Training for a Half-Marathon: From Zero to 13.1 Miles

I’m not a person who likes to exercise. I usually go to the gym once a quarter. I tried many things on the past, but I can’t stick to any particular exercise routine. Most of my exercise comes from playing soccer once a week, biking with the kids at a park (during summer), hiking every once in a while, and that’s it. Last December a friend of mine mentioned how he was just like me until he signed up for a biathlon (triathlon?) and that he didn’t want to lose the money nor look bad in front of his kids and that gave him the motivation necessary to train for it. I thought with myself I never tried that, so why not? Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I signed up for the Seattle Rock-N-Roll Half-Marathon.

I quickly read on the Internet that it takes between 12-16 weeks to train for a Half-Marathon for a beginner, so I went to my Calendar and marked early March as to when I should start training – The Seattle Rock-N-Roll is in late June.

Let the training begin

I thought I would start training in Austin, during SXSW since my hotel was by the river and they had a nice flat trail. Wishful thinking. There was no time during SXSW. So last Sunday (about 14 weeks before the race), I decided to go to the Marymoor Park here in Redmond and run the trail to Seattle. I wanted to run as slow as possible and see how far I could go.

As someone who has never run before, I didn’t know how my body would react to it. I’m on my late 30s, and you keep hearing and reading stories about how your knee is going to hurt or damage, how your tendons might suffer, etc.

Well, I ran about 3.2 miles on Sunday for about 40 minutes (2.7 miles running, .5 miles walking at the end). Interestingly enough, my legs felt great. I bought the right shoes and socks to do this. The only reason I couldn’t run any longer was because of my lungs. I ran out of energy on my chest. My heartbeat was fast, but OK.

OMG, It’s 5K!

As soon as I got back into the car with my wife and kids, I thought a 3 mile run was a pretty good start and then I decided to switch my data entry to Kilometers instead of miles (I’m a metrics guy). Then I realized I ran about 5 Km. Wait, what? 5K? That’s a 5K race! My first run of my entire life (I never ran before) was a 5K!

I really felt awesome. Thank you body for not breaking down on me.

On Tuesday I ran another 5K at a Treadmill. I realized that running on the trail is more fun than treadmill, but treadmill gives you more control over your pace.

Today I ran another 5K and a slightly faster pace (under 35 minutes).

In case it’s not obvious, I ran three 5K “races” in 5 days! That’s coming from a guy that couldn’t stick to any exercise routine whatsoever.

The Plan

I put together my own half-marathon plan. I looked at the Internet for several half-marathon training routines, and created my own version adapting it to my needs. Pretty much I’ll exercise 6 days a week and rest on Monday. I’ll run on Tuesday and Thursday at the gym. I’ll do Cross-Fit training or strength training at home every Wednesday. I’ll play soccer on Fridays. I’ll run near my house on Saturday (or maybe on a park), and on Sunday is the day I’ll do the longest run of the week.

The one thing I forget was to bring a water bottle. Today was my third training and I forgot it again, and I got pretty thirsty.

Now I just need to find enough 40-45 minutes podcasts for me to listen during training. Any suggestions?

The 5 different classes of people at SXSW

Picture by Betsy Weber

Trying to label SXSW is pretty hard. We love to label things and find patterns so it makes it easier for us to understand what things are, but calling SXSW a conference is not the right label. Not only that, but depending on who you are, SXSW will present itself in a whole different experience.

I remember Chris Pirillo talking at Gnomedex how he wanted to deliver a single experience to all attendees, so people would feel they went to the same event and loved or hated the same things. SXSW is the opposite of that. No two persons here had the same experience, so the feedback will be all over the map.

However, I think I manage to bucket the event into five different experiences (there are certainly more).

The Individual

This attendee came to SXSW without knowing anyone else here. He might have come alone or with a friend. They attended lots of panels and talks. They walked the expo booths. They might have gone to the some well-known parties. They enjoyed the conference, but they are unlikely to understand the hype and all the press it gets.

The Sponsor

A lot of people here are actually representing their companies who are sponsoring the event. It goes from big companies to tiny startups, from Microsoft to GroupMe, from AOL to Startup Weekend. These are the most stressed people on SXSW. They have real work to be done, but they also want to go out and enjoy the event. You see they are done with their duties when they are not running around and they are looking a lot more relaxed.

The Connected

I’m on this group. I think most of the attendees are on this group as well. You know tens or hundreds of people attending the event. No matter where you are you bump into friends. It’s really hard to pick where to go, in terms of talks, panels and parties, because you have friends spread all over the place.

The High-Profile

Everyone is equal according to the law. Everyone is very special according to their mom. At SXSW elitism is the rule. There are layers upon layers of social casts. If you are Craig Newmark  (founder of Craigslist), Andrew Mason (CEO of Groupon), Marissa Mayer (VP of Products at Google), you are at the top of cast pyramid. You are invited to super exclusive parties, dinners and brunches. Then there are different parties for each layers, until you get to the bottom of the layer pyramid and you are not invited to any exclusive party, only to the public everyone-with-a-badge-can-get-in party, like Mashable. BTW, even on the Mashable party a lot of the “elite” shows up, so you might bump into some famous tech/startup names anywhere.

I’m sure I missed a lot of other classes of experiences at SXSW. Feel free to add them to the comments.

Random Thoughts About SXSW

Wow. That’s one word to describe the tip of the iceberg of South-by-Southwest. This is the biggest conference I’ve ever been to. There are probably 15,000 people here. I’ve been to trade-shows with 100,000-200,000 people, but they were trade-shows, with booths, not conference with panels, talks, keynotes, etc.

Thought 1: There was a line for the volunteers to register volunteers for the event!

This is massive. The entire city of Austin is taken over for SXSW. All hotels, bars, restaurants and conference rooms are taken. The official event itself happens in about a dozen (two dozen?) different venues, each venue with a dozen (or two or three dozen) conference rooms with different things happening at the same time.

Thought 2: Rookie mistake – I’m trying to see too much

Besides the dozens of parallel talks happening all the time, which can drive you nuts choosing between them, there are also the unofficial events (parties, cocktails, lunches, dinners, brunches, meetups, drinkups) Next year my strategy will be to figure out what’s the minimum amount I should plan to go ahead of time, and let the rest fall into place during the event.

Thought 3: The Tech & Startup world are here

I’m a fairly knowledgeable tech person. I’m also a fairly early-adopter of tech trends. SXSW is where the influencers come to be influenced. It’s where the innovations the cutting-edge-press will start paying attention to are shown it the first time. It’s hard to describe it.

Thought 4: There are a lot of women here

Everyone keeps talking about the lack of women in tech. I don’t know what’s the deal with SXSW, but about 40-45% of the attendees are women. There are a lot of foreigners here as well. I also noticed a few common groups: the tech-people, the startup-people and the marketing-people. (BTW, I’m excluding the Film people & the music people).

Thought 5: Where every Marketing trick on the book (and not on the book) is tried.

The amount of marketing dollars spent at SXSW is enough to make Fred Wilson have a heart attack. It’s pretty ridiculous. Branded food trucks, people on costumes holding signs, fliers, QR-codes everywhere, games, giant projections on buildings façades, banners & signs, parties, exclusive parties, and exclusive VIP rooms inside exclusive parties. My first thought is that most of this is absolutely wasted money. My second thought is how companies (& people) are desperate for attention and they don’t know how to get it, so they throw money at the problem.

Thought 6: It’s like carnival in Brazil. No sleep.

Talks and panels start at 9:30AM, run all day long until 5:30-6:00PM, then the parties, receptions, cocktails, dinners’ start. One after the other and overlapping each other: From 6-9pm, from 6-11pm, from 8-11pm, from 9p-2am, non-stop. If you try to accommodate just a slice of that into your schedule you are dead by the third day.

Thought 7: This is where technology is stretched to its limits

I don’t think when people invent technology like Wi-Fi, 3GS or Foursquare, they ever think of a scenario where 10,000+ people will be using those services simultaneously at the same place. So far I’ve been pretty happy. I have problems, but most of the time it’s working for me. I can’t live without a connection.

Thought 8: I walk a lot!

There are many ways to get around, but most stuff is happening in a 6-block radius from the Austin Convention Center (the main venue). So things are not far enough to take a cab, although there are shuttle, pedicab, and other ways to get around.

Thought 9: It’s going to get bigger!

It’s my first year at SXSW. I’ve read about it last year on how the conference lost it’s ‘touch’. I read it recently how very prominent people justified why they weren’t coming here because it’s not great anymore. Sorry. They are wrong. It’s not what they want it to be. It’s probably not even what it used to be. But it’s big, powerful and it will only get bigger and more powerful. I put a lot of events together. I can tell you SXSW has tremendous momentum. People here talk about the plans for next year like if it’s summer. There always will be a summer. There “always” will be SXSW.

Now I’m going to watch my friend Michelle Broderick give her talk on Marketing.

Google Account Hell

I've been on this situation for a while but it's getting worse. I have two Google Accounts with the exact same email address. One is marcelo@calbucci.com which is a Google Account I created probably 6-years ago or so. The other is marcelo@calbucci.com which is a Google Account because of Google Apps for your Domain.

You'd think Google would treat them as a single account, but they don't. It's very, very confusing and frustrating. It screw things up when people invite me to edit their Google Docs. It screw things up with my Google Profile and now things got a lot worse because I enabled Two-Steps Authentication.

I'm hoping that Google will come to their senses and fix this madness. I can't be the only person who has this problem.

What if you have 40,347 unread emails on your Inbox

Two days ago I saw this tweet by Samuel Rosen that said:

"Doubtful that @davemcclure hits inbox zero anytime soon. ouch twitpic.com/45hmel". 

So I clicked on the link (see image below) and I saw that Dave McClure has 40,347 unread emails! His Priority Inbox (Google's GMail of telling you what's important) has 5,776 emails!!!

Not only was I shocked, but I felt a significant amount of pain, like seeing someone on TV after an earthquake with his legs under a giant slab of concrete. I mean, think about it. You have 5,776 emails that are important and you have not seen it yet. You have 40,347 emails who could be important! How do you deal with that?

Over the last two days I thought about a strategy to get out of this mess. What if it was me? The sad part is that I could not come up with a descent answer to that. I could think of features we should have, like an expiration date on email, but we don't have that yet (well, MS Exchange has that, but I'm sure most people don't use it).

Anyway, the only thing I could think of is for David to hire about 2 email assistants, give them full inbox access and let them go through the pile of email to see what's important, what's not, what's in the past, what's is 'spam', etc. If they average 30 seconds per email, it would take 42 days for them to go through all that, and assuming the incoming rate is not out of this world.

Good luck Dave, and feel free to ignore the last 3 emails I sent you over the last 4 months.