Happy Tuesday everyone! We hope you all had a great holiday weekend. As a small business, we end up working most of the weekends but it’s not a chore because we generally go for a run before going in. Plus, the atmosphere in the office is decidedly more relaxed than during the week. In fact, we even opened a bottle of wine after our photo shoot Sunday afternoon and that never happens Monday through Friday. Ok, truth be told, it does happen occasionally during the week too….but never before 5:00 p.m.! Ok…once it did happen before 5:00 p.m. but come on, it was, like 4:58 p.m. or something.
Don't tell but there's an open bottle of wine just off screen!
Anyway, I digress. During our run, we started talking about things that inspire us. That’s one of the benefits of having an Ambassador team and staying connected with so many of our customers. You all are doing so many inspirational things. On the weekends, our office tends to look like a command center for a tech company as we have multiple computers open with different social media feeds scrolling. Seemingly, every few minutes, someone calls out a race result or shares an amazing photo and we all comment, cheer, or scramble over to look. In any event, the list of things that inspired us grew quickly and we thought it might make sense to share our thoughts.
Then, as often happens during runs or bike rides, the topic bounced around and we began chatting about the MLK holiday. We’re from Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Junior spent so much time and we thought that perhaps we should also talk about things that “move” us.
Finally, to cap things off, we had to share one thing that made us incredibly happy. So, with all of that as context, here are:
Three things that inspired us over the weekend
Two things that moved us, and
One thing that made us incredibly happy.
Three Things that Inspired Us
The Coast Ride. The Coast Ride is an epic, quad burning, base building, multi-day cycling excursion that happens early in the year. The participants make their way from San Francisco to Santa Barbara over three tough but glorious days. We loved logging in throughout the weekend and seeing the photographs. We are truly inspired by the purity of intent on display here. There’s no prize or official finishers medal at stake. Rather, the athletes saddle up each day because they love being on the bike, they love being fit, and they love being with each other! Congrats to everyone who participated this year.
Lindsey Vonn’s Win. Now, it’s true that Coeur is primarily an endurance sports apparel company but that doesn’t mean we don’t love all sports. In fact, we spend as much time with tennis and skiing on as we do running, biking, swimming, and triathlon. Over the weekend, we had the pleasure of watching American Skier, Lindsey Vonn break the record for World Cup wins. For those of you who follow skiing, you know that Lindsey is coming off of a knee injury. You probably also know that in competitive skiing (as in many sports), the true champions race to win. There’s almost a counter-intuitive nature to sports that almost penalizes an overly conservative approach. The more cautious you are, the tighter you get and performance seems to frequently suffer. We were on the edge of our seat during Linsey’s final run as she raced aggressively and flat out took the win!
The Universe. Ok, this is way outside the scope of endurance sports but if you have a moment, take a look at this Youtube video. We were told that it is the largest picture ever taken at 1.5 Billion pixels! It’s actually a composite of over 400 pictures taken from the Hubble Space Telescope and captures something like 100 million stars. We’re going to look at it anytime we need a reminder of our place in the Universe. Kinda puts that flat tire we had during our last race in perspective!
Two Things that Moved Us
A blanket. Yep. We’re going from the cold vast expanse of space to a comfy, warm blanket. Our mother’s taught us well and we do make our beds before we head off to work. Today, for whatever reason, I happened to see what was written on the blanket we threw over the bed. It says, “Good Friends are like Angels. You don’t have to see them to know they are there.” So true. Let’s hear it for friends.
MLK. We mentioned earlier that we are originally from Atlanta. Thanks to the release of the movie Selma and the news coverage from the weekend, we got a much needed reminder of how much courage it took to stand up to a flawed and unfair system.
One Thing that made us very happy
Introducing our newest/most tenured sponsored athlete. Katie Hursey was one of our first sponsored athletes. We’ve gotten to know her as a competitor and as a person and we can’t be more thrilled to be working with her. She’s a fierce competitor on the course and one of the nicest individuals you could meet off. Over the last year, we also got to know her boyfriend, then fiancé Tommy Zaferes. Tommy share’s her profession as a triathlete and is also a fantastic person.
Over the weekend, Katie and Tommy got married and we couldn’t be happier. They immediately join the ranks of triathlon power couples and we’re looking forward to being associated with them and watching them shoot for spots on the Olympic team next year. Congratulations to Katie Hursey...oops, I mean Zaferes!