From The Blog

Ok, technically tomorrow is rest day as well  … but since tomorrow includes traveling, checking in, and psyching myself up … I’m just going to say this is rest day.

I’ve been in Colorado for about a week now allowing my lungs to get used to the mountain air. Breathe in, breathe out. Rinse and repeat.

It’s been a gorgeous weather week and I’ve had some amazing mini-training seshes here along with great family hang time. I’ve also become good buds with, Pollo, my brother’s family dog 🐶 and taking morning walks with him that look like this:

So now, on to Buena Vista where the race will begin:

Above is an overview of the race 🏁

Basically, it’s a 120 mile, 6 day, 20,000 ft gain run. And yes. I am a bit nervous about this, if you were wondering …

Ok, back to packing!

It all started a year ago. My brother-in-law asked me to run a 120mi race with him through the mountains of Colorado. “Ummmm … ” was my reply.

In fact, I didn’t really answer his question for 4 months. Finally, after much soul searching, praying, and deep breathing, I said yes. And so 2017 began with me – running – a lot.

I ran the Nashville 1/2 Marathon in April, then immediately shifted my focus to training for the big one: the http://transrockies-run.com in CO. I can’t say the past 3 months have been easy. I’ve had terrible knee issues and neck soreness that still won’t go away. I also found out a few weeks ago that my race partner in crime – my brother-in-law – the one who got me into this madness … has pulled a hamstring and cannot run. So, now I’ll be running solo. It’s fine though, I only have to run alone for 120 miles. 😮

Seriously though, I’ve been going through some of my gear tonight and reflecting on all the training, all the time invested in prepping for this race, all the pain, and all the adrenaline that’s in my body.

I am excited and nervous and I’m fighting the feeling of being completely overwhelmed tonight. I was doing some training today on a mountain with my brother, and as I kept jumping over the the rocks and logs on the trail, a Bible verse I read a long time ago came back to me:

“He makes my feet like the feet of a deer and sets me securely on the heights.”
‭‭Psalms‬ ‭18:33‬ ‭HCSB‬‬

I have no idea how grueling the upcoming 6 days of this race are going to be, but I really believe I’ll be ok.

So, I have a few more days to shake off the jitters. Meanwhile, I’ll be eating pasta and lots of salty things!

(If you want to follow along on this adventure with me, I will try and post an update every race day on this blog. Of course, there might be times where I’m just too deep in the mountains to connect to the webz.)

Now, off to rest while I still can …

I love the possibilities of SVG.

And in the current landscape of mind-blowing retina displays, we can’t ignore them. Chris Coyier gives a great overview of using them; I used his technique recently in a project. It worked great! I highly recommend it.

Also be sure to check out Kyle Foster’s SVG workflow video if you’re setting all this up for the first time.

Front-end development. What is it? Not all code running in the browser is “front-end code” anymore. It’s become blurry and difficult to assess what a front-ender should be responsible for in 2016. Single-page apps have joined so many coding technologies together that we need something to help us understand the division of who-does-what.

On the one hand, there is still a lot of design and user flow to consider. And on the opposite side, we still need servers that retain our data. In between, Angular and other JavaScript frameworks have been doing more and more dynamic tasks: Like taking that data and using API’s to push it to the browser (a la JSON).

That’s when I came across this article early this year. It has a fantastic visual showing the range of modern web responsibilities, and as the author states:

almost all developers occupy some contiguous segment of this continuum

 

I love this explanation. Bravo, Matt. Bravo. Thanks for breaking it down for us.