Note: I’m doing some summer cleaning and found this unpublished post from October of 2009
Last week I ran in the Chicago Marathon (more on that later) and that closes the chapter on racing for 2009. Now I may dabble in a few fun runs but for the most part I’m going to focus on recovery, relaxation, and catching up with house projects before working up my 2010 goals. 2009 was a great year for racing for me for a few reasons. First, I took the triathlon plunge and really liked them; heck, I ended up doing four of them. Now I decided to try the tri because long distance running has left me pretty banged up since since 2007 and my last two stunk! In fact I had decree that NO MARATHON would be run in 2009 (for me only of course, you go ahead). Training for the tri left me feeling fresh and the swimming allowed my upper body to feel strong unlike marathon training which kills the beach bod! Most of the winter was spent in spin class and swimming (although you couldn’t tell by my swim splits this summer). Okay, the second reason 2009 was successful was that I broke the Jake Decree and signed up for Chicago. My run club buddies where all going and I had yet to run Chicago and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to run it with friends. So I wanted to recap 2009 race circuit…what a year. I started the year out of shape and then worked back into it for the tri’s. Then at the end of June I was sick for a solid month with little activity and my races suffered. At the end of July I did a 230 mile mountain bike trip in the San Juan mountains which started my road to recovery. I built up the running base after that and started getting in running shape again. RUNNING RACES
- Chicago Marathon
10/11/09 – 26.2 Mi 3:17:54 7:34
Chicago is a major marathon and I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to experience that with my running club buddies. Running a race with the support of friends is a treasure and the collective Chicago Marathon experience of the group is a major positive. Kelly and I made a long weekend of it and the race went as planned. I was playing it safe and going for a solid PR but not my BQ. My job was to pace Todd to mile 20 one a 3:20 pace and then I would take off from there, Todd ended up taking off on me! My splits were consistent though and I felt good. The Chicago support was beyond amazing, the mass of runners and spectacle of spectators made me realize I love the big races. New York, I’ll be seeing you.
- PACE 5K
Lake Nokomis – 9/26/09 - 5 km 19:25 6:15
Good follow-up to the 5K the week before.
- Bolderdash 5k
Lake Nokomis – 9/19/09
- 5 km 19:19 6:13
PR – burned a little too fast at first but banked enough time to roll it in under 20 which was my goal.
- Midnight Summers Run
8/13/09 - 3 Mi 19:39 6:33
Bummer of a run because they served light beer instead of Surly but I ran a good workout and beat Carrie Tollefson!! (Trust me, I have no illusions.)
- Brian Kraft 5K
Lake Nokomis - 5/25/09 - 5 km 20:17 6:32
Good start but ran out of gas on back side.
- Eau Claire 1/2 Marathon
5/3/09 – 13.1 Mi 1:39:11 7:35
Felt good and that I could hold the pace for a while. Think I could have cranked it up a little bit more but was real happy with the race especially given my running fitness. I was hoping for a 1:42 or so.
- Get in Gear 10K
4/25/09 – 10 km 43:18 6:59
Pretty happy with this 10K. First one in three years I think and for not running much I felt like this was a good time. The second 1/2 was a little faster.
- Human Race 8K
3/22/09 - 8 km 34:34 6:58
First race since last fall and ran it hard. I had a late night with Bill & Terri over for dinner and the legs felt heavy and I couldn’t catch guys like I wanted but I had a good kick at the end.
TRIATHLONS I don’t have good info on my tri times…or any notes from them as well. It was a whirlwind.
- St. Croix Tri – 9/5/09 – Sprint overall place: 64 out of 511 division place: 7 out of 32 time: 1:14:53 swim: 11:34 trn1: 2:44 bike: 31:41 trn2: 1:38 run: 27:18
- Lifetime Tri Olympic - 7/11/09 (sick)
- Rochester Tri – Sprint - 6/28/09 (won clydesdale)
- Buffalo Tri Olympic (First one ever) – 6/7/09
So it is mid-July in 2010 and I haven’t been sleeping well, my mind has been extremely chatty late at night. I have filled that void on other nights through reading or watching season 1 of Rescue Me (which I find generally entertaining and of good quality but not in the class of Mad Men or The Wire but perhaps on level with Weeds and yes, these are the only shows I really watch so I’m far from fully informed). Anyway, tonight I felt that those options were more mind-numbing than I needed as there have been changes brewing in my mind that are far from ephemeral, most are of the professional variety and covering the delta of where I was versus where I wanted to be and that gap was widening through the stagnation and oxidation of the comforts in the present which were fully overtaking the present completely and skewing the entire scene. My wording is intentionally complete and yet completely vague for a reason but the essence is that things had to change and they did and I’m excited.
I’m entertaining a period of greater self-reflection that feels a little indulgent since I’m generally fairly self-aware but hey, I’m going deeper. As a part of the exercise I wanted to reflect on some of goals I have put forth in the past while. Now I’m not the best list taker so these are as my tonights recollection. And I’m going to remove the general goals of continual self-improvement like: get more sleep, be a better listener..blah blah blah.
- Start my MBA – so I’ve been bored and when I’m bored I like to kick start things by signing up for more expensive years of school! This goal has been shelved for sometime in the next 5 years. While I know I’d enjoy the experience I really need to focus on the why’s because just last year I enrolled in a Ph.D program in Computer Science before collecting myself. Besides, I’ve already self-funded one graduate program and afterwards I did not give myself a raise! There will come a time when this is more aligned to the present and that just isn’t now.
- Start my startup – pulling on the bootstraps and going to town on the idea that has been baking in my head for quite a while. I’ve discussed it with folks, sought feedback from would be consumers of the niche endeavor and feel confident but I got caught up in billing time that by the end of the day I did not want to code. This should see traction soon.
- Production Rails work – I’ve read about Rails, Rails 2, a now there is Rails 3 and while I’ve made the local blog engine and used Ruby for some administrative server work I’m missing a production rollout until…drumroll…I finally do it through some running club focused development I’m throwing on Shawn’s design with our run club. So this goal will have been met in a few weeks.
- Improve Networking and Mentoring – The world is a small place and I’ve been working to stay in touch with those I’ve had the opportunity to work with and trying to get to know those I haven’t yet. One of the benefits I’m looking for is to feel involved in the local developer communities and it has been working and I’ll keep on it. Another aspect is mentoring which has been a nice aside from the day-to-day and I do look forward to teaching at some point.
- Contribute to Open Source (kinda) – so I broke the rules a bit on this one and decided to volunteer my time on something I really enjoyed which is runningahead.com and is not open source but it is free so I figure good enough. Now this goal has been met in theory only as I haven’t given Eric the attention I planned on but he’s being patient so this goal will get checked off.
- Improve my running – this has been going well, my effort and dedication to running has grown as has my appreciation of good health as I’ve had plantar fasciitis for 6 months was close to tying the famed shin splints of 06 as the most painful and is only a year away from matching my record of longest injury with my double hernia of 07. Once the plantar heels up I feel like I’ll drop it to another level. I was keyed in for an easy Boston Qualifier at Fargo this year and drew a bad weather day for this clydesdale and overheated.
- Read more consistently – I read all the time and waste little of my day but I have a plethora of magazines and the daily paper along with my technical (print and web) content that my ‘fun’ reading collection has been largely ignored. I really did enjoy reading The Road on the Kindle this year and I read the Dan Brown book candy finally giving up my boycott to see what the fuss was about. Turned out like I thought, easy reading the doesn’t bring much in the end and yet draws you to it…much like when I watched Rambo as a child (and perhaps still).
- Write you fool write – so there is the writing of this variety which I have not taken too very well. I’m been adament about the separation of Jake and computer but lately am having a different take and plan to write more. I’m not sure what about, my first approach was to treat this as business only but really who are we kidding with the separation of concerns these days. Google will find all sides of us and present it with a nice little bow to whoever looks. If I treat this as business only it is not like the 4500 races I’ve ran won’t come up 2nd, 3rd, 4th in the google results. And trust me, I just can’t be that guy who posts code about the latest IoC framework written entirely in Scala for JSON or business advice detailing my knowledge on the devaluation of Apple because of AntennaGate (I’m keeping my iPhone4…you can’t pry it out of my kung fu grip). I will work on writing more but at the end of the day I prefer building things or dreaming of large nest eggs.
BUT – My creative writing has been dormant and my poetry as been decimated. Once upon a time I would attend poetry slams and open mikes…now I wouldn’t perform but I’d think about the day I’d perform and if you are still here you should know that you are reading the blog of 2004 Sonoma library – Healdsburg branch – poetry champion! Those days were wonderful inspiration, being in a new place and drinking wine all the time generates a lot. So! I’m going to write some more and I may even put something on here from time to time to keep it fresh.
My wife turned me on to using LoseIt on the iPhone to track out diets and this NY Times piece writes on that use by others. Personally, I’ve found this latest take at caloric tracking incredibly simple and because of that maintainable. In the past it was easy to tire of logging a meal or snack but LoseIt makes it simple. This process has shown some insights on my diet and shed a few pounds too.
Patient Money – Losing Weight the Smartphone Way, With a Nutritionist in Your Pocket – NYTimes.com.
Everytime I read another post about the simplicity and affordability of moving to Rails I go hmm; this time I’m going HMMMMM!
InfoQ: Architecting TekPub – Moving from ASP.NET MVC to Ruby on Rails.
