her mother, and then we split up the prizes between all the sisters who contributed to the project. Christmas presents were ready just in time!

p.s.

On a personal note... I do realize the delicious irony of having this blog post be two days late; right after I posted about my commitment to following a routine for my posts! Drat, I broke the chain! Part of the trouble was collating information about model-driven development for some upcoming posts. This post was a backup plan, but it grew into (hopefully only) two. I'll finish the story tomorrow with the business numbers that I'd originally planned for this one.

Apologies for the purely factual, very dry tone of the post. I'm not very good at weaving a story, and that's part of what this blogging exercise is all about!

Don't break the chain!

As I was preparing to commit myself to regular blogging, I looked for different ways to help me stay on target so that I wouldn't run out of steam once things got hard. The best thing so far has been to make a recurring task in Outlook, since my personal organization goal is to use the task list regularly.

There are lots of goals that people have that have to be done every day. Personal development goals like prayer or meditation, diets, quitting smoking.... They each have to be done every day. In my reading I discovered Jerry Seinfeld's productivity system!

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself—even when you don't feel like it.

He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here's how it works.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

So there you go! Don't break the chain.

Don't break the chain.

But what happens if your goal isn't a daily activity? My goal for blogging is Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. You'll end up with a series of lines on your calendar, and I've been a bit annoyed at how that would look.

Until I found this!

At first I just thought it was a cool calendar, but then I realized I could use this as my "Jerry Seinfeld Wall Calendar" to keep track of when I've done my tasks. Instead of boring old stripes running down a page, picture filling in a series of concentric circles! If you miss a day, it'll show up as a hole in one of the rings and you'll be extra motivated to make sure you get the next target dates so that you can keep those rings perfect.

It would be cool to have multi-colored markings for different tasks, but that would probably get unwieldy to update. Nope, just do a separate one of these for each non-daily task you're keeping track of.

Greeting Cards and Business Models

My wife and her mother run a greeting card company called Any Horrible Occasion. It's a great line that has divorce cards, cancer cards, lawsuit cards, and cards for any occasion. Check them out sometime, they're hilariously funny!

It all started when they were running a company for LDS-themed greeting cards, that then got buried under when a large corporate entity took over the market with some pretty shady business practices. Yeah... no bitterness here! Since my mother-in-law is a twice-divorced single mother of 6, she's had some ideas over the years for real-life cards that make people laugh at the situation. She'd talked with various artists to brainstorm it, looked at all kinds of photography, and somehow settled in on the idea of fine art gone bad.

My mother-in-law has found a great niche. There are lots of cards that look at situations in life in a mean-spirited tone, or that resort to easy punchlines that are crass or rude. Any Horrible Occasion cards talk honestly about the difficult situations in life while retaining the receiver's dignity.

It's been a great little line of cards! Everybody that sees them has an emotional reaction-- either they love them, or they hate them. Apparently that kind of reaction is a very good thing! It's okay to offend some people because you need to break out of the Zone of Mediocrity that comes from trying to please everyone.

That brings me back to market niches. In the religious market especially, you're never going to please everyone. While you may be wildly popular among your target denomination, everyone else is going to call blasphemy on you. Run the numbers for a minute. In the US, the LDS faith takes about 1.9% of the population. That means you're almost completely guaranteed to never sell to 98.1% of the market!! Who in their right mind would try to sell a product that 98% of the population would never buy?!

Any Horrible Occasion targets a broader niche. I can't really back that up, actually, since its sales numbers have never been what Twin Peaks was, but we think the target audience is broader. At the National Stationery Show in New York, Any Horrible Occasion has won 2 LOUIE awards in two years. Since the award is based on sendability, quality, price, etc., I have to assume that there's some segment in the broader world that appreciates AHO's unique brand of humor.

Whatever the niche is, it's the reaction that people have that's been most important. We've been called everything from genius to prostitution of fine art, but it's incredibly rare to find someone who just says, "Meh." It's this visceral reaction to the product that's going to drive sales. People who love it are passionately showing (and sending) cards to their friends.

People who hate it are also passionately showing cards around. Ever notice how when you're at a restaurant and somebody gets bad food, the first thing they do is say, "Oh my gosh, this is SO NASTY!! Here... try it!" That's the kicker. Even if they hate the product, they're advertising it for free!

Turning that passion into sales is easy enough once people see the cards. For the moment we need to work on getting them out to be seen.

ORM v. O/RM

When I was doing my undergrad in computer science, I spent a lot of time with Terry Halpin doing Object Role Modeling. We refer to it as ORM (think the "ohmmm" mantra, with an "r" thrown in!), though in industry the acronym usually refers to Object Relational Mapping. Whenever I think of Object Relational Mapping, or O/RM, in my head it's "The Dark ORM", just like The Dark Side of The Force.

In true ORM, you're taking a conceptual model of your business, or "domain", and using that model to help drive development. It's a very top-down approach to software development. This is great for when you're talking with business owners, trying to figure out how to build a system to support their needs.

In The Dark ORM (O/RM), whichever relational mapping system you choose (and there are many for general use, Java, or .NET) will look at the existing database and try to generate objects from the tables and fields. There are some very legitimate criticisms of O/RM out there, some even calling it the Vietnam of Computer Science (summarized here). This bottom-up approach is very popular among programmers because it lets them start building the system immediately. Once they have the data structure in place, they're able to generate large amounts of code; and, let's face it, that gives people very warm fuzzy feelings!

One of my side projects has been a local modeling agency, and currently I'm migrating some VERY ancient code that I wrote to a new system. In the next few posts I'll detail some of the procedures I've used to create the new site using both ORM and O/RM together as part of a model-driven development methodology.

What do I think?

Among all the social news sites that I read, I found this gem of a post. To sum it up, he says that the reason people aren't great at writing is because they're not great at thinking. It's tough to come up with an original bit of prose when one's not had an original thought.

Harsh!

But oh, so true.... I've noticed in my day-to-day that while I'm impressively well-read on a variety of topics, I don't have much to contribute to the discussion other than regurgitating anecdotal stories and apocryphal factoids to which I've long-since lost the reference.

One of my goals for the new year is to get myself a bit more organized, and as part of that I've started using the task list in Outlook. For a guy who used to work at Franklin Covey, this is sinking pretty low!

So I just set a recurring task for myself. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I'm going to post something to this blog. Something that I've found interesting and can expound on, or maybe something I've done. Maybe something I have a question about. In fact, it may be a good chance to string my thoughts together on a few different things.

The tough part of everything is, of course, doing it. So I'm using my task list this year. I'm writing in the blog. Yep. Just doing it.