October 2024 – LINISNIL

i’m currently working on running a consistent weekly mileage of 16 miles this year and hopefully making my way up to 20-25 by the beginning of next year.

so far … it’s been going mostly good. a couple of weeks ago following a 5k race (i hit a pr of 23:57 at a 7:43 mile pace!) i started experiencing some very mild symptoms of runners knee / patella-femoral syndrome (more so on my right knee, towards the medial underside of the patella) but it seems to be subsiding / not getting worse over time. i’ve been trying to loosen up my quads a bit with rollers to see if that helps but i’ll keep an eye on it

my current training schedule is:

sunday	long run (8 miles)
monday	recovery / easy run (2 miles)
tuesday	recovery / strength training (lower body) (3 miles)
wednesday	easy run combined with a workout like strides or tempo
thursday	recovery / strength training (upper body) (3 miles)
friday	easy run combined with a workout like stride or tempo
saturday	rest / recovery. no strength training to prepare legs for long run the following day

this schedule is basically identical to the boilermaker 15k training program that i’ve been following for the last 3 years (very inconsistently). in my first two boilermakers i ran with my wife and we did about an avg 12min pace and finished in just under two hours. this year in july i ran by myself and finished in 1:28 at a 9:31 mile pace.

the key thing about this training schedule is that it follows a mostly low intensity, 80/20 philosophy where at least 80% of the runs are easy runs and at most 20% is high intensity. with 16 miles per week, 20% is about 3 miles and that’s how much time i try to spend in higher intensity running distributed between tuesday and thursday. outside of that, i try (but not always successfully…) to stick to an easy pace of 10-11min mile.

there’s a couple of tweaks i’d like to start making to my running moving forward to hopefully reduce any risk of injury and improve my overall enjoyment of running

adopt RPE (rate of perceived exertion) as primary measure during my runs instead of glancing at my watch first to gauge effort based on pace or heart rate. i run on hills often and sometimes focusing on pace causes me to go much faster than i should for easy days
pick a couple of specific and recurring workouts for my run workout days on tuesday and thursday. right now it’s a bit make up as i go and i’d like to just remove that decision making on the day of

hex notation shows up a lot in computing so it’s really useful to understand. it’s really hard though to learn to take your base 10 lens off because that’s what we’re so accustom to!

in base 10 position notation, each place represents up to 10 digits (0-9). this is really handy because when we go beyond 9, we can shift over and use a new position to denote 9 + 1. so the value of each position in a base 10 integer is essentially the radix (10) raised to the power of the position index which starts at 0.

for example, the digit symbol 8 below represents the value 8 because every digit is below 10. once you most leftward to a new position, each digit actually represents 10^1 all the way to the leftmost position 10^n.

the same set of digits for a base 16 system ends up looking the same, but the actual value is different. below, 128 in base 16 is 296. from right to left, 8 + 32 + 256 = 296. this is because rather than representing 10 symbols in each place, hex holds 16 symbols

in base 10, each place holds one of 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. in base 16, each place holds one of 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F where A = 10 (base 10), B = 11, C = 12, D = 13, E = 14, F = 15. so A in base 16 is equivalent to 10 in base 10. when looking at this for the first time, it looks wild because you’re so accustomed to equating the symbols “10” with the value “10” (both in base 10), so switching bases really requires you to decouple the numerical symbolic representation (may or may not be base 10) from the value (which you still want to think about and write in terms of base 10).

one of the handiest things about hex and why it’s commonly used in computing is its relationship with binary or base 2 notation. machines encode all information in binary format. compared to decimal and hexadecimal, binary notation only holds 2 values in each positional index (0 and 1). the interesting relationship, though, between binary and hexadecimal is that 16 is actually 2 raised to the 4th power. put another way, we can represent any single hexadecimal value with four binary values and vice versa. this makes converting values between the two bases much easier than converting between binary and base 10. i highly recommend checking out this khan academy video to gain a intuition behind the why

thanks to this relationship, we can use hex as a far more compact literal representation of binary values. while binary is the most efficient for computers, writing in hex makes it far easier to write and read for humans. for example, the bits 1111 can be represented with just F since they both represent the value of 15 (decimal). four bits can represent up to 15 values. what else represents 15 values? a single hexadecimal digit! and since hex is a power of 2, we can expand this beyond just four bits – we can pretty much use hex to quickly convert really any sequence of bits in most computing architectures whether they’re 32bit (8 groups of 4 bits) or 64bit

Month: October 2024

running training load update

hexadecimal notation