I had one of the stranger CMEpalooza-related conversations of my life over the weekend. I was in one of those interminable zig zag lines where you go back and forth…back and forth…back and forth…only to get to what looks like the end of the line but then find that you are merely getting dumped into another zig zag maze. It’s a psychological horror show, and yet we often voluntarily subject ourselves to it over and over again. The amusement park, passport control in the airport, ordering food at the ballpark — I can’t imagine how much time I have wasted in line just this past month!

Anyway, as I was zigging and zagging in one direction on Sunday, a man with his wife, adult daughter, and grandkids was zigging and zagging the other way. After we had passed each other maybe, I dunno, 10 or 11 times, the man stopped me to ask “I keep looking at your shirt and wondering, what is the CMEpalooza STEPtacular Challenge? It looks pretty awesome.”

Now before you think I am some sort of celebrity that gets recognized in public everywhere I go (that would be Derek – he is the Taylor Swift of Chestnut Hill) I should back up for a second and acknowledge that I was wearing my Spring 2025 CMEpalooza STEPtacular Challenge (sponsored by Talem Health) t-shirt. I know I have mentioned this before, but these t-shirts are super comfortable and quite breathable on a hot summer day. If you don’t have one, you should totally enter this Fall’s STEPtacular Challenge and get one. Did I mention that they are free to everyone who enters?

Anyway, I knew I had about 30 seconds to respond to this kind gentleman’s question before we zigged and zagged out of earshot. So I started with Part 1.

CMEpalooza is a biannual online conference that I co-produce. It is geared to people who plan and create continuing education programs for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals.

“So CMEpalooza is for doctors?” he asked, seemingly familiar with the healthcare world (I’m guessing he was a physician, though I don’t know for sure). “It’s a way for them to get CME credits?”

No, not exactly. CMEpalooza is for the people who develop the programs through which doctors and other providers can get credits. People in academic centers, who work for associations, medical education companies, pharma folks – people like that.

I zigged. He zagged. Five minutes later, the conversation continued.

“So what about this STEPtacular Challenge?” he inquired. “What’s that all about?”

It’s this event we hold a week or so before each of our live broadcast days. You just have to send us a screenshot of whatever app you use to count your steps. Any day you reach 10,000 steps or more, you can enter. We give away a few hundred dollars worth of prizes. It’s open to anyone who wants to enter. Win or lose, you get one of these amazingly comfortable t-shirts just for entering.

I zigged. He zagged. Five minutes later, the conversation continued.

“So what I hear you saying is that I could have turned on my step counter the moment I stepped into this $@%#-ing zig zag line and I would have gotten enough steps in to enter? How do you afford all of these prizes?”

(Turns around to show back of the t-shirt)

You see how it says ‘Sponsored by Talem Health?’ They sponsor the STEPtacular Challenge every year and provide the financial support to allow it to happen. We have lots of great sponsors of CMEpalooza — they are one of them.

(Whispering to his daughter, who it seemed was also a healthcare provider) “Maybe we should check out this CMEpalooza thing. Assuming we ever get to the end of this $@%#-ing zig zag line.”

Becoming a sponsor of CMEpalooza doesn’t require jumping through hoops, filling out endless forms, or yes, zig zagging through another interminable line. I mean, there are currently 28 sponsors of CMEpalooza Fall, and they certainly are all too busy to waste time with any of that. No pressure or anything, but if you want to have any chance of being as popular as Derek is in Chestnut Hill, you might want to consider joining them as a CMEpalooza sponsor.

If you want to see what we currently have available for this Fall, you can check out our current Sponsorship prospectus (also available on our Sponsor tab). Our Fall sponsor event is coming up once the leaves start turning, and I am sure that Derek is already working on his haikus for our higher-level sponsors. I promise we’ll treat you right.

Last Wednesday, Radiohead surprise released a new album (it isn’t really a new album, so to speak, but a new live album of old songs, which, as I always say, old Radiohead is better than no Radiohead) and gave me the great idea that I should surprise release a new CMEpalooza blog post to, you know, generate buzz, and guerilla marketing, and increase synergies, and whatnot, though it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to do a suprise CMEpalooza blog post if I told Scott about the surprise CMEpalooza blog post, so I had to figure out a way to write up a surprise CMEpalooza blog post without telling him I was doing that, which is a little bit tricky since I usually send him a heads-up whenever I have a draft of a new post, so he can edit all my typos, crazy punctuation, and run-on sentences, which he is much better at than I am (don’t tell him I said that), but I can’t send him a heads-up of a surprise CMEpalooza blog post because then the surprise would no longer be a surprise and that would ruin most of the fun of it, which is why I decided to write the surprise CMEpalooza blog post as one long run-on sentence, because then the only punctuation I need to worry about is commas and parentheses and I mostly know how to use commas and parentheses (it’s those dastardly semicolons and em dashes that always get me) and also then I don’t need to bother with all those annoying rules of paragraph formation, like only one idea per paragraph, blah, blah, blah, geez, give me a break, I mean, if that Norwegian guy Jon Fosse can write a 700-page novel as one long winding sentence and win the dang Nobel Prize for Literature, than surely I can do the same for one surprise CMEpalooza blog post, though I have to admit that I have discovered one flaw in my plan for a surprise CMEpalooza blog post, which is that I don’t really have any particularly urgent or new news to share that is worthy of a surprise CMEpalooza blog post, making this, uh, all a bit awkward, unless, let me check, yes, yes, we do have a few new updates to the CMEpalooza agenda that I can report, including new information about the 4 PM Afternoon Snack Session (sponsored by Medscape), and additional faculty added for a couple of the other sessions, so please be sure to check out the updated CMEpalooza agenda if you have not done so recently and thank you for reading my surprise CMEpalooza blog post.

When people ask me what I enjoy most about my job, I usually tell that them it’s the daily and varied intellectual challenges I have to overcome. I like to problem solve and come up with creative ways to collect and disseminate information, whether that is through the education I help develop as part of my full-time role (ie, not CMEpalooza) or through what we do with our CMEpalooza blog and twice-annual extravaganzas. I get to work with smart people (yes, even you Derek) who push me to be the best version of myself and not take shortcuts just to “get things done.” Whether I want to or not, I am constantly learning and being forced to engage my brain on a daily basis.

But here is the problem: All of this can be mentally draining. Inevitably, I find myself running out of gas at about the halfway point of every year. I find every excuse to step away from my desk (“It’s nice outside. I should go for a walk to recharge my batteries. I promise to think about work while I’m traipsing around the neighborhood. Yeah, yeah, that’s it.”) and even when I am in my home office, I am not super productive or creative. The quality of my work suffers, which makes me grumpier than usual around the house. I’m just burnt.

Of course, we all know the solution to these issues: Summer vacation!

Every year, I hear stories about people’s international colleagues who are “sooo sooo lucky” that they set their OOO message to “I’ll be gone for the next 4 weeks. I don’t know and I don’t care who you contact in my absence, as long as it’s not me. Byeeeee!”

We all know that isn’t the way things work in the United States. First of all, many of us don’t get a month’s work of vacation days annually, and even if we do, they often have to be spread out throughout the year for our mental well-being. I was watching a rerun of The Office last week, and there was this great quote from Pam that summed things up well: “I get 10 vacation days a year, and I try to hold off taking them for as long as possible. And this year I got to… the third week in January.”

I hear you, Pam. I hear you.

That said, I am one of the multitude of Americans that takes my lengthiest vacation of the year with my family in the summertime. We did 2 weeks in Italy last year, which was frankly too much for me. I was getting extremely antsy to get home on the last few days, so I convinced my wife and son that 10 days would be our family sweet spot moving forward.

There is a ton of research focused on the restorative value of vacations. I won’t bore you with the details, but essentially, study after study has shown that taking a break from the daily grind — be it 3 days or 3 weeks — and going somewhere that isn’t your house can have substantial short-term benefits on work productivity and attentiveness. Some people will opt to sit on the beach for a week. Others will hike and camp in the wilderness. Others will drive a few hours to visit family and just sit around eating and drinking. Personally, I like seeing new cities, learning about their history and culture, and eating well. I learned in my 20s not to try to jam too much into a summer vacation, so our current vacation schedule usually involves one activity per day (ie, historic walking tour, hiking/kayaking/something else active, or something unique to the region) with plenty of downtime surrounding everything. Eventually, everyone figures out what works for them during vacation time — this is what works for us.

As you may have read in Derek’s most recent blog post, we spent our summer vacation in Sweden this year in late July-early August. From a vacation destination, it was a good trip. Not a great trip, but a good trip. The cities were clean, the downtown areas were very walkable, but the weather was extremely variable (cloudless and sunny at 9 am, ominous and rainy at 11 am was a normal day) and we had one tour guide who cancelled on us 15 minutes before we were supposed to meet because he “wasn’t feeling well” (the tour started at 2 pm and you just now are not feeling well? I’m not buying it, Ulf) (note from Derek: uh oh, bad news for Ulf. He’s definitely going to get a sternly worded Yelp review now.).

Regardless of our summer destination, I have a fairly predictable vacation routine from a work perspective. Since I am always the first person awake in our family, I’ll usually log onto my email while the others are sleeping and spend up to an hour addressing anything urgent. Basically, I’m just dealing with small details that don’t require a lot of mental acuity (so yes, no blog posts – sorry). I know that a lot of “experts,” as well as our European colleagues, suggest a total unplug from work, but my approach is what works best for me — I don’t have to worry that anything urgent is being unknowingly overlooked but I’m also not having to fully mentally engage. Plus, my inbox is fairly clean so I don’t have to worry about coming home to a lot of nonsense.

And you know what? By about day 5 of our recent trip, I started to feel intellectually unstuck. I actually jotted down a few ideas for future CMEpalooza blog posts so I’m not dreading the “Uh oh, what should I write about this week?” feeling that hit me earlier in the summer. I actually found myself looking forward to getting back into the rhythms of work.

Studies show that the mental and emotional restorative impact of vacations lasts about 3 weeks. I’ve been home now for 5 days. My wife will be glad to know I won’t be my usual grumpy self for a little bit longer.