Remainder Reminder

 Well, I got my homepage into a position that I like, and rolled it out. It has a cool kind of old-style terminal vibe that I like (click and take a look, I'll wait!). I think it also looks cool on mobile, where I moved the sections to tabs on the side and still holds most of the same old terminal vibes without the exact same form factor. I also made it navigable via keyboard (as well as mouse/touch) to really give it that terminal feeling. The problem is, I have no content, haha. I actually just would like to use it for a kind of landing page that shows various projects I am working on, but that kind of gets weird because of my diversity of interests. I still need to think about how to represent various different types of projects in a way that is at least somewhat intuitive or at least makes sense. We'll see how that goes.

A couple days ago I was writing about my old blogs and how they just disappeared into the ether, which had me thinking about it just as I was going to bed and a lightbulb popped over my head. Wayback Machine! So rather than going to bed at my usual early hour, I crawled through a bunch of snapshots and uncovered some old gems. Well, gems for my nostalgia, I don't think anyone really cares about me playing FFXI or drinking to excess for a frankly disturbing number of days in a row. And just looking through now, I found some writing that is fairly transphobic*, even though it is couched language expressing that I don't care how other people live, which was I guess fairly tolerant for 2005, but in 2024 just isn't cutting it. So, perhaps fortunately, my blog wasn't popular enough to be indexed too often, and there are only bits and pieces available to read. Still, I am considering trying to dredge through and maybe repost anything interesting I come across (if there is anything like that) for curiosity value.

In other news, I have been training for a half marathon. Before COVID I was a pretty competitive runner, and would generally finish in the top 10-20 participants in any given half marathon. Then COVID hit and I stopped exercising. There was an outdoor mask rule that people took seriously, and it is hard to do cardio with a mask on, so I basically just gave up. Fast forward to about a year ago (April/May 2023) and my work sponsored people to join the Incheon Half Marathon. I signed up for the 10k race because I knew I was in terrible shape, and ended up having to run walk to a 56:53 finish (I just looked it up). That is a shameful pace and I felt terrible about myself. I realized that I needed to get my act together and start doing something because this wasn't good.

I started running daily again after that wake-up call and pushed and pushed most of last year. My pre-COVID half marathon time was between 85-88 minutes, and I really wanted to get back to that level, nevermind that I am five years older now (45!!! almost 46!!!). I didn't manage to break the 90 minute barrier last year (I ran something like 90:20 in November), but I was right there, and felt confident entering 2024 that I would be in a good place come Spring. Also, there is a certain poetry behind the idea that I went from run walking a 10k at the 2023 Incheon Half Marathon to being back on my game and running under 90 minutes in the half course at the 2024 race. 

Sadly, that was not to be. The original date that registration closed was like April 22, with the caveat that there was only room for 10,000 runners. The race never filled up in the past, so I waited. When I checked it on April 6th, just out of curiosity, the website had a pop up that said they reached the quota and registration would end on April 5th at 5:00pm. I missed the deadline by like 12 hours. This was frustrating on multiple levels. First, I really like the Incheon Half Marathon. It starts at Munhak Stadium and then goes straight down the road through some underpasses, over some overpasses, then over the Songdo Campustown Bridge and all the way down through Songdo to the sea before looping back and ending at the stadium. It is a beautiful run, and it is in my neighborhood. Also, it is a big race and they have some international talent come to compete for prize money. The second reason I got frustrated was because I had planned my training specifically for the date of May 12, and now had to scramble to find another race. One annoyance of living in Songdo is that it is surrounded by the sea and even though it is in the 'metro area', getting to races in Seoul or other places is too much hassle. 

Anyway, I looked at the race calendar and weighed my options. There was a small race in Sangam (Seoul World Cup Stadium) on the same day, and then another race on May 25 in Incheon at Seaside Park on Yeongjongdo (where the airport is). I weighed my options, small uncool race in an inconvenient place but on the correct date, or wait two weeks and run a more fun race closer to home. Well, the deciding factors were that I was training for a specific date and that May 12 is a Sunday, while May 25 is a Saturday. Sundays are easier for me to manage with family obligations and such, and so I chose the smaller less convenient race. Plus, the real scale-tipper was that May 12 in the morning will probably have tolerable weather, while May 25 is getting really close to the blast furnace zone of Korean summer. Either way, Game On.

*I am embarrassed and appalled that I would ever write something like this, and even though probably no one read it then and no one will read this now, I am sorry that I said such gross things. That being said, it makes me feel good to know that I've grown as a person enough that I see previous writing and am like ewwww, I cannot believe that I wrote that.