Business Travel Is All Sunshine And Daisies, International Edition

I travel a lot.  I’ve logged over 100,000 miles a year for the past 6 years or so and I’m always tired when the end of a travel year comes.  It’s only morally significant when December comes, I’m tired pretty much all year.  But, my travel pales in comparison to my best friend, who flew just shy of 300,000 butt-in-seat miles in 2014.  To put that number in perspective, it’s like flying from DC to Boston and back.  Every day.  All year.

He and I discuss his travel frequently.  It’s hard not to, with as much travel as he has.  There are tons of international travel to destinations that would make most travel junkies jealous.  Japan, Mauritius, Auckland, Brazil and more.  He had mentioned he was going to put together a post on the struggles he’s had adjusting to the travel.  Here are those thoughts, unfiltered:

I am a business traveler who does a fairly heavy amount of international travel.  As someone who naturally enjoys travel, I consider myself very fortunate that I happen to be in a line of work that requires me to travel each year to 6 continents. (We have not yet figured out how to profitably sell software to the penguins on Antarctica!)

One of the more interesting aspects of constant international travel that I’ve learned about is the unexpected things that can happen.  In the last two years I have:

– contracted scabies from a hotel bed in Africa

– been bitten by a scorpion that was nested in my hotel bed

– gotten a concussion on an A380 (the largest passenger jet in the world) due to heavy turbulence

– And I currently have an itchy, burning rash on my leg which I’m hoping is just a heat rash from SE Asia’s 90+ degree days which I just returned from.

There is also the long-term wear on your body.  I hit the wall last May after ~17 weeks of travel. I had just returned from Cancun (the BEST place to host a “business conference”!) and my body was done.  I slept for 6 or 7 days, unable to work or do much. In more serious cases, I have had colleagues suffer heart attacks and other critical conditions while on the road. Each person is different – each cause is unique – but it is not uncommon for business travelers to whisper to each other something like, “If Jim keeps this travel schedule up, it’s going to break him.”

But overall, travelling the world on someone else’s dime is a pretty great lifestyle.  I work very hard to make my company a lot of money, and my travel pays for itself hundreds of times over. But waking up and having breakfast in Singapore, lunch in Frankfurt, and dinner in Washington DC all in the same travel day is just awesome.

His is an interesting perspective on something that can seem cool from afar.  The fact that I haven’t posted since Thursday evening is due to my own mini-marathon of 3 cities in 5 days this week and just running out of steam as the week got to an end.  I can’t even imagine how hard it would be if not for the bare bones effort I put into eating healthy and exercise (I’m already behind pace on my New Year’s resolution to work out 150 times in 2015).  When you’re getting up at 4am to make a 6am flight or taking a long redeye, it can be awful tough to bounce back and get in a routine.

The post Business Travel Is All Sunshine And Daisies, International Edition was published first on Pizza In Motion.

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