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Today's Half Marathon Practice

I ran a little more than a half marathon today in preparation for the half marathon that I'm going to be running in Sacramento in two weeks. I'm getting a lot better at this a lot faster than I would have expected. I did 13.92 miles in 2:01:04, which is a 8:42 minute/mile average. That's crazy, since this was a somewhat relaxed training run, and I ran something like a 8:50 on one of the first races that I did. Of course, I have a map.

Today's extended run

I went for my run this morning, and discovered that they had closed part of the trail I run on. So, I created a detour, and got a little carried away. (The plan was for a 6-7 mile run, that ended up being almost 10 miles.) I did learn that running on Treat Blvd sucks, running on Oak Grove Rd is only a little better, and running on Ygnacio Valley Blvd east of Heather Farm is actually quite nice.

Nap Time

She doesn't want to nap in her crib anymore, but floors and couches are
just fine.

GPS data from Saturday's run

I decided to give up on doing it the hard way, and I found a website that would generate the map for me. So here's the GPS data mapped on a Google Map.

Previously.

Running in the rain

In my opinion, running in the rain is one of life's great joys. While I'm not sure I would have wanted to do the 16 miler in the rain, the 7 miles I did this morning was just about right. I haven't had the chance to run in real rain like this in at least a year. This has turned out to be a good running weekend.

Walnut Creek to Danville on foot

I ran 16.5 miles yesterday, in 2:36:18, which is a 9:31 minute/mile average. I've been putting off this post because I wanted to post a map with my actual run data on it, but with the tools I have, that's proving to be a bit more work than I expected. Anyways, here's the route I plotted beforehand.

In the process of running that distance, I've proved to myself that I can do a half marathon (13.1 miles), no problem. However, I'm definitely not doing a marathon any time soon, as the last 3 miles ended up being an exercise in perseverance.

The first 10 miles of the run on the Iron Horse Trail were absolutely the best. There are some really beautiful stretches of trail through Alamo. For those of you not on the crazy runner kick, it would be a really nice bike ride (and it's pretty much all flat.)

Anyways, when I get my GPS line nicely overlaid on a Google Map, I'll
post it here.

Emma attempting to share her food with Scratch

(download)

It's an all Emma all the time type of night. ;)

Emma's a budding B-Girl

I didn't post this before, because it was blurry, but I looked at it again, and I just had to post it anyways because the pose is just priceless. No, she wasn't prompted, she did that all herself.

Random Emma Pictures

Enjoy.

(download)

JRuby lead developer expounds on useful JVM flags

I probably start up a JVM a thousand times a day. Test runs, benchmark runs, bug confirmation, API exploration, or running actual apps. And in many of these runs, I use various JVM switches to tweak performance or investigate runtime metrics. Here's a short list of my favorite JVM switches (note these are Hotspot/OpenJDK/SunJDK switches, and may or may not work on yours. Apple JVM is basically the same, so these work).

via blog.headius.com

If you write any serious Java at all, I highly recommend that you click the link above and read his post. It is full of many amazing gems that I can see being really useful for optimizing and debugging Java applications.

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