I started running a couple years ago, and after surviving three half marathons, I’m finally taking on the big challenge. I have signed up to run the Quad City Marathon in September. 26.2 miles.
I have friends who are endurance athletes (50 mile runs, Iron Man, etc) so I’m surrounded by people who have run this distance a number of times, which is a benefit for me. I have taken their advice and I’m motivated by the insane level of endurance that they can accomplish.
After talking to them and reading as much as I could, I decided to following the Novice marathon training plan by Hal Higdon. It’s one of the most popular training plans out there, and he’s one of the "experts" on the subject. If it’s worked for so many before, it can work for me!
I’ve taken the Novice I training plan and put it up as My Marathon Training Plan on Google Spreadsheets. I will update it as I go for the next 18 weeks. For the first week, I was thinking of following the Novice II plan, so I did a bit more. Then I decided to just follow the Novice I plan as-is, so I adjusted.
Hal Higdon talks about using a walking strategy to complete a first marathon. Although I hesitate to plan to walk during a "run", I have decided to take his advice and walk through each aid station. I did some simple analysis of a Marathon Walk Strategy and was surprised to see that adding in walking doesn’t really affect the final time for the pace I plan to try for, so it’s not like it’s going to add a half hour to my finish time or something. It seems to make sense, so that’s my strategy.
So hopefully 17 weeks from now I will be crossing the finish line, a proud first-time marathoner. Wish me luck!
Two new kind of search engines debuted recently, in the increasingly-crowded space of companies trying to search, organize, and present relevant information from the mess of bits on the interwebs.
WolframAlpha is a "computational knowledge engine" rather than a general search engine. It doesn’t just aggregate url’s and match keywords. Instead, it seeks to find relevant answers to real questions using its internal collection of equations, facts, comparisons, and figures. If you put in "weather NYC" it doesn’t just find pages that have those words and show them to you, hoping those pages contain what you are looking for. It understands that you are looking for weather information about New York, and offers you a view of the actual data rather than pages that contain it.
Where Google might be equivalent to asking a librarian "which books contain information about weather, specifically about New York?", WolframAlpha is more like asking a weatherman from New York what the weather is like there. Big difference.
Topsy.com is a search engine trying to capitalize on the popularity of Twitter. Instead of scouring the web for all web pages it can find and indexing the words on each page, it "listens" to all tweets on Twitter and pulls out the keywords and url’s posted with them. It associates the words with the url and aggregates the results.
Searching Topsy for "weather nyc" gives you back nothing useful. But that’s because it’s not meant for that. Instead, Topsy is a view into pop culture and the stream of public consciousness. Searching Topsy for "obama" won’t give you a summary of the President’s actions or all the important news of the day. It will give you a view into what url’s people think are interesting and related to Obama right now. It will also show you who is mentioning the search terms, how many there are, etc. This is a great way to monitor a brand, a current event or issue, or a technology. These things will be tweeted about often, and the way Topsy aggregates the information and presents it can be very interesting.
I finally updated my jQuery Cheat Sheet to match jQuery 1.3.2. I hope people find it useful!
