Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Rock-n-Roll Half Marathon 2009 Completed - 6:57 pace, personal best!

I ran Rock 'n' Roll San Jose 1/2 marathon this morning - oh what a joy!

The race was very well organized, ample parking space in the San Jose Downtown, very well marked course, 14 lively local rock bands playing through out the course, gun time at each mile marker, short queues at porta potties, nice big sized medal, and last but not the least cheerful crowd at each turn was very pumping.

And all that contributed to run my personal best so far, the results and time splits are:

These are my best timings for 5K, 10K, 10 mile and 1/2 marathon so far. Its exciting to shave off 34 secs from the pace from little over 2 months ago in San Francisco 1/2 Marathon. Read previous marathon results.

The winner was Meb Keflezighi who completed in 1:01:00 at 4:40 pace, congratulations! I'm happy with my results :)

I followed a 1:30 pacer for the first 10 miles but then constant coughing slowed me down little bit. But, I still enjoyed running the wide streets of downtown!

Check out couple of pictures after the finish line:

Some friends and family members ran along with me which made the marathon a special event as well. As you can see, kids also ran in their own spirit. Completing 400 miles of training from Jul-Sep 2009 was not possible without family's support, many thanks to them!

Enjoy a small video clip of the start line and at 4.5 mile:

Some improvement suggestions ...

• The pacers showed up barely 10 minutes before the start of marathon. And their timing flags did not pop out until right before the race. I've seen pacers at other marathons ready typically 15-20 minutes before the start with their flags wide above the runners.
• The water station volunteers were very cheerful and enthusiastic but were way too many. They were literally jamming the running route at some places. If a runner wants water, they'll come get it so please keep them back and the running route empty.
• Generally I don't hydrate during 1/2 marathons at all. But felt the need to drink some Cytomax around 8 miler and so grabbed a glass. It had more ice (biiig cubes) than Cytomax which certainly made drinking a bit of challenge, especially if you are trying to keep the pace as well. The glass should contain liquid and only that to make it easy for the runners.

Over all, I thoroughly loved and will most likely run it again next year, hopefully with a better timing :)

UPDATED: More detailed results (compared to other runners) are now available:



Fully searchable results and leader board is also available:

Read more detailed story listing the records made etc. here.

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Posted by Arun Gupta in Running  |  Comments[1]

Silicon Valley Code Code Camp 2009 Trip Report

The Foothill college was sprawling with developers, architects, engineers, et al from all over the San Francisco Bay Area to attend the Silicon Valley Code Camp 2009. This was my third speaking engagement (2008, 2007) and the code camp has certainly matured over the last years. The attendance is steadily growing and the quality of sessions is become more mature as well.

I presented on Java EE 6, GlassFish, and Eclipse Tooling for GlassFish/Java EE 6 and the slides are available below:

and

Both the talks were demo intensive and showed Deploy-on-Save, Preserving session state across deployments, Java EE 6 wizards in NetBeans (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and Eclipse (1, 2, 3), Metro JAX-WS Web services development in Eclipse, GlassFish v3 Monitoring, GlassFish v3 REST interface to management and monitoring and many others. All the demos are available as screencasts and/or blog entries and the complete set of links are listed in the presentations.

Here are some pictures from the event:

That's it folks, see ya next year!

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Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[0]