So for the last few months, I have been really dodgy on my running. I haven’t kept any schedule that remotely resembles regularity. My running partner moved away to California for a new job and I’ve been struggling keeping myself motivated and accountable. I also have a terrible habit of pacing too fast, feeling like crap, then pausing the GPS unit while I catch my breath. I really want to break this habit.

Today is a new day. From here on out, I will start posting my pace charts. Since I am currently using Sport Tracks for my training log, I can generate the pace chart as a PNG directly. From there, I use F-Spot to tag the image and then upload it to my NextGen gallery. Every week, I will post the week’s worth of images and summarize how the training towards a sub-2 hour half-marathon.

I should note that I got this idea from Thomas Bubendorfer, who’s excellent blog I have become an avid reader. He also posts his heart-rate graphs, but I only have the Garmin 205, so no heart-rate.

So to kick things off, here is this week’s training. I had the Qualifier this week and I’m going to a funeral here in about an hour. So training early in the week didn’t happen, and I won’t be able to train again until I get back on Sunday evening (probably just go to the gym instead). I decided the quickest way to force my body and lungs to get accustomed to the pace I want to run is to just do it and progressively extend the distance. For the first week or 2 my intervals will be a single 1 mile sprint. I can’t do a long run this weekend, but I was start again at something less than 8 (probably 6 next week).

Without further ado, here is this week’s training:

I should also note that it does not appear that the NextGen gallery supports adding the detected tags to the official WordPress taxonomy. For the time being, the image tags will not appear in the tag cloud, so I won’t duplicate the tag by creating one now.

Also, you might notice a few significant drops in the paces. The bad habit I mentioned that I want to break. Basically, I stopped the watch to catch my breath, then started it back up. This habit can make a 30 minute run stretch on for upwards of an extra 15 minutes and it really bugs me that I do it. By posting these pace charts, I’m hoping to train harder and stop pausing the watch (unless I have to, i.e. for traffic or water).

So I finally got around to upgrading WordPress, this time upgraded to 2.4-bleeding. That’s right, I’m now officially running svn sources for my WordPress install. I followed the instructions here, added a step for backing up the old install to a bzip2 (and subsequently a network-wide backup), and everything went smoothly. In fact, you may notice right now that this article has both categories and tags.

The next key step was to upgrade my necessary plugins. I tried to install an AJAX spell checker but it requires mbstring and I’m having a few things upgraded before I can continue using this. I also installed the AJAXed WordPress plugin to smooth out some user interactions. There are tons of options with this plugin, so I’ll continue playing with them in the future.

I removed the old PageViews plugin as it really wasn’t providing any useful information. I stripped that code out of the template and moved on to the WordPress.com Stats plugin. I’m not a huge fan of it either but I guess I better do something that that useless account I created.

The Tiger interface plugin is horribly broken though, so I had to roll that out. As far as the new WordPress interface (either 2.3 or 2.4-bleeding) is somewhat 1998 with better graphics. The creation page now has everything as expandable sections rather than draggable sidebar items. This is create for eliminating clutter unless I need to actually change a setting, at which point I’ll have to scroll.

I also installed NextGen Gallery and will be giving the auto tag generator a try. This of coarse means that I will have to eventually go through my pictures and finally tag all of them before I can make them available. This will finally give me the chance to provide feedback to the F-Spot developers.

I also installed a new social bookmarking plugin. This time, I went with obsocialbookmark instead of Greagarious. I liked Gregarious’ features, but it integrated with non-white background blogs like square peg and a round hole. I really just wanted something simple at the bottom of every post and obsocialbookmark seems to accomplish this better. Speaking of which, I may be updating the theme in the future.

I upgraded sshd because of some rather annoying brute-force break-in attempts. I made sure to lock down all of the machines in the hellkeep network. I installed and enabled DenyHosts on every machine. I highly recommend following those steps as DenyHosts actually works well enough to halt almost all break-in attempts on hellkeep. I could be more vicious (and probably should do this anyways) and report the wankers running compromised networks to get their ass in gear and close those holes (no pun intended). I should probably look into setting up a Tripwire scan.

Lastly, I finally was able to make the switch to Banshee. I figured out why gstreamer related packages were not installing. Apparently, if you set your PORTAGE_TMPDIR to something over an NFS share, then you’re bound to get trouble from time to time. With Banshee as my main DAAP, I can now handle all of my music with a somewhat intelligent playlist and podcast integration. I might even try hooking up my wife’s iPod to it later.

I love doing this huge upgrades every year; it’s like getting a new lease on your computer.