After nearly 20 years working at Anheuser-Busch, MIKE SUNDET last month left the company to become Senior VP and Dir of Sports & Entertainment for Momentum Worldwide. Despite the change in employers, Sundet’s locale remained the same as he will be working out of Momentum’s St. Louis office. Sundet said, “It’s a virtual world now, and it doesn’t really matter where you sit. We’ll travel to wherever we need to be for meetings.” He said of the transition, “It’s a little like drinking out of a firehose. Trying to get up to speed and learn multiple businesses simultaneously has been challenging and overwhelming at times, but there are so many good people here teaching me. It’s going pretty well.”
SAMPLE SIZE: Friday night I am going to dinner with some friends to a place called The Tavern Kitchen & Bar. It is one of my favorite restaurants in St. Louis. The chef there, JUSTIN, is just amazing. He does tasting boards that give you four different entrees on a small plate so you can try everything, and the wine list there is phenomenal. Nightlife activity for me consists of with kids or without kids. There is a little dive bar near my house called Larry’s Tavern. It is one of those hole-in-the-wall tin shacks with a gravel parking lot where everybody knows your name when you walk in.
CULINARY CHOPS: Saturday night, I will be cooking at home. It’s kind of my go-to weekend relaxation time. I have a new tool in sous vide, which is cooking through water submersion. I got it a month ago, so it’s pretty new to me. I’ve done pork tenderloin and last weekend we tried a pot roast. We are having some people over to the house and drinking a little bit of wine. I don’t know what I’m cooking just yet -- probably need to figure that out -- but I think I’m going to try some type of fish. Just in terms of restaurants -- particularly when I’m traveling -- I live by Yelp. I travel to so many places that I like to try new things. When I’m in a new city, I want to experience as many new dinner places as I can, something that I haven’t seen before. I tend to do pretty good staying off of the desserts and junk food, but my guilty weekend pleasure is ice cream. I take my kids out for ice cream on weekends, and I have no plans to stop anytime soon.
TRAILBLAZER: I am so used to getting up early, if I make it past 7:00am on weekends I feel like I’ve overslept. I try to run on mornings, and sometimes I need a little coffee or caffeine -- a little go juice to get me going. I like to hit the The Shack for breakfast on weekends, or I’ll just do Starbucks on the way to getting in a workout. I have done triathlons in the past, so I’m big into the running and the biking. My daughter is an avid bike rider. She likes to ride her bike while I go for a run. She’ll ride ahead of me and try to make me run faster to chase her. There are some good trails near my house. I like to run through one of our state parks to clear the cobwebs and forget about everything for a little while. It gives me an opportunity to come back home re-energized and take on the weekend. My workouts are a must for my mental health. I’d rather get up early and lose sleep than miss my workout.
THE GAMES PEOPLE PLAY: When I’m not working on weekends, there is a lot of kid time. I have a 16-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter, and they are both involved in a number of activities. My son plays baseball, and this weekend we will be doing batting practice. My daughter plays soccer and volleyball and she has games on both Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday, it will be BP in the morning and soccer and volleyball games in the afternoon.
SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS: I will probably be watching some of the hockey playoffs this weekend. My son is a Bruins fan, but they missed out on the playoffs this year. So at this point, I’m all in on the Blues. They have had a great season, and hopefully it continues through the playoffs. Both of my kids are Patriots fans and I took them to Arizona for the Super Bowl. It was just an unbelievable experience to be at something that big and crazy, and to have their team win it was just off the charts. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime trips that I will never forget.
THE AVIATOR: We have agency meetings next week, so I will be traveling to Miami on Sunday. I’ll probably run after breakfast, spend a little bit of the morning with the kids, and then it’s off to the airport. When I’m flying for work, I usually have the headphones on and am checking e-mail. In an office setting with phone calls and people stopping by and meetings, it is hard to devote my time. I really find that planes are a great time to pull out the computer and read through e-mails. I’m a Google fanatic. Any time I’m in discussions with my kids or I have friends over and someone doesn’t know an answer, I immediately have to pull out my phone and start searching.
