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I postponed my entry in the ING NYC Marathon until 2008. I know with certainty that I could have run the course this year and finished it, but I would rather use my lottery entry to do the race under better circumstances next year. This is my first time canceling a race, but it is a wise thing to do in this instance. Injury during the race this year was almost a certainty because I haven’t been able to commit sufficient time to my training. Anyone who has trained for or is considering a marathon knows how important the full 20 weeks of training is, especially the long runs.

To the detriment of my race preparation, I chose to work long, extra hours during the times I had scheduled many of my long runs. I am seriously committed to my physical training, but delivering projects on time at work has a higher priority. In the last few months at work, I’ve sacrificed those precious hours of training time to develop a platform (a web application, services and caching mechanisms) that aggregates content for widgets, and several flavors of the widget itself. The platform uses many technologies, including but not limited to: Hibernate, Oracle, Java, RESTful services, servlets, XSL, XML, XHTML, CSS, JSON, AJAX, Prototype, Http-client.

Sorry — my post about running turned into a post about web technologies 🙂

Here are a handful of courses I run during lunch or before work, all of which begin at Dow Jones’ campus. Thanks to GMap-Pedometer for a great measuring tool.

A bit unsafe: “Old Faithful 5K loop” – uses Perrine and Shalks
3.1 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459749

Pretty Safe: Uses Ridge to the high school
3.75 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459727

Pretty Safe: Uses Ridge and Perrine Road
4 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459716

Pretty Safe: Uses Ridge and Perrine Road
5 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459702

Unsafe: Uses Ridge, Stouts, US Hwy 1
5.25 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459744

Very Safe: Uses Ridge, Perrine, Krebs, Hamilton
6.0 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1377955

Very Unsafe: Crosses Hwy 1 and uses Princeton Forrestal
7.5 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459768

Very Unsafe: Uses and Crosses Hwy 1, but has a great hill near the water tower and McDonald’s!
7.75 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459790

Not so safe: Uses Shalks and crosses RR bridge to Grover’s Mill Road
8 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=459782

I ran the Long Beach Island 18 mile race on Sunday October 7th, 2007. This was my first time running that race — the heat did not make it a very pleasant experience, especially since the race started at 10:30 am. I had to drink lots of extra water throughout the course (which gave me stomach cramps) and I had to slow my pace down a bit. In retrospect I’m glad I was cautious considering the number of people who suffered heat-related illnesses in races throughout the country (like in the Chicago Marathon which was closed early due to the heat).

The course is flat — it begins near the intersection of Joan Road and S. Bay Ave. (south end of Long Beach Island, NJ) and extends 18 miles to the north end of the island, finishing in the Barnegat Lighthouse State Park. At the end of Central Avenue, it hooks left on West 4th St., then right onto Broadway, and finally into the park. Jeannie, Matthew and Peter were there to support me. They waited almost three hours for me to get to the finish line. Once I arrived and loosened up a bit, we climbed the steps to the top of the Barnegat Light House (217 steps I believe).

Thanks to all the spectators (mostly residents of Long Beach) who supported us. All the cheering and clapping helped us through the 18 miles and the heat.