Hitting the wall !

I've never run a marathon, but last year I made my best effort (so far). With weekly trips of 17K I felt I was on track. In my preperations I talked to friends who has finished the dreaded 42,125K and heard about "hitting the wall". Their description was kinda like "everything was OK, according to schedule. I was tired but doing OK and then all of a sudden my body was drained. Everything hurt and I couldn't focus on running anymore". Even though I never pushed my body to that extent, over the 17K runs I imagined what it would be like. The ironic point is that most were within the last 10K or less.

As far as MEEP goes, I'm afraid that I'm close to hitting the wall! I've looked over the initial MEEP schedule, and I'm pretty close to finishing what was mentioned in that first curriculum. I'm confident that I could have finished that within the first 3 months, looking at it from where I stand now. The ironic thing about this is, that the scope of my MEEP has changed. The finish line has been moved while I've been running.

Now another 4 books (1741 pages) have been added, moving the finishing line so far out in the distance that I seriously doubt that I can cross it within the allotted time.

Further more I'm worried as to the direction I'm going. In a real marathon the course is clearly marked, people line the streets and at tricky intersections special markers indicate the direction to run. As for MEEP, I don't see the course as clearly. We have all been given the challenge to read and increase our knowledge, but the structure has not been clear to me at all times. I'm afraid that I spend too much time on one thing, and won't make it through something even more important. On the other hand I'm forced to move forward at a breathtaking pace if I'm to have even a remote chance of finishing all the material within the time set aside for this.

The hands-on exercise was actually really good. Even though it sounds like we hugely disappointed Mogens, us MEEP'ers all agree that it was very good and we all learned new things there. As for James Morle I was greatly impressed. I only knew his name from peeking at his book and from chapter 8 of "Tales of the Oak Table". I was perhaps expecting a bit more Bill Gates, both in appearance and age but what I found was perhaps more Ewan McGregor. A really cool guy probably not much older than myself with alot of knowledge and still giving us the impression that we were all seeing eye to eye. A pleasant surprise :)

As a final note on my progress, I'm halfway through Dan Tow's "SQL Tuning". I find this book very "dry" and have opted to switch it for Cary Millsaps "Optimizing Oracle Performance". Desperately scrambling for progress and knowledge. Perhaps also hoping that the advice of the Cheshira Cat in Alice in Wonderland holds true "if you don’t know where you are going any road will take you there”