Tomorrow, The Lady and I make our way to Philadelphia for Sunday’s marathon.
If you’re interested in tracking my progress, I’ll be setting up a live tracking link through MapMyRun that will be available on my Twitter, which will be updating regularly every mile of the race, starting at 7am EST (or is it EDT now?). There’s also a text message update service through the marathon itself; once I get my race bib, I’ll post the number in case you prefer push updates to pull (I’ll edit this post and put the number at the bottom).
Am I ready? Check out a recent post for an idea of how I’m feeling. But the upshot is I’m excited.
One final point here, though. These are the conversations I enjoy:
Me: “I’m running my first marathon this weekend.”
Person: “Awesome! Good luck!”
Me: “Thank you very much, I’ll definitely need it!”
These, on the other hand, fall into a different category:
Me: “I’m running my first marathon this weekend.”
Person: “You’re crazy. That’s crazy. CRAZY!”
Me: “THIS IS THE MEME THAT NEVER ENDS…”
There’s nothing that says the second assertions is wrong, per se. I’ll even take it, provided it’s tempered with some amount of the first. But hearing the second by itself more than zero times gets old very, very quickly. I encourage you not to be The Second Guy. I’m certainly more than a little intimidated by the distance, particularly given how exhausted I’m feeling. Deep introspective insights from the peanut gallery are neither what I need nor what I asked for.
END RANT. BEGIN GUINEAS.
On the research front: I updated my more technical blog with the details of where that stands. Since then, I’ve been in constant contact with my advisor as we try to close this project out, and he’s managed to keep me invested in seeing this through, in particular by specifying very concrete end conditions.
I suppose that’s what I feel like has been lacking in this project: there’s no clear end goal, which makes the failure of certain methods even more disillusioning and discouraging. He set a pretty solid one yesterday, and as a result I have a much clearer idea of what needs to happen to wrap this project up. In fact, with the narrative he put forth, I’d love to start stubbing out a paper for submission, hopefully today before final preparations for Philly begin.
Running and research have pretty much been the extent of my life for the past month. There are many exciting projects in the wings (distributed, real-time tensor analysis, as a tantalizing hint!), and I am eagerly looking forward to a lengthy break from running at the conclusion of the Philadelphia Marathon.
In particular, The Lady and I will be paying my parents a visit over Thanksgiving, and I’ll get to see my sister for the first time since March! She’s been on this side of the pond now for over a week, and it’s been even more difficult than usual to get in touch with her; go figure.
Also: wish The Lady a happy birthday–we celebrated it last weekend, since her actual birthday is this coming weekend! 🙂
Skeptical beautiful flapper birthday runner lady is skeptical.
Theatre of Consciousness 
So excited for you guys! Can’t wait to follow along! Is there a goal in mind… or just to finish? 🙂
We’re running this first one together, and jointly our goal is to finish 🙂 I personally think we could do sub-4 if we really pushed things, but on the first go-round it’s probably best to go at a pace that feels good, regardless of how fast/slow it is.
Happy Birthday to the Lady! Who looks Steampunk-ish 😉
Someone once told me he likes to listen to The Planets by Holst and would arrange the sequence to his average time estimate of where he expects to be on the course. Don’t know if that will help (you probably shouldn’t experiment during the actual marathon), but a sample may help.
We were aiming for 1920s, so I suppose that works!
I do have playlists for various race distances. I don’t tailor them to a specific course, but I do try to take my general pace into account: “ok I’m going to be this far in and hurting this badly, I need a song like this one” sort of strategy.