#5396 - databases are the new spreadsheets
I haven’t been running the last month or two which isn’t good considering I’m in training for the Marine Corps Marathon in October. I ran my last marathon (Vancouver USA, in Vancouver, Washington) back in June and then pretty much jumped right back into training for the Marine Corps Marathon. Probably wasn’t such a good idea as in the past there’s been a few months of rest after one marathon before I start training for my next and this time there wasn’t really any sort of break at all except for perhaps a week or two of rest. I didn’t start out as strong as I hoped I’d be and figured it was just due to fatigue but things got to be at a point where I’d have to frequently head back early because I was either sore, or not yet used to the heat/humidity, or other such reasons. Then it got to be at a point where my right hip flexor would be bothering me after just a few miles and it would still be bothering me for a few days afterward. I thought that it was just sore from overuse so I rested for a few weeks (perhaps closer to a month) before running again, but even after that break it would start to bother me again after just a few miles. I’m scheduled and determined to run a 10K in about two weeks so I should really get it checked out, but first I need to research someone who can check it out. Physical therapists? Sports medicine types? One of my friends suggested a chiropractor. Maybe? I dunno.
In any case, not being able to run more than a few miles lately means no Marine Corps Marathon for me this year. Bummer. It’s even apparently past the date for options like deferring registration to next year or assigning your bib to another runner, so that’s unfortunate since marathon entry is now on a lottery system.
Still, just because I haven’t been running doesn’t mean that I can’t do running things. I was thinking about incorporating a leaderboard of my races here on the site: partly to learn how to tie PHP and SQL together, partly because I’ve been having trouble remembering some of my personal records, and partly because my race results are scattered across who knows how many websites so I might as well try to get them all in one place. Well, I should say they were scattered across who knows how many websites as now I’ve started work on a basic structure for my database and added in all my race results I could find. Now to see about coding something to access it to highlight my PRs by race type. It used to be that I’d put something like this together in a spreadsheet (as I’d tend to do with any sort of data I want to keep tabs on with such regularity that it’s become a running joke about me with my friends), but now it appears that databases are the new spreadsheets. Maybe when I get this up and working I can get my Nike+ training data in there to analyze, too. It’d be interesting to see what trends I might be able to find.
Originally published at The Glenn Fitzpatrick Times. Please leave any comments there.