Seattle Rock N Roll Marathon 2010 Race Report

This was the second annual Seattle Rock N Roll Marathon and my second attempt at it. This is a large race (25,000 entrants with about 6000 doing the marathon) and will probably be my last RnR and my last large marathon for quite awhile.

I had a bit of redemption given my performance in the 2009 race. I had trained very well for this run and felt quite ready with my base, tempo training, etc. Of course the last couple of weeks of taper always give you a bit of time to doubt your abilities. But I felt really good going in that I would be able to hit my goal of a sub 4:00 and possibly hit a 3:50 marathon.

One thing about marathon training is there are A LOT of plans on how to train. There is a A LOT of advice on how to taper. There just isn't that much about how to actually run a marathon on race day. With that in mind I sought out this advice during the taper week and found some good stuff.

Here is what I found.

Grand Ridge Solstice Trail Run - Race Report

After reading Anton Krupicka's blog yesterday I decided to screw my taper plan and go for a trail run (of course as a couple of my friends and I have been discussing what use is a taper when you're running a marathon one weekend (Seattle Rock 'N' Roll) and a 50k (Grey Rock Trail Run) two weekends after that?). The trail I really like is at Grand Ridge Park which I ran a month ago for the first time. It's very lightly traveled and I learned last night that there is an effort to get more people out to the park. The WTA (WA Trails Assn) has also added a couple of more trails and has plans to add more in the future. It's right in the foothills of the Cascades so you get a bit of elevation and plenty of up and down. This is also the local park where I'm planning a 50k in August (Grand Ridge 50K) so I figure get as many miles in running those trails as possible.

50 Back & 2 Forward

One year ago I was two weeks away from running my first marathon - the inaugural Seattle Rock 'N' Roll (race report). Two weeks from now I will compete in my third marathon - the 2nd annual Seattle Rock 'N' Roll. As I begin my taper I thought it important to take a look back and take stock of where I am.

Training Time
This time last year I had put in a measly 37 hours and 21 minutes of running training. I have put in 66:19 this year.

This time last year I had put in 41:08 in total training. This year - 86:35.

Note that this year I broke my toe and was thus out for six weeks. I did, however, add cycling into my cross-training during this time and have also added yoga into my routine this year.

Injury
At this time last year I had developed ITBS due to overuse and a rapid increase in mileage run. This year, I have had some minor issues with my ITB but have adopted the roller and kept it looser. I have also added yoga, trail running, and done specific IT Band workouts to strengthen my lateral leg muscles.

Green River Marathon - Race Report

The Green River Marathon is a free marathon put on each year (this was the 14th annual) and is what I would describe as a community-driven event. I had not run a race like this in awhile and frankly I was looking forward to it. I have three "big" marathons on the books this year - Seattle Rock N Roll, Portland, and Seattle and after this year I plan on seriously limiting myself to trail runs and smaller community runs.

Luck led me to the start line this year. I found this race somehow online last year and thought it would be good training for the Seattle Rock N Roll. Unfortunately a bout of ITBS during my training led me to bail on the Green River Marathon even as a training run. I put the run on my calendar this year but it was soon trumped by the Blanchard 50k as I wanted to finally get my first ultra trail run under my belt. Last Monday (T-6 days) the race organizers canceled the Blanchard run due to lack of permits so I emailed the race directors and secured a spot for the race on Tuesday.

An Open Letter to HostingRails

Dear HostingRails.com,

I am unsure who to contact as I have tried on numerous occasions today to contact you by phone, email and through your support system. Given the lack of response from your team I am understandably disappointed.

Let me say this first: I have had two websites that have been offline all day, during business hours. From 9am PDT to 8pm PDT. Actually, only one site is up and running at this time.

One of these sites is a client site, the other is a personal site.

Both of these issues are related to a server upgrade you had planned on your servers.

I received emails from you informing me of a server upgrade over a period of "24 to 72" hours and that my static IP address would be changed. This type of upgrade is pretty standard save for (1) the fact that it happened during business hours, (2) the fact that it happened during the week, (3) the fact that you provided no time when it would happen, and (4) the fact that you gave a 48 hour window over which the upgrade would happen.

However, I was assured that "While we do not anticipate any issues related to the upgrade, we are available to answer any questions that you may have once the move has been completed." This is a quote from the email you sent me.

As soon as I found out that my sites were down I immediately filed tickets through your new ticket system (which now requires me to login to my account v. just filing a ticket from the website).

I called at 10:11am to your new phone support system. I actually talked to someone who was friendly but suggested I file tickets through the support system. I had already opened one for one of my sites; he suggest I open a new one for the other site and he would get this into the queue with "priority."

I also updated my nameservers with the new information as I was instructed to do.

I checked the site during the day with little progress on the tickets.

I called back at 4pm PDT to check on the status of my tickets. There had been no progress. In one of my meetings during the afternoon I worked myself on trying to get the site up and running and updated the tickets as I uncovered more information.

Not only was the support rep unhelpful on this call he was entirely uncaring about my situation. I explained that I had a client website that had been down all day - no sympathy at all. No information he gave me that suggested he knew anything about the tickets in process - only that "one of the engineers is looking into the issue." Given that you had major hardware upgrades happening today your support staff fielding calls didn't seem to know anything about it.

Oh, I also attempted to contact you on twitter as well, no reply. It was interesting to see a litany of replies to you from very unsatisfied customers.

Sorry, time for a little tech talk. I do this to show that your migration was not well planned and so that I may document the steps I had to go through to get my application working.

While my tickets were "being looked at" I was able to SSH into my server and get my Rails application up and running. One of the features of your upgrade was to allow your hosting clients the ability to choose a specific version of Ruby with which to run their applications. I was previously on a Ruby 1.8.7 server. Naturally when I logged in my server was running 1.8.6. I got this all working according to the tutorial on your site (your engineers BTW had completely hacked a solution that did not work b/c they any existing mongrel process would never be stopped) but was shocked that my migration had not preserved the version of ruby I had previously been running.

This of course was not enough. Once my application was running I discovered that my database, while in existence, was empty. No data, no tables. Nada. When I logged into cPanel I was unable to see my database or any database user. I was thus stuck again.

I finally got an email reply from one of your "engineers" that told me they'd been having permissions issues and that "reassigning users to the database" should solve the problem. Clearly, they had not understood my ticket update - I could not see my database. I had attached an image just in case a visual would help.

Ultimately I solved this problem myself by restoring my development database into the production database. Fortunately this is a new website with very little in the way of dynamic content at this point and so I was able to reasonably restore the system. I figured based on the email response I had just received it would be several more hours before I was able to have my backed up database restored.

The punchline of course is that at 1:16 pm PDT I was notified that my server upgrade and migration had been completed.

During the day, because I had plenty of time to just twiddle my thumbs waiting on your support team, I did a little research and found out that you have recently been purchased by Jumpline. I don't know anything about Jumpline but if today's events are a result of your management then I am duly unimpressed.

Let me summarize this here for you:

1. I have been a loyal customer to you for over two years. I have recommended many people to you for solid and inexpensive Ruby on Rails hosting.
2. You used to have competent engineers that would resolve issues quickly and through email, not some arcane and unhelpful ticketing system.
3. You used to have engineers that would take the initiative to resolve issues. Now you have engineers that throw support tickets back at clients that now have to resolve issues themselves.
4. You used to resolve issues in a timely manner. Now apparently 12+ hours of downtime is perfectly acceptable.

I doubt there is anything you can do to maintain my business. I am actively shopping for new hosting providers. While I hope to find an organization that can exceed my expectations as a customer I most certainly can find one that offers far superior service than you.

Regards,

Jeff

The Dog Days of Spring

We're 10 days into spring and already I'm starting to see more of my online running posse hit the doldrums, weather through injury, mentally, or like me, through sickness. The training in starting to pile up and it's leaving its toll.

I was knocked out by some kind of flu for three solid days.

Nothing like sitting around grousing when you're unable to run. I remember well - I was a miserable sot two days after I broke my toe in January.

Determined not to stew in my funk I at least decided to get out of the house today and do some work at Starbucks. That felt good - it was a beautiful day and lots of people were out and about.

Felt good enough in fact that I came home, threw on the running gear and went for a run. I chose a route where I could circle back early if I felt like it.

But I didn't. So I pressed on and got in a good five miles.

Welcome Spring - the season of rejuvenation!

The lemonade from the lemons is while I may have missed a couple of days training I was able to rework my training plan to turn this week into a rest / recovery week. I'll throw down a couple of easy runs over the next few days and kick it back into gear next week.

And that's reason #73 I love running - nothing like a good run to kick your tude back into gear!

Annie Leonard and the Story of Stuff

Seattle is fortunate to have a program called Town Hall which regularly invites renowened guests for lectures - economist Paul Krugman, Moby, etc.

Annie Leonard was at Town Hall on March 24 to discuss her new book named after the famous web video The Story of Stuff.

If you have never seen The Story of Stuff it is an articulate and digestible movie about ... stuff. Material. What we use and consume. How it affects us. What our impact is on the world around us and what this really means to us.

Everyone should watch the video.

I regularly talk about running. But I'm not just a runner and need to speak about things that inspire me whether it's from running or not. And to be frank Annie Leonard is truly inspiring. And her message needs to be heard.

To be honest there is no way I can summarize or discuss this topic with the passion, veracity, or intelligence in the way that Ms. Leonard does. But this problem of what we consume, how much, and how much is left is of great concern to me.

Three facts stood out at me last night in her talk:

• Overall humans consumes 1.5 planets worth of resources a year.
• The United States has 5% of the world's population yet consumes 35% of the earth's resources.
• If the top 3,000 corporations externalize about $2.2 trillion of their costs a year which is roughly 1/3 of their profits.

OK, the last one requires a bit of explanation but it basically has to do with the costs that corporations push out to us consumers.

Alright, that's heavy stuff. The best part is that the message is not demoralizing. If anything Ms. Leonard is hopeful that we can solve the problems that we've created for ourselves.

How? The small stuff is good. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. As runners one of the biggest impacts we can make would be not to drink bottled water.

But her argument is we need to flex the "civic" muscle in our brain versus our "consumer" muscle. Join organizations that are doing something about this - invariably these groups need help.

As for me I need to figure out how to become involved. I'm tired of sitting on the sidelines and need to do my part. Sacrificing is difficult but as a runner I know about sacrifice and dedication in pursuit of my goals. I'm passionate about food so it may be something in that area or maybe something to do with toxics in our consumer products. The good news is there is no shortage of problems we need to tackle.

Who's with me?