July is Flying

Hello everyone!  I've been silent on my blog for a bit, but for good reason: July has been very busy!

• ScriptEd's internship program launched
• We added three new people to our ScriptEd team (Cami Aurioles as our Director of Development, and Michael Oppong + Alyxe Lett as Program Managers).
• Courtney Legates will join our team as a Program Manager on Monday
• We'll have two more joining soon... bringing our staff to 18 people! Whew!

A little over a year ago, we were a staff of four.  As you can imagine, the very quickly growing staff means that my job responsibilities change constantly.  I'm learning to adjust on the fly and am so excited to bring ScriptEd to the next phase of its organizational growth. I'm also in the process of searching for an (affordable) coach to help me navigate leading the ScriptEd team and community, so if you've got suggestions, send them my way.

Sort of related: this weekend is the New York City Triathlon, and we have a team of incredible supporters competing with us this year. Consider making a donation, or coming out to watch us on the run.  Bonus points if you bring ice with you and hand it to us at the top of Harlem Hill :)

Have a great weekend everyone!

Swim Coach for Hire (to get me to Australia!)

As some of you may have already seen, I raced a half ironman (1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, 13.1 mile run) in Syracuse, New York on Sunday and secured a spot to the World Championships in Australia this September. I qualified through the race's roll down process --  athletes in some age groups did not take the spots available to them, so the spots were allocated to athletes in other age groups.

I've spent the last couple of days thinking about whether or not I can make the trip happen.  It's a really long way to go for a race, and it's not cheap -- I estimate that it will probably cost me around $4,000 - $4,500 when all is said and done (flight, lodging, bike transport, etc).

At the same time, it's a pretty incredible opportunity to have a chance to race alongside world class athletes and I don't know that I'll get the opportunity again.  So I'm going to try to make it happen!

To offset the costs of traveling for triathlons in the past, I've used AirBnB and rented out my apartment. This time, I'm going to see if offering myself up as a swim coach can help me generate some extra income to help cover my costs for the race.

Here's my pitch:

Let me to help you with your triathlon swimming!

Some of my triathlon swim specific accolades: Over the weekend I did a 30:48 in the half ironman swim, which was only about 1.5 mins slower than the guy who won the whole race. My fastest Olympic distance swim was 13:13 at the NYC Triathlon. If we're not counting that one (because the NYC swim is notoriously fast), I think my second fastest was at the Westchester Tri last year, where I swam a 20:49.

I started swimming competitively at age 7, and was an athlete on Boston College's Womens swim team through my sophomore year.  I was also lifeguard and swim instructor in high school and college.

If you want to help get me to Australia and need help with your swim, let me know! You can email me at maurya.couvares@gmail.com.

Brooklyn Tri Club Triathletes Liz, Alan and me after Syracuse 70.3 in our World Championship Trucker hats 

ScriptEd Students are Making Me a Website

This summer, ScriptEd has a really cool pilot program happening at The Factory in Long Island City.  Our students will work with freelance web developers to work on clients' projects over the summer. The working title for this program is "The ScriptEd Dev Shop."

The freelancers are sourcing clients for the program now, so I signed myself up as one of their first customers.  ScriptEd students will work on building a website for me during the dev shop under the guidance of freelancers.  They'll integrate my blog into the new site, and will create an online presence for me that highlights my work and passion projects.

I'll be blogging from time to time about project and about the progress the students make throughout the summer.

If you've got website needs and are interested in becoming a dev shop client, please contact Olivia at Olivia@scripted.org.

TOMORROW IS THE SCRIPTED HACKATHON!

I'm so excited!

We have an awesome hackathon planned for tomorrow at Google.  Over the day, our students will build projects related to a surprise theme and then will compete for prizes at the end of the day.  We'll announce the surprise theme first thing tomorrow morning. Our hackathon is always a highlight of our year, and is one of the big ways that we celebrate all that our students and volunteers have accomplished during the school year.

We are really lucky to have a terrific panel of judges. They include:

• Amy Yan, VP of Product at Rent the Runway

• Jackie Trebilcock, Managing Director at NY Fashion Tech Lab

• Janet Schalk, CIO at Hudson’s Bay Company

• Kendra Farrell, ScriptEd alumni

• Kenton Jacobsen, Director of Engineering at Vogue.com

• MD Hossain, ScriptEd alumni

• Minverva Tantoco, CTO of NYC

• Peter Coles, VP of Software at Ringly

I'm running the Brooklyn Half tomorrow morning as well before heading over to the hackathon. Good luck runners!

Inspiring Road Signs!

Today I drove to Philadelphia to meet with a foundation that is interested in supporting ScriptEd.  It was great to sit in a car and drive without distractions or traffic. It helped me clear my head.

On the way back there was a toll booth that was closed. There were signs all over the road, probably 30-40, that said "keep moving" to encourage people to not slow down for the booth -- to keep driving through.  I've had a pretty rough couple of weeks between my workload and my life, and the stress of everything got me sick over the weekend, so it was good to see these signs. I've never looked to road signs for motivation before, but you've gotta find your inspiration somewhere, right?   Keep moving!

Endurance and Persistence

As you can probably guess from previous posts, I love drawing analogies and comparisons between the things I've learned as an athlete and the things I've learned running a company.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about endurance and persistence. Since January, I've been doing 14-16 mile runs on the weekends. For me, this is pretty epic -- I've never done this much running in my life.  I am not a naturally talented runner, and before I started doing these longer runs I really did not like running all that much. At the same time, it's the sport I need to work on most in triathlons so I'm making it happen. It's taken a great deal of motivation, persistence and determination to complete these runs.

When I first started doing my long runs it was nearly impossible for me to think about them in their entirety. It was too overwhelming. To get through them, I used a lot of self-talk and setting small goals (common refrains in my head during these runs: "Ok, I'm at mile 9, I just need to get to 9.5", "Just run to that lamp post over there", "Just get over this hill and reassess", "I'm going to count to 100 before I look at my watch again", "If I can get through this last half mile I'm going to have the biggest bagel sandwich I've ever had, then go to Ample Hills").

Breaking up the runs into little goals made the task of completing them more manageable.

Starting a company, or a new project (like a podcast!) is a lot of the same.  When I think about all the things we need to do at ScriptEd it's incredibly overwhelming.  We take time to make big picture plans, but most of my time is breaking down all of those big things we need to do into small action items. I love check lists (and checking things off those lists).  We'll always have more work to do, but getting little things done every day helps me know that we're making progress.

Announcing "Lost in Transition" - A Triathlon Podcast

I'm excited to announce "Lost in Transition," a triathlon podcast that I'm co-creating + co-hosting with fellow Brooklyn-based triathletes Mat Ward and Ben Kessel.  The show will cover all things triathlon with a little Brooklyn flavor, and will feature interviews with local triathlete and cover local races.

We recorded our teaser episode this week -- listen here  (disclaimer: I'm guilty of almost everything Mat and Ben talk about in this episode). 

Our first full episode will feature Danny Pego, aka BrooklynTriDad, and will be available sometime next week.

Please subscribe to us on iTunes or Soundcloud, and like us on Facebook.

Enjoy!