About a year ago I bought a Specialized Bighit Mountain bike which is a beautiful mountain bike in my opinion. I got it so I could do some crazy downhills and some big urban freeride paths and wasn’t particularly concerned with it’s 45 lb weight.

Over the past year I have been riding my mountain bike in short distance in urban parks only using short burst of energy when approaching a big jump and landing it. About a month ago I started riding mountain bikes with a colleague of mine from work. He typically rode for longer distances on trails so it was completely different type of riding than what I was used to.

After riding like this for about 3 weeks we decided to enter the Greensboro Rock’ N Trot Biathlon. It’s now about a week until race day and I decided I would go for a run to see where I stood in that endurance department. To my dismay, just because you have been riding a mountain bike some doesn’t mean you can go out and run 4 miles at a 6.5 minute pace. I completely overdid it yesterday and my legs are feeling the pain today.

Initially, I thought I might be able to place fairly well but after my run, I will happy if I finish it at all. I am going to load up on Creatine and drink a lot of protein shakes in hopes it will help improve my endurance and ATP production in time for the race next weekend.

Hopefully this will be the first race in a line of racing in which I can improve my performance over a long period of time instead of a single month. Because this will be my first race ever, I must admit, I am a little anxious and intimidated by the guys that have been training for years for this race. I am going to train the best I can over the next week and hope like hell I can at least finish the race. I will be posting more about this over the next week and after the race. I will place my time, average speed, and position as well so you guys can have a good laugh.

Brad Henry

www.seoslap.com

This article is in response to an interesting letter I received from a florist in Norfolk regarding one of their competitors who happens to by my client.

I recently received a “Cease and Desist” letter from a flower shop in Norfolk Virginia.  Apparently, they had trademarked their city name in combination with the popularly used keyword “Florist”.   I consider this a cheap shot at trying to kill the competition using trademark law for a city who’s name is used in more that one state in combination with the most general term for their industry.  I don’t know how they got approved for the specific term using their city name seeing as how Martha Stewart is having such a difficult time with it.

Regardless of how they got their city name trademarked, they did, which means my client has to remove that exact phrase from their pages.  When I tried to remove it, I found that it actually was not even on the page.  This really got to me because they must be sending these threatening letters out to all flower shops that operate on a national level in hopes that they may catch someone that is using their “name”.

Because I feel that this is such a cheap shot in internet marketing, I feel it is my duty to fight this in the only way I know how, using SEO.  Before this happened, the Norfolk wholesale florist market was of little concern because of the market size but now it has progressed to being the principle of the matter.

In order to make a point back to the company that started this trademark infringement pursuit, I am going to focus my efforts towards my client gaining as much Norfolk flower shop and florist market share as possible.   Through my research I was able to see that a lot of people also search for Norfolk Wholesale Florist in the Norfolk Virginia area as well so I will also be trying to gain market share for that specific phrase as well.

This is not a link scam or a joke, this is really happening. Here is their actual Trademark

http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=l1dn4o.2.1

If you have had a similar run in with a Florist in Norfolk, I would love to hear from you.

Thanks,

Brad Henry