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When I got home last night I saw a note that Fedex had attempted a delivery.  I was curious what was being sent to me since I wasn’t expecting anything.  I drove down to the local Fedex facility to pick up the package and to my surprise it was a 16GB iPod Touch that my company had sent as a gift for being an employee for 10 years.  It is sweet! The eye-candy is amazing, it has good storage space (I can finally sync all my music), and the wifi connectivity for browsing is fun.

I officially signed up for the Harrisburg Marathon yesterday.   I am definitely under-prepared for a hard effort (a single 20 miler, which I did yesterday on the Conewago), but I think if I keep the pace moderate and stay smart with hydration/fueling I should be able to finish OK.  I’d like to get a marathon over with and the Harrisburg event is super convenient for me.

I was taking a look at my training for the last 4 months and realized that the vast majority of my runs have been without much purpose.  I know I should be mixing up VO2-max, tempo, long runs, and recovery runs, but there have been very few weeks where that actually happened.  Most weeks have just been a random collection of mileage.  I’ve averaged about 160 miles a month for the last 3 months, but only completed 3 tempo runs and 3 interval workouts.  I have been pretty good about getting in long runs on Saturdays or Sundays, but the distance and pace mixes have been a motley collection of 10-20 miles @ 7:4X – 8:4X (with a few in the high 9:XXs), so not much specificity.

I’ve been following Marcus Grimm’s blog and he has been doing really well using the Furman University FIRST program, which boils down to:

• Do 3 really intense running workouts a week (VO2max, tempo, long run@ quick paces)
• Cross-train at least 2 times a week

I ordered the book on the FIRST program from Amazon and read through it last night and this morning.  Frankly, I’m intimidated by the paces described for the tempo and long run workouts, but after I’ve recovered from the marathon effort, I’m going to pick a goal race and start using FIRST and see how it works out for me.

Here are sample running workouts for the 1st week of the 18 week half-marathon program, based off a 19:40 5k performance level:

• VO2max 10-20 min warm up, 12*400m @ 85 seconds (5:40 mile pace) w/ 90 seconds rest, 10-20 min cool down
• Tempo 2 miles easy warm up, 3 miles @ 6:37 pace, 1 mile cool down
• Long Run – 8 miles @ 7:18 pace (projected half-marathon pace + 20 seconds)

I was working with dsadm on a Sun Directory Server 6.2 install yesterday and ran into a snag with using the cert-export/cert-import functionality. Here are my notes:

1) When using the dsadm cert-export command, you provide a cert alias name, but it actually exports all your certificates.

2) When using dsadm cert-import, I had a problem where it re-imported the serverCert and caCert but the trust permissions on caCert weren’t correct. This caused outbound SSL connections to fail since it wasn’t able to validate the other server’s certificate. (this scenario was for an in-house certificate authority, so it may not apply for people using certificates issued by Verisign and the like)

You can read about the NSS trust flags at the certutil man page.

Steps to show/fix the caCert trust issue (using the certutil located in /usr/sfw/bin on Solaris 10)

——————————————————————————————————-

# look at the trust settings for caCert, which should be C,,

/var/directory/master1/alias> certutil -L -d . -P slapd-
defaultCert CTu,u,u
serverCert u,u,u
caCert c,c,

# modify the trust settings to the right values

/var/directory/master1/alias> certutil -M -n caCert -t C,, -d . -P slapd-

# list the trust settings again, now they are correct

/var/directory/master1/alias> certutil -L -d . -P slapd-
defaultCert CTu,u,u
serverCert u,u,u
caCert C,,

I just took a look at the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant 1.0 documentation and the concept looks pretty sweet.   In a nutshell, you take a flash archive image of a machine running Solaris 8 and then on a Solaris 10 08/07 + patches machine you create a new “solaris8″ branded zone and install the archive.   A “solaris8″ branded zone has a few special features versus standard zones like:

• you can specify a hostid
• patches to the global zone don’t get applied

Now, the kernel that will be running is a Solaris 10 kernel, so a solaris8 zone won’t help you run special device drivers in the zone, but all your userland libraries will be the same as the source machine (and you get all the benefits of being under a Solaris 10 kernel like DTrace from the global zone).

It will be interesting to try this out.  I love Solaris 10 but know there are a ton of customers with large install bases of Solaris 8 machines that are worried about the migration effort.  I bet you can pretty easily move a lot of older SPARC boxes onto one of the new Niagara 2 based machines with this new virtualization method.

Mark Rebuck and myself went down to Newville this morning for a 5k race that is held on the rails-to-trails path. We got there a bit early and initially I was surprised because only about 10 runners were milling around, but soon a bunch more people showed up. I think the race ended up with about 40-45 people. It was also nice to see that Nate Powell decided to come for the race. The course was an out and back layout, with a small decline for the first 1/3 of a mile or so, then a very slight incline up to the turnaround at 1.55 miles. The conditions were nice, it was about 55 degrees, brisk but not too chilly.

I did a bit of walking and a short jog warmup and then lined up in the 2nd row for the start. The whistle blew and we were off. I was really happy with my starting effort, it was a fairly even pace hovering between 6:16 and 6:20/mile. By about 1/2 a mile I had moved into 4th place. I had a 6:18.83 first mile split and was about 5-6 seconds behind the guys running in 2nd and 3rd place (the first place guy had about 15 seconds on them at this point). I started struggling a bit on my second mile and could see the average pace rising to the mid 6:30s and the 2nd and 3rd place guys pulling away. The turnaround point was a bit odd. There were cones to indicate where to turn around and a guy with a pickup truck who was handing out cups of water. The distance between the final cone and the pickup truck was less than 2 feet, and it was a bit awkward to swing a 180 around the cone and avoid hitting the guy and the truck. I grabbed a dixie cup of water, downed it quickly , and then was off again. I’m sure I didn’t physically need the water on this short of a race, but my mouth was getting dry and I think psychologically it helped by giving me a second or two to get my head together. I started trying to increase my effort, but my legs were still feeling a bit flat. My second mile split was 6:34.01 (2 miles in 12:52). I started feeling a bit better mentally after crossing the 2nd mile marker and worked on trying to keep a steady effort. I was holding a fairly consistent pace between 6:10 and 6:20 for the 3rd mile and was delighted when I saw the bridge ahead which meant about .3 miles to go. My 3rd mile split ended up being my fastest of the race at 6:14.21, and my final .1 miles was at 35.55 seconds. My overall time ended up being 19:43, which is a new 5k PR for me. I placed 4th overall and received a medal for being 1st in the male 30-39 age group. My first time placing in an age group and winning some hardware!

Mark Rebuck did well, he clocked in 23:59 and with it handily won a bet with me for a Neato Burrito. Nate Powell also did great, clocking a 23:23 and busting his old PR by 5 minutes and change!

My GPS measured the course at 3.10 miles and Nate’s had it at 3.12, so it seemed very accurate. I think the race directors did a nice job putting the event together. If they can have the pickup truck at the turnaround moved back a few more feet next year I think it will be close to perfect.

Motionbased Link

Not much traffic and plenty of ridiculously cheap parking (which I suppose drastically changes on days their baseball team is playing).

There is a park that runs along the river for about a mile and a half which is pretty nice for running (although it is almost all concrete).

If you are a Brazilian Steakhouse fan (or a carnivore in general), Boi na Braza does a pretty decent job, although it still doesn’t top the reigning champ (and holder of most of my expense money) Fogo de Chao.

Fountain Square has a jumbo-tron and a lot of lighted outdoor seating with free wifi. When I walked by tonight they were showing a football game on the huge screen.

Just across the river is Newport on the Levee, a big shopping/food/entertainment complex with a large aquarium.  If you don’t have a car you can walk across one of the bridges or take the TANK shuttle for $1.25.

Next weekend I’m running in the Cumberland Valley Rails-to-Trails 5k (8:30am Sat Oct 20th in Newville PA) with a friend from work. I’m also considering running in the Harrisburg Marathon (8:30am Sun Nov 11th). While I haven’t been doing any specific marathon preparation, my long runs have grown in length and I ended up running two 18 milers in the last month. If I can get in a 20 miler on the weekend of the 27th and feel healthy, I’ll go for it.  If I don’t feel healthy, I’ll work the race as a volunteer.

My friend Jon Laman just ran his first ultra-marathon today, the Blues Cruise 50k (31.1 mile) trail race near Reading, PA.   You can check out the motionbased stats for his race.  Way to go Jon!