There are only a couple of weeks until the Falmouth Road Race. I am pleased to announce that my longest training run reached 4.5 miles. My new strategy is hill based. Because I am not in 'peak' shape, I will be running and walking during the event.

My plan is to run all the downhill stretches and walk all the uphill stretches. I haven't quite decided what to do on the flat stretches from mile 3.5 to 6.5 as it winds through neighborhoods and around Falmouth Harbor. It will depend on the weather and the legs.

Poor outcomes happen, generally at the most inconvenient or unexpected time. But pushing through happens as well and it isn’t over until it's over. This concept was reinforced for me in a very high-pressure situation in Miami and the Bahamas many years ago.

During my tenure as Chief Human Resources Officer for a restaurant company in Memphis, one of my side duties was to lead the planning committee for the annual management conference.

I was not without experience planning meetings, but this was a 300+ person meeting that had traditionally been held in Destin, Florida on the Panhandle and was golf-centric, since the company’s leadership was golf-centric. I was not sure how many years it had been held in that location, but it could have been a dozen or so.

The committee consisted of the Executive Assistant to the President, the Director of Marketing, one of the trainers in my department and the Director of Purchasing (since vendors assumed the bulk of the cost of the conference).

My first year in charge, I did a lot of listening, a lot of consensus building, and a lot of repeating what had been done in the past. It was a successful, safe, event that didn’t win any awards or get any accolades. It worked to achieve the goal of bringing about 100 leaders and 50 vendors, along with their spouses, for a relaxing June weekend with some leadership training, some golf, and some bar time. 

There was also what we called a ‘food show’ where each of the vendors had a booth and provided samples and information about their products, old and new.

That portion of the event was what motivated the vendors to pay for it, and the two hour session was actually very valuable to everyone, with a lot of conversations, engagement, and relationship building.

My second year was different. The company had been sold, the former Chairman retired, and the new owners were not golf-centric. 

One of them suggested Orlando and the committee set out to do research. When you are a meeting planner, venues are happy to provide complimentary ‘site visits’ to the decision makers, and the Stouffer Orlando Hotel did so for our team. We spent a few days there, looking over the facilities, the proximity to attractions, and other factors. During my stay, I bluffed my way into some meetings for groups that were having their events at the hotel to add to my evaluation and as a result the committee decided it was the way to go.

The move to Orlando was a huge success, and got rave reviews, compared to the Destin golf event, so the next year, we did it again and booked the Buena Vista Palace, also in the Orlando area, and had the same type of success.

So, after three successful major conferences, our committee decided we were up for even more excitement and explored the idea of a cruise to the Bahamas for the annual conference. The costs would be about the same as the Orlando costs, 90% paid for by the vendors. But we had a problem: there could be no food show on the boat, Royal Carribean wouldn’t budge.

Fortunately, the Intercontinental Hotel in Miami Harbor was attached to a skyscraper and in that skyscraper was a vacant floor, the 26^th, and we arranged to have the food show there.

The committee toured the hotel, the skyscraper’s 26^th floor, and hopped on a cruise ship to check out the Bahamas. 

When we got back to Memphis, the senior leadership team enthusiastically endorsed the decision, and we set out to plan the event.

We met weekly, we reached out to vendors, we designed the meetings, the agendas, the everything. The plan was to arrive in Miami on a Wednesday for two nights, have a banquet on the first night, have the food show the next day, and start the cruise on Friday, returning on Monday.

At the appointed week, the committee arrived a day early to make sure everything was just right. And it was, until it wasn’t.

Disaster #1: The big arrival day was Wednesday, and I was waiting in the lobby to greet the executives, who naturally came in first, the first issue developed. An Alitalia flight crew staying at the hotel refused to check out because of a change in their flight. That meant about 20 rooms were not available for the leadership team to check in. They were pissed. 

In fact they were so pissed that the only vice-president who was not in my fan club, and who had come from working at Holiday Inn a few years before, actually went behind the counter of the hotel and tried to take over. Oh boy. Embarrassing. And of course, as the team leader, it was clearly all my fault.

And since the awards banquet was to take place in a few hours, the ripple effect of leaders (and their wives) not being able to get ready in their rooms impacted the situation as well.

Disaster #2: The next day the food show was all set up. Great views, good layout, vendors real pleased until… the food didn’t show up. Their samples were to be cooked in the hotel kitchen and rolled up the elevator to their booths. 

That’s exactly what happened. Unfortunately, the food showed up 90 minutes into the two-hour food show. Yep, another black mark on my reputation as an event organizer, albeit a black mark with a great view of the Atlantic Ocean and Miami Harbor.

I’m not sure if that night I was ‘inconsolable’ but I knew that this event was a real mess, would be poorly rated by everyone, and perhaps end my tenure at the lead meeting planner and potentially impact my career as well.

I remember accepting the fact that it was what it was, there was nothing I could do about it and the experience wasn’t over yet.

I remember sitting on the deck in our room looking out at the ocean once we sailed and thinking about that expression ‘this ship has sailed.’ 

The next memory that I have is sitting on the beach on a private island the cruise line owned, next to the sunburned vice-president (who was not in my fan club) listening to him rave about the experience.

The ship, the entertainment on the ship, the food on the ship, the private island, the time spent in the Bahamas had completely turned things around so much that everyone forgot about the "check in" fiasco and the food show fiasco.

Years ago, there was a promotional theme for the Bahamian Tourist Board: It's Better in the Bahamas.

I thought of that and realized that the Miami part of the trip was only a temporary disaster and that judging anything before it is complete, is generally not a good idea. 

One of my cliches that reinforces this message is that there is no record anywhere of who is leading after the seventh inning of a baseball game: it doesn’t count and generally doesn’t matter, if the outcome is success.

So for me, regardless of what happened or didn't happen in Miami, I will always feel that it’s better in the Bahamas, because it was.