Antony Golding

Another marathon, another retirement! Number four was completed on 7 December 2008, this time the Las Vegas Marathon – my fourth in three years and a month. Just like after all of the others, I’ve decided to retire from full marathons and concentrate on smaller races such as 10k or half marathons.

The main reason for this is a simple one. Marathons are bloody hard work! Considering the long, hard training runs, the amount of time spent away from my girls when I was training, and the sheer exhausting nature of a marathon, it’s shorter runs for me from now on (until the next time I forget about all the pain I’ve endured and enter another).

I finished in Vegas in 3 hours 42 minutes 47 seconds, with a pretty good finishing position of 531 from 11,279 runners. This was my personal best time for a marathon, beating my 2007 Paris Marathon time by a full two minutes. Great!

Photos from the marathon are available in my Flickr set.

2008 statistics

During 2008, I ran a total of 527.31 miles. It was a very patchy year for my training with several months passing without more than a couple of runs, so 527 miles isn’t too bad. Considering the arrival of Mia in August too, my training in the last five months of the year has been pretty good.

The 2009 challenge

I’m challenging myself to almost double my 2008 mileage in the year of 2009. 1,000 miles is the goal, an average of 83 miles per month or around 20 miles per week. It’s an achievable target if I get a little more consistency and dedication to running. I’ll try, but it will be difficult. I start work at 7am, so running before work is out of the question. If I schedule a run for after I get home, it’s always a big challenge to leave my adorable daughter behind so soon after seeing her again. Running immediately after work but before getting home is the best weekday option, and I’ll be continuing the marathon ‘long run at the weekend’ plan.

I hope to take part in at least four half marathons and at least four 10k races in 2009. That should give me the necessary impetus to keep up my weekly mileage requirements. My first race is set – I’ll be taking part in the Great North West Half Marathon in Blackpool for the second time in February 2009. I got my best half marathon time in Blackpool in 2007, and I’ll be hoping to beat, or be very close to my 1 hour 35 minutes finish time from then.

A couple of extra challenges within the challenge are to finish a 10k race within 40 minutes, and a half marathon within 1 hour 30 minutes. If I manage either time, I’ll re-evaluate the challenge and try to reduce my personal bests further still.

And absolutely, definitely no more marathons. Well…

The time of year has arrived when 24 ways, the advent calendar for all web designers and developers, returns. From 1 to 24 December, a daily article containing ‘web design and development goodness’ is published.

The first installment, ‘Easing The Path from Design to Development‘, provides a useful reference on handing over a project from a creative designer to a web designer/developer, something which will have caused issues for many web coders.

Last week saw the launch of the new version of The Quays website, created by a partnership of businesses and organisations with interests in the Salford Quays area.

The difficulties of cross-browser rounded corners were highlighted during the design implementation. For CSS3 compliant browsers (or ones that support border-radius or a browser-specific alternative – such as -moz-border-radius – at least), the design appears as was originally intended. IE6 and IE7 utilise a “HTML Component (HTC)” behaviour file to mimic the CSS effect.

Browsers without border-radius or HTC support will get standard square blocks which don’t look too bad, but pale slightly when compared to the rounded versions.

Interestingly, and this was pointed out by Alex, the graphic designer of the site, Opera doesn’t support any variation of border-radius. Testing with both -o-border-radius or -opera-border-radius didn’t bring any joy, so it seems Opera is lagging behind both Gecko and Webkit browsers in the CSS3 implementation race. Unless anyone knows any differently?

If you can, geographically speaking, please do so.

… or get your marketeers to steal someone else’s promotional campaign.

For almost a year, Salford City Council’s Visit Salford website, leaflets and poster campaigns have all contained the phrase “Take a fresh look at Salford” as the main strapline.

Despite such a close proximity to Salford, which adjoins their town, Bolton Council have pilfered the strapline to use in their campaign to promote an area named Farnworth.

“Take a fresh look at Farnworth”? Take a fresh approach to marketing, Bolton Council – originality.