The weather was I could say perfect for running. I also started in the green, second wave of runners (1h30m-1h45min). Combination of those two factors made it a nice task to control the race and keep my target pace of 4m55s/km, here and there saving couple of seconds per kilometer. As people around me were as fast or faster than me there was no problem with overtaking in the crowd, water was served in bottles (!) so the waste of time was negligible.

It is one of those races I will try doing every year, really enjoyable in Hyde Park were I do my longer training runs anyway, feels like the home race. Plus I am really starting to like half marathon distance.

Unfortunately I am carrying a knee injury now I am not sure if I can recover before the Frankfurt Marathon on Sunday next week. Chances are 50/50, I couldn’t be able do it today for sure.

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My split times:

5 km - 00:27:22
10 km - 00:54:27
15 km - 01:20:42
20 km - 01:46:26
half - 01:52:07
25 km - 02:12:59
30 km - 02:40:23
35 km - 03:07:50
40 km - 03:36:35

place (M/W)     9333
place (ag)      1292
place (total)   10113
time total (brutto)     04:00:12
time total (netto)      03:48:02

Apropos my race strategy I intended to keep 5m10s/km for first 32 km then allow a fade of 35s. I’ve struggled to keep the target pace. First of all as I already mentioned it was very hot and having trained in London I am not used to that, much prefer to run in 10C-20C and even during a rain. Second: it was very, very packed, I overtook almost 1000 people during the run which costs time (next time I will try to start from earlier pen, this time it was F). Additionally drinks are served in plastic cups without a lid, almost impossible to drink and run so the time spent at water stations easily doubles. As result I was always below the 5m10s/km and had to make much bigger effort to keep the on-target pace by not allowing myself that sweet 35sec fade in last stages. I did slow down but less than planned and less than I would like to. At the end I got to the finish line 58sec faster than planned. It cost me a lot though.

Tomorrow I participating in the Royal Parks Half Marathon in London. I will try to take it easy and treat it as a training run as in 2 weeks I am flying to Frankfurt where with my friend we will try to hack the marathon PB again.

Other running related awesome news is that I got a place in the London Marathon 2010 through my 4th ballot. Still can’t believe it!

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There is a ground rule that says that the more miles one does before a marathon the better finish time will be. Second ground rule says: don’t injure yourself! To be able to combine those conflicting rules we need to run often so the cumulative distance is adding up but still maintaining a reasonably low risk of injury. It is going to be my second marathon so I tried to leverage experience from the preparation for the first one. I knew what I could improve. In the first one my training was based only on the Long Weekend Runs and supplemented by non strictly running activities: squash, football etc. I think my total running mileage for entire training was something around 200km done during 12 weeks. It’s is really low and looking back I don’t know how I managed to finish under 4h mark. Learning from that I decided to introduce more often runs and settled on 5 times a week plus added 6 weeks to the duration of the training to enable building distance slowly and gradually. The overall structure of the training is similar to many others: there are 3 types of runs: short, medium and long and the distance is gradually growing until the long run gets to 32km (20 miles) around 4 weeks before marathon. With 5 runs I stuck to: 2 short, 2 medium, 1 long and decided to do two runs with the maximum distance 32km (4 and 6 weeks before the race). Not being able to quit all my social/sport activities I added on top of that 5-a-side football and squash, once a week each. I think it supplements the speed training which I didn’t want to introduce this time round yet. Every couple of weeks of increased work load there is a rest week with decreased distance that gives us the recovery time.

You can find details of the marathon training plan outlined in the table below. I prefer a countdown numbering so the training starts with week 18 and finishes with week 1:

As you can see I haven’t followed the plan entirely due to different reasons. For instance I missed completely week 17 due to my injury, another due to travel and holidays. Regardless of that I am very happy with my preparation so far. As long as it’s a cold not flue which prevented me from going for a run this week. Some overall stats to date:

Count: 60 activities

Distance: 607.59 km

Time: 55:48:37 h:m:s

Average speed: 10.9 km/h

Average heart rate: 149 bpm

Calories: 48,591 C

There will be a follow up post about how to keep in shape when doing multiple marathons as in next 5 weeks I’m planning to run:

1. Berlin Marathon - 20th of September 2009

2. Royal Parks Half Marathon in London  - 11th of October 2009

3. Frankfurt Marathon - 25th of October 2009

As you can see I will need a bit of luck to get through all of that without an injury. Keep your fingers crossed.

Ah, I almost forgot. Predicted time for Berlin: 3h49min.

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Not at all. Before leaving month ago for the summer holidays to amazing Hel Peninsula in northern Poland I spent some time unsuccessfully trying to find some information about routes and paths for runners in this part of the world. I have to admit I haven’t invested much effort in this as it’s so easy to get used to instantaneous access to high quality data. I thought I will try helping to fill this gap in the web landscape. Month ago, at that time I was roughly in the middle of my 16 + 2 weeks training program for the Berlin Marathon and I needed a route of 23 km for the longest run the week I was in Jastarnia in Hel. The Hel Peninsula is the longest polish peninsula and is about 35 km long from Wladyslawowo at the base of the penisula to the Hel City at the tip of it. Clearly plenty of space for a pleasant run.

Biking route

I was nicely surprised to find a well maintained biking path which stretches along the entire peninsula. Between Wladyslawowo and Jastarnia where the the land is as narrow as couple of hundred meters the path wanders very close to the water line from the southern Bay of Puck side or as locals say “Small Sea” side. It offers great views on open sea with hundreds of windsurfers and kite-surfers.

The next part of the route from Jastarnia to Hel leads through very beautiful pine forest. The surface of the path changes couple of times and the path itself behave more like a snake trying to get to a juicy bite. The path is used by bikers but it is safe as they rarely go fast and there is not many of them.

Path through a forest on the dunes

If you prefer to run in a shade then there is a path from Kuznica to Jastarnia leading through the forest covering dunes next to the beach from the “Big Sea” side. At first it is only a path but it changes slowly in a wider ground road when approaching Jastarnia. I recommend making a short stop 3 km before Jastarnia to visit fortifications from The Second World War.

The beach

If you see yourself training like this guy with a strange accent then Hel is also for you. The beach from the Baltic Sea side is as long as peninsula itself. I tried it couple of times when a tiny forest path started to gradually disappear in front of me and the only way to move forward was to use the beach. It is not a place for a gentle jog, trust me. But so much fun! The beaches in the Hel are very popular during the summer so if you want to do the beach run make sure it happens in the morning well before 9am or in the evening after 7pm.

Conclusions

In general, if it happens that you spend your holidays there but you need to carry on with your training or just want to do something else then frying yourself on the beach, windsurfing or biking then it is not a problem with finding interesting places for a run there. Also, remember to greet other runners that you meet on the road as it seem to be a common behaviour in Poland.

I recorded some GPS data from my runs there.

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I’ve been profiling recently a legacy J2EE system in an attempt to improve its performance as the system is expected to get much bigger hit in near future. Turned out that only severe architectural changes and essentially rewriting core components would dramatically improve throughput of the system. The underlying issue was the long standing enemy: distributed transactions. This experience led me to thinking more about high performance systems and principles to follow.

Executing a distributed, long transaction and blocking until everything is committed will always be a bottleneck, so we need to make sure to avoid mistakes from the past as we can see everywhere increased business demand for greater scalability. Therefore we can forget about traditional model of the two phase commit. However, in most cases, we can’t trade the reliability and consistency of the system for its performance. So, what are our options? I think the keywords would be:

• loosely coupled
• locally transactional
• operating on local data
• taking advantage of multi-core/machine power

Which leads to:

• data grids
• concurrent programming languages (Erlang, Scala, Clojure, …)
• actor model

To achieve high throughput system that scales but remains consistent and reliable we have to change couple of things. Instead of distributed transactions consider using smaller, independent stages (workflow) that can fail or succeed independently. No need for transaction coordination. Operations by mean of partitioning would be executed where the data regarding the operation exists. The partitioning which is given in data grid solutions like Coherence can be a bit tricky with solutions which don’t provide this feature (Terracotta, at least the version 2.7.3).

Personally for me database is dead.  Personally I would go for Scala.

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Interesting task I have to say. I think I will approach this by addressing both project management and engineering requirements by setting up an iterative process based on bits and pieces from Scrum and XP. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone involved in the past in Web21C Experiment. The Scrum process will kick off with pretty standard set of features hence I will not bother you with details.

What I want to achieve in field of team organisation is to:

• grow a successful team that delivers business value (doh!) as soon as possible (doh!)
• improve internal and external communication and information flow
• share common understanding of the domain and the system
• learn how to cope with inevitable change
• activate developers to be more encouraged to introduce new ideas and solutions
• put the team in position to be more in the partner relationship with business
• improve motivation and satisfaction from work
• encourage being passionate about technology and sharing that passion

In the same time in field of engineering practices I’ll stand my ground on:

• automation, automation, automation
• continuous integration
• code coverage
• automated integration tests
• patterns
• non mandated on-request pairing (you wonder what it is?)
• lightweight solutions
• shared code-ownership

There is an interesting lean Kanban process on horizon which looks as a good match for the environment however I will not be pushing for this initially. As the process should evolve over time there is always time to navigate original agile scrum process towards something which can be maybe a better choice. Only time will prove.

Comments, advice?

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I participated yesterday in the Bupa London 10k race, second edition of this, as organizers were trying to sell, premiere London 10k run. They are not far from the truth to be honest. Click on the image of the route. With starting line on next to Buckingham Palace and St. James’s Park and with the finish on The Mall, taking runners almost for a sightseeing including Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, The London Eye, Cleopatra’s Needle, Tate Gallery, Millennium Bridge, The Monument, Lloyds of London, Leadenhall Market, Bank of England, Mansion House, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Horseguards, Nelson’s Column and Admiralty Arch is a running event in the capital not to miss for medium to long distance runners. It is a race organized by the same people working hard each year to make the London Marathon what it is, so everything what was needed was there. Even weather, comparing with previous year’s torrential rain, was just perfect.

I haven’t been preparing for this race in particular, mainly because after finishing Paris Marathon I decided to have a month off running. Only a week ago I started some training, first week of the 18 weeks programme which I am going to follow this time as preparation for the Berlin Marathon, Royal Parks Half Marathon and the Frankfurt Marathon. Yes, 2 marathons and a half in 5 weeks. I know, I know. I will write a bit more about this another time.

Coming back to the Bupa 10k. My time was 48 min 26 sec (5k split 24m56s), the official new personal best for this distance. Taking into account irresponsible but much appreciated BBQ the night before I am really happy with the time. It is slightly worse than my unofficial 46m52sec for first 10k from the Lisbon Half Marathon. I am using Garmin 405 for GPS tracking now so the details of the run are available on the Garmin Connect site.

The public registration for the London Bupa 10k 2010 opens next week on the 10th of June. It seems pretty early for a run happening in 12 months, but if someone wants to take part in the next year’s event I recommend signing up asap as I am sure the places will be sold out quickly.

Congratulations to Dave for achieving his dream target of sub-1h, Milan for not showing up, Andrew and Rachel for finishing their first 10k in a very good style and Maciej for being just scary fast for a first timer.

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It is an awesome tour of Paris. The route leads from the Champs-Elysées to the  Place de la Concorde, Rue de Rivoli along the Louvre, then Place de la Bastille and roundabout of the Place de la Nation. Not far next is the second biggest park in the city: Bois des  Vincennes where runners make a 7km loop. Half marathon mark is on the way back from the park to Bastille where slight downhill helps save some energy for the second and final part. From Bastille the route goes towards the river Saine and the next 10km give everyone chance to enjoy river side views of Paris. The famous-infamous 31km mark is next to the Eiffel Tower where couple of hundred meter up hill stints remind about the distance behind and the already drained to minimum resources in the body. The biggest park in Paris, Parc de Boulogne, is a place for final effort where each passed kilometer brings us closer to the finish line on the Avenue Foch overlooking Arc de Triomphe.

It was the fastest race in Paris of all time, this year. Winner of the men’s event Vincent Kipruto of Kenya set a course record of 2:05:47.

On personal note I am happy with my own performance, far from above mentioned time, but within my sub-4h target. The official split times from the chip were:

5km      00:28:29
10km     00:56:34
15km     01:22:50
21.1km 01:55:44
25km     02:18:02
30km     02:47:28
35km     03:15:43
42,2km  03:57:21

Second part, let say from 32km hasn’t been easy but I managed to avoid hitting the wall and kept my pace at reasonable level. GPS track from the race is here and here (my phone crashed!). The race course and conditions were very good, maybe slightly too hot but is there anyone who knows how to control it? Great experience in a beautiful city though! I paid my personal price for this by missing the best snowboarding trip of the year to Laax but I think at the end it was worth it. That’s what she said.

So, the first marathon done! I already have got plans for the next one. Berlin in September, here we go.

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For me it was a tune-up race before the Paris Marathon. I tried to take this as easy as possible which in race conditions is not a trivial task to do. As a result of this I have beaten my personal best by 11min :) Official time from the chip was 1h 47min 14sec. As always more details on the run together with GPS data is on the Nokia Sports tracker site.

Interesting city, ok organisation of the race, nice route and superb weather. Clearly worth doing.

Countdown to Paris continues. 5 days left, excitement is getting more and more obvious every day. I have to say I am really looking forward for that one. I am really lucky with my health, no major injuries during the prep. As it turns out at the Runner’s World forum there is a quite big group of runners from UK so I believe I will meet some of them in Eurostar on the way to Paris this Friday. If not then certainly in the Corcoran’s after the run!

Race starts on Sunday at 8.45am local time. Target time 3h 55min. Wish me good luck.

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My plan

It is a 12 week program which intends to accommodate my existing sport activities to replace some of the shorter runs with just around 30km of actual running a week. It is intended for people who are already in overall good shape as the plan is rather short. The week structure is:

Monday - rest

Tuesday - 5-a-side foolball - 60 min

Wednesday - squash 45 min

Thursday - fast run <= 10km

Friday - squash 45min

Sathurday - gym - cross training

Sunday - long run >= 20 km

The intention is that the squash and football replace hills repetitions and intervals often used in marathon preparation plans. Important to mention is that exercises at gym are not focused on legs. Rather everything else but legs. The distance of the long run should start with around 15km, then gradually get to 25km with maybe one 30km run during the training cycle. Last two weeks is a tampering time when  training impact should be decreased. Allocation of activities to the days of the week is flexible with only the long run to be done preferably on weekend.

My plan doesn’t really follow the rule mentioned above about making as much distance a week as possible but instead gives me a range of different activities. I believe it prevents fatigue often caused by excessive running which then might lead to injuries and overall lower performance.

Certainly it prevents boredom and allows you to have a social life for those 12 weeks! Also the length of the training is suitable for preparation for European marathons taking place at the beginning of April allowing someone to have normal Christmas and New Year’s break unlike the longer schedules. You know what I am talking about, don’t you?

I should know how well the training works in just 5 weeks as I will stand on the start line of the Paris Marathon on April the 5th. I replaced a usual long run 2 weeks before the final race day with a start in the Lisbon half marathon. That will be the gear, hydration and feeding strategy test day. More to come.

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