Good riddance to August

Wow... where to start?

It's been so, so long since I've written. The month of August was not very good to me, and life had me so busy that I barely touched this blog, written about my running, or even ran for that matter.

In my last post, it looks like my personal best at the Rock N Roll Half Marathon was the highlight of my month. Alas, I have survived and look forward to what the rest of the year holds in store for me.

Houston, we have a problem:

For those of you who work in IT, you know that when disaster hits the Data Center, things can go from bad to worse in a very short time. In the first three weeks of August, we had three disasters, one after the other, that caused us quite a bit of downtime, and many hours recovery time. Let me just say that three disaster type scenarios so close to each other is a very rare event in the IT world. I would spend more time at work than I did sleeping through the entire month of August.

The Perfect Storm:

A "perfect storm" of sequences managed to take down Internet access, a corporate email server, and an entire server farm in a streak of bad, bad luck that caused over three weeks of scattered downtime for our users. The last event even rarer still:

As soon as we come out of a weeks worth of a complete email server recovery, routine maintenance on a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) unit in the data center went awry after a power generator failed to kick in during a battery replacement. This caused the entire data center to go dark in the middle of the work day, and wreaked major havoc on over 13 production servers. This happened on a Friday, and our recovery took the rest of the weekend. All of us are still shaking our heads at the turn of events.

Coming into the first week of September now, things have quieted down quite a bit, thankfully. There is still lots of work to do, and although my days are pretty much back to normal, we are all still on pins and needles around here, and for good reason.

Running out of time:

My running mileage for the month of August took a pretty big hit due to all of the other fun I was having. I got as many runs in as I could, especially the long runs on the weekends. Clocking 12 to 18 hour days doesn't help with conserving energy, that's for sure. Still, the runs I did get in saved my sanity in a time when I thought my head would explode. Coming into September, I'm back on my normal training schedule.

What's next:

The Chicago Marathon is now less than five weeks away. The 16 mile run I did this past Saturday went really well, and my last 20 mile training run is in a couple of weeks. This weekend I'll be running the Lewis & Clark Half Marathon in St. Charles, MO. I'm using it as a tune up run for Chicago, and it is my last race until the big day.

So that's it. The post is a little longer than I thought, but it's done. I hope to keep writing, now that things have calmed down quite a bit.

Thanks for hanging in there :)