What should be considered when deciding to do a marathon?

2013-12-03T12:16:00+00:00

My answer to What should be considered when deciding to do a marathon? on Quora

Running a marathon is easier then you think.

First, get to a point where you can run 5K. Couch to 5K is a popular program for this. Barring major health issues, anyone can get to that point.

Next, do 10K. After a few times running a 5K this shouldn't be too big a stretch.

Guess what: a marathon is 42km. You're nearly a quarter of the way there!

Now, sign up for a half marathon. That's only two 10Ks back to back. If you've been running 10K once a week you should be able to do this without much trouble.

The bad news is that a marathon is way more than just two half marathons... but it's totally possible. Follow a well documented training scheme and you'll make it. It will be one of the hardest things you've ever done, but it's absolutely possible to do it.

I managed a marathon after less than six months of training, starting from zero fitness. I trained 3-4 times a week: 2 short runs, a medium run and a long run on a Sunday.

Go for it!

Tags: productivity, running, quora

Comprehensive notes from my three hour Redis tutorial

2010-04-25T22:36:16+00:00

Last week I presented two talks at the inaugural NoSQL Europe conference in London. The first was presented with Matthew Wall and covered the ways in which we have been exploring NoSQL at the Guardian. The second was a three hour workshop on Redis, my favourite piece of software to have the NoSQL label applied to it.

I've written about Redis here before, and it has since earned a place next to MySQL/PostgreSQL and memcached as part of my default web application stack. Redis makes write-heavy features such as real-time statistics feasible for small applications, while effortlessly scaling up to handle larger projects as well. If you haven't tried it out yet, you're sorely missing out.

For the workshop, I tried to give an overview of each individual Redis feature along with detailed examples of real-world problems that the feature can help solve. I spent the past day annotating each slide with detailed notes, and I think the result makes a pretty good stand-alone tutorial. Here's the end result:

Redis tutorial slides and notes

In unrelated news, Nat and I both completed the first ever Brighton Marathon last weekend, in my case taking 4 hours, 55 minutes and 17 seconds. Sincere thanks to everyone who came out to support us - until the race I had never appreciated how important the support of the spectators is to keep going to the end. We raised £757 for the Have a Heart children's charity. Thanks in particular to Clearleft who kindly offered to match every donation.

Tags: brightonmarathon, guardian, marathon, nosql, redis, running, my-talks, highlights, annotated-talks

Simon Willison's Weblog: running

What should be considered when deciding to do a marathon?

Comprehensive notes from my three hour Redis tutorial