I am finally getting around to posting an entry about our amazing Wasatch Back Ragnar Relay experience from last weekend.   180.5 miles (I think that was the final tally), two vans, 11 people, 28 hours 5 minutes and 59 seconds, lots of sweat, Gatorade, water, Honey Buckets (can you believe that is the name of the company that provides Porta-Potties), and even some fun mixed in with some pain.  It is a testament to the brain's ability to selectively remember that I look back at the experience fondly.  My three legs were 5.1, 3.2, and either 5.2 or 5.6 (can't remember at this point I think it is the former).  For a total of around 13.5 miles.  My legs comprised the shortest segment of the race for any one runner I think (that is in interest of full disclosure - not necessarily something I am proud of).  I ran my first leg at a 9:08 pace and followed that up with an 8:33.  I was extremely pleased with those efforts - they were better or on my par with my best training runs. 

  My third leg was climbing up the road on the southeast side of Jordanelle that runs from Kamas to Heber.  It was brutal for me.  I finished it in with a 10:55 and that included walking which I did at the top of the inclines to give my screaming quads a break.  After that leg I collapsed into the van for over an hour while Sean and Megan finished out the last legs for our van - I was pretty oblivious to what was going on around me.  By the time I had recovered we were done and everyone was ready to eat some real food (the spaghetti Friday night at North Summit High School was good - but it was too late and I was too tired and hurrying to get to bed to truly enjoy it).

Below I linked to a search of Twitter (using something called tweetscan) for the posts that I did while we were running - it has quite a bit of info about how each member of our team did (Noel, Cory, Megan, Sean, Rachelle, and me) as well as how Van 2 (Stacey, Mark, Brian, Neal, and Daniel) did - although Van 2 I just cover overall - not individually.  I also have included a tweetscan search for all Ragnar posts - which catches a few others from other people (as well as some non Ragnar related ones).  Lastly is a link to the first photo album that I put up while we were running our first legs.  More should follow soon.

• http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=Ragnar&u=HintonBR&d=
• http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=Ragnar&
• Ragnar Relay 1 photos

Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles.  For a technical only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss).  For a family only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss)

  Well we are down to less than 3 days until the start of the Wasatch Back Ragnar Relay race - to be more exact about 66 hours to go.  Our training is much lighter this week - just one more training run to go after today (which will be tomorrow).  Today I hit an 8 1/2 minute mile pace over just under 3 miles - I was happy with it.  It is the fastest I have gone yet.  I don't anticipate averaging that over the Ragnar, but  it was cool to push myself.  My legs are more sore today than they have been for a while.  Sitting all day doesn't help much either!

  One of my first tasks at my new job has been to look at integrating the Exception Handling block and Logging block into our .NET Stack.  We are also exploring using Unity as the Dependency Injection container.

  Things were moving along as I started playing with Unity and the Exception Handling block, but as soon as I tried to simply add logging of the handled Exception - it all blew up in my face.  Fortunately others had discovered the problem as well which was traced back to a bug in the CLR which had previously been reported and marked as fixed in .NET 4.0.  Now I understand that bugs happen and especially when they are bugs in the underlying platform there is only so much to be done.  The Entlib team did provide a code fix that could be applied to the source code and then with a custom compilation of Entlib you could be off and running again.  Well sort of - having a custom version of Entlib introduces other problems when you are talking about using the VS config tool to manage Entlib config.  When deploying this to 30 developers so they can manage Entlib config on their projects it gets to be problematic as the instructions for getting the built-in config tool involves changing solution properties and copying binaries around are not trivial.

  If I were doing something out of the ordinary I would be more willing to pay the price  - but I am trying to do the most basic Unity-EntLib integration here.  I am disappointed that issues with such a common scenario weren't caught before release.  The p&p teams have obviously invested time to make Unity and EntLib play nicely together (ala the Unity extensions that are available out of the box to enable Entlib to work with Unity) - I would have imagined that acceptance testing of any sort would have caught this.  Perhaps the explanation is as simple as the issue repros differently (perhaps JITs differently) on different machines.  Here is hoping that when the fix to the binaries that is hopefully in the works comes out that the team will explain how this happened.  Based on the principles that p&p espouses I know they value quality highly which makes this even more unusual. 

 Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles.  For a technical only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss).  For a family only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss)