I haven’t updated my gallery @ halfviking.com since September so this weekend I uploaded all my New Year, Christmas, Frank and Nic’s wedding, Franks Stag, Marathon and visits to Clare photos as well as updating my Colwyn Bay gallery. Plenty of fun photos there… enjoy.
Thanks to all for coming out on Saturday night to celebrate my 29th year on this god forsaken credit crunching land. It turned into a bit of a lads fest with a trip to the dog track and getting blind drunk in town. I’m only one away from the triocha now….. arghh!!!!!!
The lads were showing off their Mos too. Congrats to all of them
My Irish bank AIB has recently launched a redesign to their site. I’m a devout Firefox user and the site used to work in Firefox. Today I tried to access it and got a blank screen. I viewed source to see if it was something obvious but it was blank. I then tried in IE7. Works fine (and does look well I might add). It also works in Opera 9.25. I had a read of their accessibility statement and saw this…
Sorry AIB.. you fail.
Update: I also sent them an email from their contact form and it now seems to be fixed… Totally redeemed yourself!!!
Today I had to book a ticket so I can go and help my Dad with some building work he is doing. The wonderful Aer Arann have a flight from Manchester to Galway so I figured I’d get that. I found a flight for the Friday night and booked it. A few seconds later I received a text message with the flight details and my booking number. Super, no need to print anything.
I then had to book a train ticket to get to Manchester airport (which very conveniently has a train station), I searched National Rail and was able to SMS the itinerary to my phone, awesome. I didn’t buy my ticket from National Rail as I already have an account with The Train Line so I bought my ticket from them instead. Shortly after I received a text message with my order details.
I think using SMS like that is absolutely brilliant, I don’t have to print anything, check my email or remember to bring anything at all with me. I do like to see progress like this. Good work
As mentioned before I managed to finish the Dublin marathon last Monday. It was a gruelling experience. I wasn’t able to run at all in the three/ four weeks leading up to the race due to an injury sustained in the half marathon. 8 physio sessions later and with a wallet a lot lighter race day came upon me.
I carbed up the days before the race and got plenty of liquids on board too and felt quite good apart from the knowledge that my knee was still not 100%. My physio said that I should take 4 Ibuprofen before the race to help with the knee but I have a nervous tummy and didn’t want to risk ibuprofen, instead I took two solpadine and was going to take another two just before the race….. that stuff is vile!!!!! so I only managed the first two.
My mum drove me in on race morning and waited around with me while I stretched and warmed up (my warm up run felt great so I was gunning for a good race).
I bullied my way to about 8 rows from the front of the runners as there is nothing worse than trying to get by people on race start (as I found in the 10 mile race earlier in the year). I was crazy nervous but some Al Pacino “Inches” calmed me down just before the starting gun went. I tore off with the runners so I wouldn’t get trampled and soon settled into my desired pace which was between 6.30 and 6.50 minutes per mile. I felt great and was really flying with a 41:54 10km split.
However soon after 10 miles my knee (specifically the soleus muscle) started to flare up big time.
You can see from the graph (my Garmin forerunner 405 worked a treat) where it all went wrong. People talk of the “wall” so I thought maybe the pain was the “wall” and not my knee, I tried battling through but no such luck. My legs felt good so I was mega pissed off but figured if I stopped and stretched every now and again I would be OK and still get an acceptable time.
I battled on stopping every km to stretch and walk. I stopped for an aided stretch with my mates at 12 miles (cheers Paddy) and also with a physio about 13. My dad was at 21 miles so I stopped and took on some glucose with him, The sugars didn’t last long as I had to sit/ lie down on the kerb at 23. My sugar levels were very low and I felt very faint. A very VERY hot FM104 lady gave me three small bags of Haribo which I wolfed down and shuffled off again. She was really hot!!
The last few miles were pure agony with every muscle cramping up. I saw Brian and Carol at the approach to the finish which gave me a boost but then I saw my Mum’s Norwegian flag waving furiously which gave me a huge burst of energy and sprinted to the finish line crossing in 4 hours and 7 minutes and 52 seconds. Nearly an hour later than expected (my eventual goal is 3.15 to 3.30) but I was just sooooo happy to finish it.
To redeem myself I have signed up for a 10km before Christmas, a half marathon in March and I might have secured myself a place in the late April London marathon (I’ll be hitting you all up for sponsorship for that one).
The crowd were amazing and thanks to my friends and family that came out to support me… It really did help. Thanks to all the strangers that shouted my name (painted on my shirt) and to those who handed out sweets and drinks. It was a great day despite experiencing worlds of pain I had never even dreamt of.
Thanks to all and well done to all finishers!!!!!
Speed statistics for the race. The sharp increase around 1.5 miles has to be a GPS glitch as I definitely did not run at 4.21 pace at any stage. 
Race statistics, I would have thought I’d used more than 2880 calories, it certainly felt like it.
My official results
I also have the kml (Dublin_marathon_27th_October_2008.kml) and kmz (Dublin_marathon_27th_October_2008.kmz) files exported from google earth as well as my race on google maps.
What would I do differently:
Bring on London 2009!!!!!
I posted a reply on the boards.ie Dublin Marathon 2008 thread and through I’d cross post here.
Hi guys, I’ve not read all the posts yet but well done to all. It was a great day.
It was my first and with a injury from the half marathon I struggled across in 4.07, sooooo happy to finish.
Throughout the whole adidas series I’ve been outraged at the price of the marathonfoto.com photos, €25 per download is insane!! You can get a CD with all your photos for €35 (which makes no sense at all) but you’ve got to wait about two weeks for that.
So in the interim I’ve managed to sniff the url for the higer res images (used in the flash based image cropper [which they seem to have disabled for this race]).
If your thumbnail page URL is
you need to extract the customer number from it, mine is S24G12.
When viewing this page you can see all your photos with a number to the right. This is the photos number. The first one on my page is 55798583.
Using this photos number and my customer number I can download a much higher res version of the photo than the crappy thumbnail
Where you replace S24G12 with your customer number and 55798583 with your photo number.
I hope the above is useful 🙂
Finally, I don’t want to be too negative so I will say that marathonfoto.com is a great service but your thumbnails suck and your pricing model is bizarre. I have officially complained to them and they will be getting €35 from me when they’ve completed the identification of the race.
I saw this on reddit and cracked up
“There will be days when you don’t know whether you can run a marathon, but there will be a lifetime knowing that you have – impossible is nothing”
I’ll give a more detailed post soon about the pain of the marathon but suffice to say I managed to finish it.
As some of you know I’m doing the marathon on Monday and I’m sh*tting myself already. I haven’t been able to train for the last 3 weeks because of an injury so I badly need something to compensate. I’m going with pain relief drugs, energy gels and some really kick ass tunes and possibly some cheating (with the aid of a moped or maybe a segway). Much appreciated if you can list the artist and title of some guaranteed music to speed me on my way (any genre).
Update: – This is what I have so far (2.7 hours [that’s not my target time by the way 😉 ])
I’ve signed up for a masters in UCD (Advanced Software Engineering in University College Dublin) starting in December. I’m really looking forward to it and as a treat I bought a new (used) laptop that’ll be just for Uni work. It’s an IBM Thinkpad T43 (Centrino 1.7Ghz and 1GB ram with 40GB HD, Wifi, Bluetooth, PCMCIA, Expresscard and all the other usuals) I bought it on ebay (where else?) for £240 delivered. The build quality is excellent and I’m very happy with it. I’ve got Ubuntu 8.04 running on it and it’s going quite well. I’ve encountered the following problems:
Lest not forget that there are millions of positives with Ubuntu, especially the Synaptic package manager and power management.
I’m loving Gnome and I’m trying to find a few cycles to play with MonoDevelop properly. I’ve been trying to get the localising feature in MonoDevelop working with an ASP.NET web application but no joy yet. I can get it working on a command line app though :).