It’s that time of year again! Next Monday, Patriot’s Day, I will be running in the 113th running of the Boston Marathon along with around 25,000 other runners in New England. I don’t expect to break any records but I will be very pleased to complete the course. Most runners have to qualify but I received a waiver since I am running for charity, for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Put it this way – I will take full advantage of my waiver! With 550 runners in our team, we hope to raise around $4.85 million to help fund innovative cancer research. With friends and family watching, one feature that is very popular is the “Athlete Alert” on the www.bostonmarathon.com web site, which allows you to track a runner’s progress in real time. Each runner wears a radio frequency “chip” on their shoelaces which transmits location information at every 5 kilometer “split” so that online users can track progress over the web. This year, you can register to receive text messages at 10k intervals. Just Simply text RUNNER to 41234. You will then receive an SMS text message confirming how to track your runner.
My number is 22128. The favorite will be #1 Robert K. Cheruiyot, last year’s winner but watch out for another Robert Cheruiyot (#7) and Evan Cheruiyot (#3). These elite runners are all unrelated except that they are amazing runners from Kenya. Ryan Hall from California won last year’s London marathon so will be in the hunt also. On the women’s side Dire Tune (#F1) looks keen to repeat last year’s win. I’ll catch up with all of them later…very much later…
You will be happy to know that the database is hosted by Microsoft SQL Server running on HP ProLiant Servers in a Failover Cluster for high-availability. (These servers each have 8GB RAM and 8-way Dual-core 2.8GHz CPUs). Last year there were more than 3 million database queries submitted during the race. The expectations are that this year that will be a much bigger number.
My daughter asked me if I was going to win. “Well, if 20,000 runners take a wrong turn at Heartbreak Hill, then maybe I’ll have a chance…”
Cheers
