Its 10 days into the new year and I wanted to blog more. It took me 10 whole days! What a horrible start. Actually, not too bad. I spent much of the past week working on optimizing this blog. I’ve been very unhappy with the performance of the site so first I had to fix it up. Now that it actually loads quickly, it’ll be worth using as a blog!
The other thing I wanted to do, which made the optimizing even harder, was migrating my photo gallery from Picasa to here. Now I like Google but I wanted to own my photo gallery. Obviously the gallery made optimizing my blog much more difficult. I can cache the php as html but images are just going to load slowly. So what I did was sign up with Amazon Web Services and set up a CloudFront service. What is that? Basically, any image I have is served by Amazon’s cloud rather than my server. Amazon has a really fast, worldwide cloud so the images are going to be much faster coming from there. For a site the size of my blog its so cheap its nearly free.
So up this weekend! Its my first marathon since my Bataan Memorial Death March race in 2000. Just about 13 years since my first (and only) marathon and I know I won’t have any trouble PRing since that race was absolutely horrible. I’m pretty sure it involved a nap under a water tower. If you go check out the race site you’ll understand why. That’s no normal marathon!
So Disney isn’t my first marathon but it feels like it. And while I’ve run quite a few races the past 5 years, this one feels different. For one, its the first I’ve been really prepared for. I always feel like I’m not ready for these races. And its a long, long race. And I’ll be running it with a friend. Sometimes my brother comes to a race but that’s rare. He really hates running.
It is amazing that I’m ready for this race but I am. I would not suggest anyone ever embarking on a 10 week marathon training schedule. I’m fortunate I had just enough built up from my normal running to handle it. By all rights, I should have suffered some sort of injury. That I didn’t is pretty amazing. But I finished my last taper run today and now I just have 3 days until the race. I’m ready. I even have the perfect hat for the run.