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Not ready for the full marathon just yet. But I’ll be training hard for the 35th!

Here are some of my (late) photos from past races:

Ace Hardware Run

Nature Valley Run

PGH Fun Run

TDI now hass 1000+ Facebook fans! Thank you everyone!

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I registered for the 5k category about 2 weeks ago and was surprised that the racing singlets were not given upon registration, giving me another excuse to buy another tech fiber singlet! Yay! I didn’t want to use the singlet I got from my 3k PGH fun run because it was a “little” too tight in the belly area area.

Preparation

To prepare for my run, I packed my clothes into my duffel back and slept very early (8pm early) or at least tried to sleep. I always get insomnia whenever I have an important race the next day.

I woke up at 3:30am on race day (May 16), drank skimmed milk and Cobra energy drink and took a quick shower.

Assembly

I arrived at Boni High Street at about 4:30am, quickly deposited my bag and began my warm-up stretches and laps. I took that time to observe the people and what they were doing.

After a quick lap around the assembly area, I was able to determine what race the people registered for and got a few chuckles seeing people doing funny warm-up techniques. Blue bibs for 3k, red bibs for 5k, yellow for 10k and green for 15k.

I saw a few Kenyans doing their warm-up laps and envied their bodies. They had long and thin legs and none of them looked overweight! Some even looked underweight!

Ready, Set, Go!

The 15k and 10k runners were already off once I jogged to the starting line for the 5k runners. I sized up the competition and did a few more final stretches before the race.

When the go signal was given, I didn’t rush in like a total newbie and quickly settled into my easy run pace (about 8’00” /km to 8’30” /km) and closely monitored my pace using my Nike+ sportsband.

During my first fun run (a 3k run), I nearly burst into laughter when I saw a group of excited runners running too fast and laughing, only to burnout and run out of energy a few meters from the starting line. That experience quickly taught me to keep my energy and confidence in check.

1.6 km and beyond

1.6 km later, I quickened my pace to 7’30” and monitored it a lot because I have a habit of pacing myself too fast and tiring too quickly for my own good. The very thing happened during my run! When I checked my sportband, I saw that I was going as fast as 6’10” to 6’30” /km! I was having a hard time slowing down and maintaining a steady pace.

I think it was at about 2.5 km into the race that I arrived at the first water station. I was really REALLY annoyed by the runners who just threw the plastic cups into the road after drinking. Why not just put the cup back on the table or throw it in the trash bins next to the table? There were about three water stations along the 5k route and all of them were littered with plastic cups! Tsk tsk tsk. DISCIPLINE PEOPLE!

At about 3.5 km I made my first mistake. There was a downhill in the track and instead of attacking it normally, I increased my pace to take advantage of the slope and gravity. Bad move for my knees and Achilles tendon! I didn’t feel the pain until after the race on my way home.

I slowed down to a brisk walking pace close to the 4 km marker after my downhill sprint and it took a while to recover. After a minute ot two, I resumed my regular goal pace and maintained it until the finish line.

If I didn’t sprint the downhill, I think I could have sprinted the last 500 meters to the finish line. Oh well, lesson learned.

I crossed the finish line and checked my Nike+ sportsband for my finish time. My sportsband displayed 34 minutes and 54 seconds and also told me I ran 4.8 km. My official finish time according to finishline.ph was 34’46” (gun time) and 34’04” (chip time).

Freebies!

After the race, I fell in line to claim my freebies and another annoying Filipino trait I despised manifested in front of me! The people in front of my kept calling other people they knew and put them behind them (and in front of me)! I don’t care if you know them, tell them to get in line like everybody else! DISCIPLINE PEOPLE!

I got a freebie bag from Neutrogena and was slightly annoyed that there no Neutrogena products in them! They were all Johnson & Johnson products! To make up for it, they gave the 5k finishers a “Chase the Sun” cotton shirt and singlet. Yay!

I wasn’t able to get any photos of myself and the track because I left my D90 at home and I forgot to ask my sister to lend me her point and shoot cam. I’ll have to settle for PhotoVendo’s pictures.

More! Training and Races!

I felt really great when I finished in just 34 minutes! I was expecting a finish time of about 45 minutes. I’m guessing it was because I paced myself too much during the run and couldn’t maintain a comfortable enough pace to the whole run. The disadvantage of that was I was forced to take unexpected walking breaks during my run (about 2). During my training on my treadmill, I was able to run a full 5k without stopping for walking breaks.

My next 5k fun run will be the RunRio’s Trilog 2nd leg on May 30. See you there!

Examples: The Truth about “World-Class Filipinos” and The Truth will set Filipinos free

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Check!

Surprisingly, this blog gets to ride on TDI’s good luck and gets a PR upgrade as well! Yay for unscheduled posts!

Shameless plugs below:

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So I thought, “Why not take the next step and invest in a VPS?”

So wrong…

I tried and failed to get The Daily Inquirer running on a VPS a few months back. I signed up with VPS.net and tried them out for a month. I never got far with them because of permission problems, VPS learning blues and my day job. So I gave up and returned The Daily Inquirer to Bluehost.com.

Fast forward to about a week ago. The Daily Inquirer was getting beat up pretty bad after several weeks of traffic spikes. That would normally make a blogger say “Yahoo!”, that is – if you’re hosted on a dedicated server worth several hundreds of dollars to maintain a month!

*Ahem* Jehz *Ahem*

I canvassed for a good VPS and eventually found settled with ServInt.net and dedicated 3 days studying and transferring my site to the VPS.

I quit my day job 3 months ago, so that 3 days meant almost 20 hours per day studying and transferring the site. For the past 3 days, I’ve been sleeping at about 6am just configuring, monitoring, pestering the ServInt’s tech support (great guys) and testing the site.

On the fourth day, I finally got the pseudo site working using the IP and went on to migrate the nameserver to point to my own nameserver. The DNS propagation took about 20 hours to complete and I posted some articles to test The Daily Inquirer’s capabilities on a VPS.

Then it hit me.

A few minutes after my new posts, The Daily Inquirer crawled to a halt. I quickly contacted tech support, they told that the site was gobbling up a crap load of CPU. It even reached 100% and ServInt had to restart my box. After the restart, ServInt suggested that installing eAccelerator might help alleviate the CPU load, so I said, “DO IT NOW!”

Kidding. But they did install eAccelerator and it helped. I also purged, deactivated and deleted a LOT of plugins. It helped shave off about 10% CPU load, which was still bad because that still left me with an average of 60-80% CPU load at any given time. And I wasn’t even receiving a lot of traffic! The horror…

I finally decided to give up (again) on a VPS and transferred the namespace and the new posts back to Bluehost.

A few hours before that, I was chatting with Jehzlau and he told me that shared hosts are usually powerful machines that can withstand WordPress’ CPU hogging tendencies but limit the amount of CPU and traffic you receive to protect the server and your IP neighbors. Jehz suggested that the only servers capable of hosting a high traffic WordPress site are the expensive Dedicated servers. Good luck with that…

Although a VPS promises a lot of bandwidth and memory, that won’t mean squat if your CPU isn’t up to the task to effectively manage WordPress’ CPU problems.

I eventually found what caused the CPU problem in WordPress. When we use a custom permalink structure (pretty permalinks), WordPress queries the .htaccess directive for the permalink A LOT! There were test results in the WordPress forums confirming the problem. When the permalink was left to default, the average CPU load was about 10-20% which is pretty acceptable. But when a custom permlink is used, average CPU load shot up to 50-80%. But the we can’t use the default right? Who wants a link that looks like this: site.com/?p=34334 right?

So I’m back to square one. Lesson learned and $50 after: WordPress and VPS do NOT mix. Not yet anyway. Not until the (great) guys over at Automattic and WordPress.org fix the CPU problems.

In WordPress 3.0 perhaps? Or Automattic’s VIP hosting?