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A recap of week 5 using a training plan inspired by FIRST.

Monday: 45 minutes on the bike @ LA Fitness (hills program, level 12, ~ 95 RPM)

Tuesday: Ran 5.4 miles @ Cattus Park in NJ while visiting my parents at about an 8:00 pace.  (Wasn’t part of a plan but thought it would be fun to run in a new location).

Wednesday: Speed workout. I arrived at LA Fitness a bit later than I wanted, so had to jump into my workout quickly.  I did a .5 mile warm-up, then (6) * 1/2 mile @ 6:00 pace with 90-110 seconds rest.  My pulse was consistently about 5 BPM lower than in the beginning of the month, so I was happy about that.  Cool-down was a few minutes walking on the treadmill.  I played cut-throat racquetball with Mark and Ryan for 60 minutes.

Thursday:  45 minutes on the bike @ LA Fitness (hills program, level 12, ~ 95 RPM)

Friday: Tempo workout @ LA Fitness on the treadmill. 1 mile warm-up,  3 miles @ 6:44, 1 mile cool-down.  Pulse was about 10 BPM lower for the tempo part than when I had ran an equivalent workout in the beginning of the month.  Played 60 minutes of one-on-one racquetball with Mark.

Saturday: Rested

Sunday:  My 9 mile long run last weekend went really well, so instead of running the suggested 9 miler again, I skipped ahead to the week 6 long run as suggested by FIRST:  11 miles @ planned half-marathon pace + 30 seconds (which means 7:35 with my current goal).   I waited until 10:00 am to head out so it would warm up a little bit, and then hit Conewago.  I didn’t feel quite as good as last weekend, but I hammered the last mile and was really happy with the splits: 7:29, 7:19, 7:11, 7:16, 7:18, 7:23, 7:27, 7:10, 7:21, 7:06, 6:25.

Average pace: 7:13

Average BPM: 163

MB

Overall:  It is nice seeing measurable improvements in my pace and/or heart rate data across all three running workouts.  I think I’m going to enter either a 5k next weekend (Spring Valley), or a 10k the weekend after (Dallas Wildcat) to see where I am at with a full race effort.

I had a good FIRST speed workout tonight. I went to LA Fitness and hit the treadmill for a (6) * 1/2 mile at a 6 minute mile pace with a (slightly fuzzy) 90-110 second rest period (walking at 3 MPH). I know that I had completed an identical workout in the beginning of the month, and was curious how the stats compared. I thought I would end up pulling up two separate graphs and eyeballing the data. I was pleasantly surprised when, after loading my data into Garmin Training Center, I right clicked and saw there was a builtin “Compare Activity” feature which I had never noticed before. I was able to select my current workout and the one I had done earlier in the month, and then graph different statistics for the workouts. Cool stuff.

Well, I’m still with the FIRST plan in spirit, but definitely not in practice this week.

Tuesday: The schedule called for a speed workout, but I was in too much lower back pain from Monday’s racquetball extravaganza to consider any type of workout . I took the day off.

Wednesday: I went to LA Fitness and did 45 minutes of the hill routine on a recumbent bike. I like the hill routine on the Life Fitness bikes because it is somewhat like an interval session (after a few minutes into the workout, the bike alternates 1 minute of higher-intensity fake hills with 1 minute of lower-intensity flat equivalents). I ended up catching up with Nate Powell for a bit who was also on a bike.

Thursday: I hit LA Fitness and did a mile warm up, 5 medium-tempo miles in 34:43 (or 35:49 depending on if I went by the treadmill or footpod data), and then walked for a few minutes to cool down. After scarfing down a bit of my Neato Burrito left over from lunch, I played an hour of racquetball with Mark and Ryan which was a blast. My serve is definitely improving and I’m making less silly errors of not getting back to center court after a shot, but my game still has a long way to go.

Friday: Felt good but took the day off workout-wise (unless you count bowling, which I don’t).

Saturday: I met up with Jon Laman in the morning and we ran for just over 10 miles at a pretty easy pace. We started at City Island, caught the Greenbelt near PennDOT, and then ran back through Harrisburg. It was nice to run with a friend and not be worrying about hitting any specific pace. This was my first time running outside since December 2nd when I ran on the Appalachian Trail with Jon. This clearly wasn’t in the FIRST training plan, but it made me happy.

MB Link

Sunday: Hit the trusty Conewago trail to do the recommended FIRST long run of 9 miles @ 7:25. I was feeling a tiny bit stiff in my left quad from yesterday so I decided to start with a half-mile warm up before the hard effort. The stiffness faded during the 5:03 warm up, and I started the “official” part of the run. Since I was already a half-mile into the trail I decided to make the long-run effort 9.5 miles so my mile splits would be in sync with the half-mile markers. The first 8 miles clicked by in 7:28, 7:14, 7:12, 7:17, 7:20, 7:15, 7:07, 7:13. I was feeling pretty good with 1.5 miles to go, so I started picking up the pace a little bit, but still felt like there was an extra gear reserve. The 9th mile was in 6:53, and the last half-mile a tiny bit faster at a 6:50 pace.

No question about it, this was by far my best pace/effort ratio for a long run since I started running. Towards the end of the run I was playing with the idea of adding on an extra 3.6 miles to try smashing my half-marathon PR (1:43:55) . Caution won out, and I decided it wasn’t worth the risk of getting injured or being too fatigued to have a good workout for a while.

Stats for the 9.5 miles of focused running:

Average pace: 7:12

Average Heart Rate: 163

MB Link

There is a new show starting on December 25th that follows three security specialists as they are hired by companies to attempt to penetrate their own security systems. The official blurb is at the Court TV site.

On Monday I played cutthroat racquetball with two friends from work.  I figured it would be a lot of fun and count as a easy cross-training workout, leaving me in reasonable shape to do my scheduled hard workout the next day (which worked out fine last week).  Well, I think my enjoyment of the sport was writing checks my body couldn’t pay, since I ended up playing for almost 2 hours and 15 minutes and I was exhausted at the end of it.  Today my joints/muscles (and lower back especially) are really sore.  I hope I’m feeling good enough to run tomorrow night, but at this point it is still a bit up in the air.

I definitely need to set a time limit on racquetball if I want to ensure I can get a solid running workout in the next day.

I took Monday off after working out the previous 6 days in a row

Tues had a speed workout on the schedule and I thought I would try 4 X 1200m. I had a lot going on in my mind and was thinking about bagging the workout but I didn’t want to move everything back a day. I ended up doing the first two 1200m intervals pretty easily, but just couldn’t concentrate, so bailed about 30 seconds into the 3rd one and decided to hit the elliptical trainer for a bit.  I had been really happy to see where my heart rate was during the first two intervals, but the state of your body doesn’t matter if your mind isn’t into it.

Wed was a cross-training day. I played racquetball for the first time in about a year with two friends from work and it was a blast. We played for about an hour and a half with two or three short breaks for drinks. I turned on my Garmin 305 during the last 15 minutes of racquetball and saw my average HR was 119. This was definitely a much more enjoyable cross-training workout than riding the stationary bike.

Thurs called for a tempo run. The official schedule calls for warm up, 3 miles @ short tempo pace (6:45), cool down. I liked the longer, slightly slower, tempo version better, so I did a 1.5 mile warm up, 5 miles in 34:40 (6:56 average pace), 1.5 mile cool down. I forgot to pack my Garmin, so I used the handlebar based heart rate monitor periodically during the workout, which was really awkward (the treadmill even scrolls a message saying holding the handlebar during running is a bad idea). I think my average HR was a little higher ( ~ 170 BPM) than last week, but I wasn’t surprised given the good workout the day before.

Friday I didn’t work out because I went to dinner and saw “I am Legend” with my wife.

Saturday’s schedule called for “10 miles at a relaxed run effort”. I wasn’t sure how the Conewago trail would be after all the rain we had lately, and didn’t want to drive 25 mins only to be disappointed, so I decided to play it boring and safe and went to LA Fitness. I did the treadmill equivalent of driving through Kansas (throw a brick on the accelerator and take a nap). I punched in 7.0 mph (8:34 pace) and started zoning out listening to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe and watching the techniques of the various racquetball players. I ended up running for 11 miles in just under an hour and 35 minutes, average HR 145.

Allan Packer (Database Guru from Sun) has started a blog series on the future of open-source databases which is an interesting read. My 10 second summary is “open-source databases are good enough for the vast majority of use cases and cost way way less than traditional commercial offerings, check if free or low cost DBs can meet some/all of your needs”.

I saw that the SPEC organization just released a new benchmark SPECpower_ssj2008,which measures the power utilized by a server at various points among the load curve (idle -> 100% utilized).  A quick scan of the initial results shows that most servers use roughly 60% of maximum power  while idle.

From a power consumption perspective, it is way better to have 3 servers at 50% utilization than to have 5 at 30% utilization. Taking figures from one of the submitted scores, a server at 50% utilization might burn 234 watts while a server at 30% utilization might burn 210.

This gives 702 watts for 3 servers @ 50% versus 1050 watts for 5 servers @ 30%.

On Tuesday I did a FIRST speed workout of 6 * 800m @ 10 MPH on the treadmill at LA Fitness. Like last week’s attempt at a 12 * 400m workout, there is still some fuzziness around the speed and rest intervals because of the time it takes the treadmill to ramp up and down speeds, but since I only had to transition half as many times it wasn’t as big a deal. I felt a lot more comfortable running the 1/2 mile repeats at 6:00/mile than I did running the quarter mile repeats at a 5:45 pace. I think I’m going to keep all my speed workout intervals between 1/2 mile and a mile from now on (at least until I can run them outside).

On Thursday I ran the FIRST tempo run which prescribed 5 miles @ 7:00/mile. I started off with a 7:06 first mile, ran 3 miles @ 6:58 pace, and then completed the 5th mile in about 6:50. I was definitely putting in some effort on the last mile, but the overall pace felt relatively comfortable. My average heart rate for the run was 167 BPM and my cadence averaged 95 steps/minute.
I’m not sure what my weekend running plan is yet. I might enter the Jingle Bell 5k on Sunday, but if the weather is too ugly, I’ll probably just do a long run on the treadmill.

Update: I did the prescribed long run Saturday morning at LA Fitness.  The plan called for 9 miles @ 7:25.   I started off with two 7:30 miles, then reset the treadmill (which sets a max time limit of 60 minutes) and ran another 7 miles in just over 51 minutes.  It is kind of weird realizing that my long runs are about half of what they were just over a month ago, but the intensity is definitely higher.  Workout stats: 7:21 average pace, 163 BPM.

I just wrote up this blurb for a customer but figured it would be useful to Solaris users in general so am also posting it here. I see a lot of sites developing their own security standards, and I think a lot of time could be saved and quality improved if organizations started off with a well established framework instead of rolling their own security policy from scratch.

The Center for Internet Security is a non-profit organization that works with users and vendors to provide free security standards and tools to help with a wide variety of operating systems. They have guidelines for Solaris 10 security that include:

• a document describing the suggested settings and why/how to change them
• scripts and files to help in the process
• a scoring tool that can be ran to help see if the settings were implemented correctly (it is about 90% automated, for a few questions the script has to ask the administrator if certain tasks were done).

For more information see:

http://www.cisecurity.org/bench_solaris.html

http://blogs.sun.com/gbrunett/entry/cis_solaris_10_security_benchmark1