This post is about courage and failure, and how to think about success or failure when the objective is difficult. Aaron Steele's 2014 Leadville 100 race report [https://medium.com/@eightysteele/leadville-100-6f1cfdc47fa#.317q8inpt] is one of the more honest and inspiring race reports I've read. Leadville [https://en.wikipedia.org/ »

Tim Ferriss's interview of Seth Godin [http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/02/10/seth-godin/] was stunning. It made me feel the way I did at my first TED conference, at 16 in Monterey - "Why didn't anyone tell me that it was okay to think this way?" Seth thinks about the »

It's over! My first 100k is in the bag. I finished the 2015 Miwok 100k [http://miwok100k.com/site/] in 10 hrs and 12 minutes, good enough for 9th overall and 2nd place in my age group to a 23 year old crusher who took the overall win. The pace »

I've just merged a Cascalog pull request of mine [https://github.com/nathanmarz/cascalog/pull/270] that gives Cascalog operations access to the statistics that Cascading generates at the end of each job. I've also added global inc! and inc-by! functions that let you increment custom Hadoop counters from within »

This is my race report from the 2015 Jackson Hole skimo race, the second of two ski mountaineering races I completed this weekend. (Here's my report from yesterday's race at Grand Targhee.) Jackson was going to be bigger and badder than Targhee, no question. I knew that I'd be hucking »

Wow, I haven't gotten crushed that hard in a race in a long time. Just fully WHIPPED! Jenna and I drove out to Jackson yesterday for the "Wyoming Rando Roundup", my first real weekend of racing since I signed up for all of these races [https://samritchie.io/racing] a »

This post is about some of the books related to endurance training and sports that have inspired me over the last couple of years. Training for endurance events changes you. At the beginning of a season, on my first long run, ten minutes in I feel anxiety creep in. How »

Cascalog 2.0 has been out for over a year now, and outside of a post to the mailing list [https://groups.google.com/d/topic/cascalog-user/F8EkFM7HiE0/discussion] and a talk at Clojure/Conj 2013 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DuuJW3EaN_3Q] ( slides here [https://speakerdeck.com/sritchie/ »

A little side note before I get started - pivoting from my last post on ski mountaineering racing [http://www.samritchie.io/skimo-racing/] to this post on advanced Cascalog [https://github.com/nathanmarz/cascalog] patterns has made me realize that I'm a full-fledged connoisseur of the esoteric. I'm embracing it! »

Oh my god, I can't believe that this race is over! I'm sitting in my desk chair with a little blanket over me, knees wrecked, feeling like FDR. 26 hours and 15 minutes of mountain running, and a Strava page [http://www.strava.com/activities/190732635/overview] to prove it! »

(Jason Antin [https://twitter.com/jasonantin] cranking up A Basin in our second Skimo race of the year. Photo by Camera Photography [https://www.facebook.com/camaraphotography].) My running season ended in September with the Wasatch Front 100, and I resigned myself to a winter of weight lifting and sporadic »

Last weekend, I raced the Leadville Trail 100 [http://www.strava.com/activities/181566715] for the second time. Last year's race was physically brutal; I sat curled up at the 50 mile point, 11 pounds light and unable to keep down fluids, for almost two hours before rallying and banging »

I've just finished rewriting a number of PaddleGuru [https://paddleguru.com]'s internal APIs using two great open-source libraries; Liberator [http://clojure-liberator.github.io/liberator/] and Friend [https://github.com/cemerick/friend]. Liberator is a library for writing RESTful resources in Clojure. Friend is an authorization and authentication library written »

This is the year I teach myself to become a better public speaker. I've spent the past year coding up a number of powerful Scala and Clojure projects [http://sritchie.github.io/projects/], all the while avoiding the important and difficult work of teaching and writing about the import and »

This past weekend I ticked off one of my athletic life goals; the Leadville Trail 100, a brutal 100 mile running race in Colorado. I signed up for Leadville this May after a team injury forced our boat out of the 2013 Texas Water Safari [http://www.texaswatersafari.org/], a »