04:42:43: nice round numbers that correspond to what a race pace calculator thinks I’d complete a marathon in, assuming I continued on the 10:47 pace I ran this morning for the 16 mile run.  That 10:47 pace, though, includes various stints of walks up nasty hills on the Strider’s training course.  I’m a lousy hill runner.  Today was better than many: I did at least make it up some PART of the hills at the end before walking, but I still haven’t managed to break those hills before they break me.  And it’s not as if I somehow have the gusto to speedwalk those hills: when I’m slowed to a walk, it’s more in the 16 or 17 minute per mile pace. 

 All of that to say, I’m getting more and more excited about the Marine Corps Marathon at the end of October.  If I can run what would be a 4:42:43 on THEIR course, my expectation is that I’ll do better on the Marine Corps course.  And even if I don’t, I’ve still got 18 minutes leeway to make my goal of running a sub 5 hour marathon for my first time out. 

I got my latest issue of ‘Runners World’ today.  In the articles there, they describe folks whose first marathon experience was in the 3 1/2 hour range.  Hah!  I’ll likely never be there…  But sub-5 looks promising, and I’m already dreaming of what marathon I should enter in the spring.  It’s very empowering to think that by 10am, you could’ve already run 20 miles.  And to compare your commutes to the grocery store or to work to the lenght of the LSD (long slow distance) run for the week.  Just as a cross-comparison to today’s training run, my commute to work is something like 16 miles. 

On Sunday, I had an amazing day.  (Monday wasn’t nearly so amazing, but I’ll save that rant for a separate post.)  On Sunday, my daughter scored an amazing number of goals in our soccer game AND I got to ride a motorcycle.  At one point she turned to me and said ‘that’s goal number five, Mommy!’.  The mommy side of me cheered.  The coach side of me figured I’d better get her off the field fairly quickly to try to keep things even across both our team and the other team.  It’s under-six soccer, no goalie, no keeping score, everybody gets equal playing time.  But when one kid keeps scoring, folks tend to notice and grumble a bit.  Hey, can I help it if she’s got legs like a gazelle?

Anyway, back to the motorcycle thing.  It’s been a long-time dream of mine to drive and own a motorcycle.  This Sunday was just a taste, riding on the back of a friend’s bike.  But now I’ve got the fever bad.  I keep looking in the want ads at used bikes, and then going to look up what features the various bikes have.  I’m no motorcycle expert.  One of the guys at work tells me I should look for a bike with ABS.  (Hey, I’d like abs, too, though I was thinking more of the six-pack variety.)  Others suggest getting a new bike.  Others suggest getting a Rebel.  (Did I mention that I get to whet my appetite based on two of the guys in my office pulling up on motorcycles occasionally?) 

 So now I’m dreaming of ways to finance my toy without impacting our budget or feeling like I’m depriving my kids’ college educations.  If you know any great software developers with security clearances, I’m accepting resumes.  One or two referral bonuses would do quite nicely to finance the dream. 

Hitting the iTunes store with a gift card I bought from Best Buy.  Downloaded a few songs, mostly of the ‘keep me running’ variety for the long marathon training sessions.  (Hey, Saturday’s run is 20 miles: expecting to go through a few songs there.)  In the ‘Just for You’ section, iTunes now recommends ‘Greatest Hits’, by Pat Benatar.  Ouch.

I had the opportunity to soapbox recently on the use of cron jobs versus Quartz jobs to handle a task which was to be run on a regular interval.  The task is an application maintenance task.  Periodically, we need to clean out “old” data, so that the system isn’t bogged down by data which is no longer useful. 

My arguments for Quartz were thus: 1) running the regular job within Quartz means that we’ve encapsulated the behavior that the application needs within the bounds of the application itself; 2) that encapsulation also means that we can easily maintain the configuration (how often, when the thing is getting kicked off) within our source code repository; 3) we can easily utilize the same logs, alerts, events, or other infrastructure within the application within our job, and can inject those items using IOC; and 4) Quartz has support for clustering so that multiple machines could handle the load and/or we can have built in fail-over, such that the job doesn’t stop triggering just because one key machine did.  Honestly, my key happy factors are numbers 1 and 2.  I like owning what my app does, and not needing to worry about asking an administrator to look at the cron tables.

Just feeling like a geek post today. 

The marathon training is progressing.  Today’s 18 mile run was doable, though it has left me a bit sore.  It’s the first run that I’ve gotten through, though, where I looked at my GPS watch after the run and was bummed that we didn’t go quite far enough.  Back-story: usually when the Striders say we’re doing N, we’re really doing N + at least 1/2 a mile.  The first day we ran, we ran a ten mile run.  On the way back up the hills that lead back to the starting point, I watched the mileage markers put on the road very carefully: 2 miles.  1 mile.  0 miles?!!!   (Note that I was not yet back to the starting point.)  Turns out that 0 mile marker is about a 1/2 mile into the run.  So when we run 10 miles, we really run 10 plus the .5 on the way out, plus the .5 on the way back. 

 In today’s run, we hit some hard hills.  I hate hills.  In fact, I’ve often decided to walk a good part of a hill up, on the theory that the Marine Corp is flat (mostly) and I still have to make it those last miles back to the start, so ’tis wiser to walk.  But even walking up steep or long hills takes it out of you.  At the top of a particularly steep hill, my watch marked me at 13 and change.  The next mile marker I hit listed us as 6 miles out, putting the total distance at at least 19.5 (remember that extra .5 to get to 0).   I wasn’t liking life right about then.  I was on roads that were new to me, running my longest run ever, and it had suddenly gotten longer.  As we got farther along the course, though, it became clear that that 6 mile marker was wrong.  The first indicator was that, after running a mile, the mile marker went to 7, instead of 5.  The second was when we looped back around on the course to familiar terrain, and got there much more quickly than should have happened given a 6 mile marker. 

When I finally got back to my car and pressed “Stop” on the Garmin, my watch read 17.67 miles.  First time I’ve been bummed that we didn’t go farther.  Jason asked why I didn’t just go out and run till I hit 18 on the watch.  In my 17.67(!) mile tired leg and brain state, it frankly never even occurred to me. 

So, stats for the day: 3 hours 14 minutes 31 seconds to run 17.67 miles, with an average pace of 11.01/m.  That’s slower than my norm, but includes walking up those lousy hills.  My watch gave me some other interesting stats: since I’ve had my watch, I’ve logged 125.9 miles, some 25+ hours, and 15285 calories.  I’ve done other running without the watch on the gym or home treadmill, so count all those numbers as the low end.  Think I’ll have to treat myself somehow when I hit 250 miles.  That should happen easily sometime in early October.