No more meetings... please...

I am officially, as of today, meeting'ed out. No more please. Not for at least a week. I feel like a caged animal, unable to get out and move around. Don't get me wrong, I fled the meetings long enough to get a ride in the past two days, but was in meetings all day Tuesday and Wednesday for our National Marketing Summit. As well as on Monday, getting ready for the Summit... and almost every day the previous week before. NO MORE MEETINGS! (I'm sure I'll have a dozen next week... just in retaliation.)

The Summit was a very successful exercise though, just as it was last year. Many great ideas were discussed and I didn't win all of my battles, but I came away knowing why. It always amuses me to hear the differences between what the sales reps say and what the retailers say- and even what we think and what we get told. The good news is that we will be developing a fixed gear recumbent trike for next season. I'm glad that battle was won.

Obviously the big news of the week was the signing of the pro team. I will have more team news later as well, as the ink dries on a couple of other deals. Team Inferno is an incredible group of riders and I am way, way, way beyond happy about this deal. I stammered and stumbled during our Summit as I made the announcement about the team because I was just too excited. Honestly... I am that much of a bike-nerd. Masi has such a wonderfully rich history in racing, after all- Masi built frames for Eddy Merckx and somebody else's decals were on the tubes. Now, I won't pretend that I am welding custom frames for Inferno, but the racing connection will yield some great feedback for future development. That's good news for everybody. I'll be able to get feedback from them on the development of a TT frame and the racing track frame as well. The team director, Chad Thompson, is a great guy and I have thoroughly enjoyed working with him to make this sponsorship happen. Chad stopped in the booth during the show in Vegas with another rider from the team (whose name I forgot- sorry) and both guys were very easy to talk with. Chad talked about the sponsorship proposal for a minute or two and then the three of us just talked about bikes and racing. It was really cool. Just think- these guys, if the UCI CT license works out, will be at races like Tour of Georgia, the new Tour of California, USPro and San Francisco. Damn! That gets me pretty excited.

I will have more cool news very soon. I promise. And since the bulk of my meetings are done for a while, I might be able to get back into a regular rhythm here again.

Tim