Foot Injury

Arrgh!

Dammit, I think I injured my foot by overtraining. I swore that that would never happen to me.

I had what I thought was a good hard training session, not so hard as to cause injury, only 15 km .. after all I've just finished a half-marathon. But in the days after my right foot was a bit sore, but only a little. Just enough for me to think "this must not turn into a real injury"

So I took a full week off, and took an easy 5km run just to check. no problem but the soreness was still there but did not get worse. so after 4 dayes of rest i took another run .. this time the problem disapeared? Only to reapear after the next run. Both runs were 7km.

Possible reason / solution

After giving it some thought I think I've found the reason for my problem, my shoes are worn out. I think they should have been thrown out at least 1-2 month ago. The reason I haven't bought new ones, is that I wanted to get a "running test" done by a physiotherapist first.

Concerning my marathon plans .. I still think its reachable but more of the training must come from cycling.

Commitment

New goal.

I've just bought ticket for H.C. Andersen Marathon 19. September 2010

Training

So now the training starts. My plan is to raise the weekly distance by 8-9% for 3 weeks and then cut back 15% on the 4th resting week and then repeat.

For now I will run 3 times a week.

• Tempo run - ie 5km @ 10km pace
• Intervals - ie 4x800m @ 3:30 pace
• Easy long run - ie 15km @ 5:14 pace

The Target

So what is the target? 3:45 is the time I aim for. This is just to have a goal. I know that everyone recommends that the goal for the first marathon should be to complete. I just can't commit so much training without something a bit more tangible .. but I will be statisfied with anythin less than 4 hours.

Disable Termination of ec2 instances

At my company we use Amazones ec2 clouds to serve our website and our applications.

When ever i need to create a server for some test, it's allways a bit scary when i have to terminate it. I always makes sure at least twice that its the correct server that i terminate ;)

But now theres a better way .. just disable termination on the servers that must be kept alive. (only works on EBS instances).

ec2-modify-instance-attribute --disable-api-termination true INSTANCEID

For more info and other tips, visit alestic.com

Crossing the Bridge

New Personal Record!

1:47:51 see here ( official time )

At the race there are paceholders for every 15 minues, so I planned to start with the ballon which said 1:45 as that was my goal. But since we (my brorther-in-law Michael) arrived 20 min before the start, I had some trouble getting near .. the only place I could get room was outside og the fence besides 1:30. And there I stood with about 20 other runners hoping to get in fast when the race started.

In addition to this my watch was making me nervous as it couldn't find the satelittes with all the buildings nearby .. luckly it was ready with 2 minutes to the start.

The Race

When the race started I got into the stream of people and started jogging .. when I had crossed the starting line and found my running rythm I was right next to the 1:45 ballon from the paceholders .. so far so go :)

The first 5 - 10km I was flying* .. but holding the pace at 5:00 was easy as the crowd had that speed. At 14km I started feel the burden of my glucose reservoirs beginning to be empty and my tempo fell to 5:10-5:30 ( I know .. not enough long running session while training ).

Hitting the 20km mark I decided to use my last power to hold to the pace I should and then "look" for the right moment to burn all my final resources .. that moment came when I could see the finish line. I ran the last 250m with all I had left (avg 4:31, best 3:48).

Am I Satisfied?

So .. am I happy with my result? It's almost 3 minuttes from my goal. No because I did NOT reach my goal, but Yes considering my preprations and it was a personal record after all ;)

As a side note my brother-in-law was to finish in 1:50-1:55 .. so I waited at the end of the finish area for him. It was a windy and rather cold day .. but he been there 10-15 minutes .. after 25 minutes of "he'll be here in a minute" .. I was wet and freezing from the cold wind. I finally gave in af went to get my dry clothes on. He had had an injury at 4km but had run/walked the rest of the way, completing in 2:24 .. tough but stupid ;) .. and not I didn't catch any cold.

* At the short stop at 6km I was taking a leak ;)

Real Path of a Symbolic Link

I needed to figure out the real path of a symbolic link to a file for a script so that i could set the parent dir of the file as home.

The file (ec2-version) was linked into /usr/local/bin but I needed the path to ec2-tools home.

# filename : realpath

# which file is found in the exec path
binpath=$(which $1) 
# ls -l gives 
# lrwxr-xr-x  1 briandemant  wheel  49 Mar  5 11:32                         \ 
#              /usr/local/bin/ec2-version -> ../ec2-api-tools/bin/ec2-version 
# I only need the last after '-> '
realfile=$(ls -l $binpath | egrep -o "[^> ]+$") 

# as the link can be relative we need to be in the link dir
cd $(dirname $binpath)

# and from there go to the dir of the realfile
cd $(dirname $realfile) 

# now we can return the fullpath to the real file
echo $(pwd)/$1

The last Test Before the Trial

Next saturday is the day for the half-marathon which I (should) have trained for. And yesterday was the last day I will run before the real trial so i decided to test my shape. .. read more