Dani and I signed up to run a half marathon on October 4th, but in case you hadn’t noticed there is a global pandemic going on, and the government of Quebec deemed the 42 km track of the entire marathon as one place (the organizers were quite sassy about this). However, I have a group of friends that enables one another to be extra, so we decided to organize our own half marathon instead. We planned our route, printed bibs, had a bike crew to support, and best of all, made 3D-printed medals (you can probably guess which one I was in charge of). This race became a great mix of three pandemic projects, pacing, printing, and “python-ing”.
Let’s start with the main one, running. While I have always been athletic, I never really enjoyed running or jogging just for the sake of it. This pandemic forced me to find an excuse to get out of the house and running quickly became a household favorite. As soon as my roommates and I got Strava things started to get real, and “Kudos” started flying around the house daily.
At the start, I would get tired after only one kilometer, but slowly I built up my endurance and was able to run 2, 3, 5, 9km without the much-needed break. Proving what I knew all along, that I am a machine that never gets tired. By that point, I actually started smiling during my runs, shouting, and fist-bumping for motivation, and genuinely enjoyed my time outside.
Although I could feel myself improving, running faster and longer distances, as the summer progressed, I wanted to prove it. This meant showing the data and creating some beautiful graphs. I am teaching myself some python, and this was a perfect application. I went through the Strava API and used the bokeh library to create a graph showing my runs over time, colored by how close they were to October 4th (the day of our race)
This was the first time I’ve created interactive graphs, and I will definitely be using them more often. Go ahead, use the slider and see the dots appear and disappear, or hover over the dots and see their fun alliterative titles (I started doing that at the end so no fun titles at the start). If you are curious and want to see the actual run, click on the dots and it should take you to the Strava website.
I hope you had fun with that graph, and I trust you clicked the clickable things, but now look at this one! I plotted the distance (km) that I ran vs the pace I was running at (km/h) . Moving the date slider back and forth two different trends show up. The graph shows the two types of runs that I trained for. The first, a 5km loop which I ran faster as time went by, shown by the vertical line (pace goes down at a constant distance). The second trend, the horizontal line, shows my longer runs at pace (constant pace but increasingly longer runs).
Finally, to conclude my story, I’ll go into a little more detail on the 3D-printed medals. After the race got canceled, our household was furious and decided to take matters into our hands by organizing our own race. The recently purchased 3D printer came to mind as a tool to make the medals. It took a couple of failed ideas and attempts before I was able to finalize the part. I ended up experimenting with changing the filament mid-print, and given it was my first time doing so, the result was quite good. This will certainly not be the last two or even three-color print that I do. Below you can see the final result, Dani came through with her sewing skills to add the “germ green” bands, making them look even more official.