Tag Archives: Olympics

Great quotes from Olympic athletes

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The ultimate quotes – inspirational, motivational and more – from Olympic athletes…

  1. “Falling in life is inevitable, staying down is optional” ~ Carrie Johnson
  2. “Never put an age limit on your dreams” ~ Dara Torres
  3. “When anyone tells me I can’t do anything, I’m just not listening anymore” ~ Florence Griffith Joyner
  4. “The only way to overcome is to hang in” ~ Dan O’Brien
  5. “If you want to be the best, you have to do things that other people aren’t willing to do” ~ Michael Phelps
  6. “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” ~ Missy Franklin
  7. “Nothing can substitute for just plain hard work” ~ Andre Agassi
  8. “Everything that I’ve ever been able to accomplish in skating and in life has come out of adversity and perseverance” ~ Scott Hamilton
  9. “The potential for greatness lives within each of us” ~ Wilma Rudolph
  10. “Have fun, because that’s what life is all about” ~ Ryan Lochte

And a link to another blog (“parents desk”) with some more great quotes.

Truly inspirational.  The motto for the London 2012 Olympics was “Inspire a generation” – I think they’ve gone way beyond this and inspired generations.

London does it best.  I can’t wait for the Paralympics and we’ve got tickets.  Super humans and even more inspiration.

Why testing is important…

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Another Olympic post – this time on the genius (not) that is the London 2012 Olympic ticketing system.  This will be a vent of sorts, as I’ve spent too much time messing about trying to buy tickets as have millions of others.

The games themselves have been nothing short of amazing and what all the athletes have accomplished is incredible, but sport is also about people watching it.  And for an event of this scale you need a good mechanism in place to get people to see the sports they want to see.

Before we get started on the main theme of the post, Royal Mail have done it again.  We managed to get tickets for the Paralympics that start in a couple of weeks time.  An e-mail from LOCOG confirming we’d got them arrived (and we’d paid £6 for super delivery rather than picking them up at the event).  But no details on when they’d arrive, even roughly – so a black hole and left hoping they would arrive in time.  Then an e-mail from Royal Mail telling me the tickets were ready to be delivered…

Followed by another to tell me the tickets would be with me the next day.  And then one to confirm they’d been received by me, literally within seconds of me electronically signing for them with the local postie.  Now that is real service and great to see the Royal Mail – that great British institution – as a shining beacon in the whole Olympic ticketing fiasco.

The actual ticketing system went live around April 2011 – so over 16 months ago – and in that time it hasn’t changed one bit (as in problems fixed, updates done etc).  That’s a year with no new development.  How can that be right?  Was it perfect when first released?  Had all the testing that was done shown it to be perfect?  No and that’s one big no.

Rather than go into all the issues myself there is a great post on BuzzFeed Sports by Alex Rees that very nicely gives you all the juicy details – see below (it’s worth a read)…

It is very apparent from this that virtually no real testing on how the site or service works can possibly have been done.  User acceptance testing?  No – why do we need to do that, it’ll work.  Load testing?  Will many people be wanting to use the site at the same time?  Surely not.  Performance testing?  It’s just a web site.  Problems identified by the public (the users or customers), should we fix them within 16 months?  No, what’s fixing all about?

Any of these are part of computing for beginners 101, and to get onto building a web-site 101 you have to have got the first certificate already.

So why has this happened?  Good old outsourcing.  LOCOG clearly aren’t a software house and don’t build ticketing or e-commerce sites.  So they put together an RFI and get it out with all the big boys in the market place, including ticketmaster (who won it and built the site).  And it will have come down to money – ticketmaster will have bid and bid at a price they could win at and LOCOG will have picked the cheapest so they keep costs down.  Now I may be making some assumptions here, but I’ll bet they’re right!

The site will have been designed to some brief specs (or even an Agile type user story) – we need to sell tickets for the Olympic events for the public – it couldn’t be simpler.  They will have been paid to build it and maybe run it for a little bit but future development, fixes, upgrades etc?  Never – why would we need them, it’s only the Olympics and it’s only on for a short known period.  It’s not an Amazon type service that will keep running.

That’s the key here.  This has never been built to improve or do the job well, it’s been built to just (almost) do the job and no-one’s re-visited it (the design) since and has no intention to.

Testing before we go-live?  Why would we possibly need to do that?  Testing with our actual end users and listening to what they say?  Surely not, you only get…

  • Empty seats
  • Bad press
  • Frustrated British public

But like I said at the start it has been an absolutely awesome Olympic games, the best I’ve seen – and we did get some tickets (for the rowing) and saw some of the free events (road cycling) and today we’re off to see the men’s marathon in London.  And my favourite bits –  the men’s 100m, 200m, 4x100m and the men’s 10,000m and 5,000m.  Mo Farah – a local Teddington man who went to St. Mary’s University in Twickenham (where we do our karate now) and a Bushy Park Parkrun runner – is my hero of the games!  What an athlete.

The little Nobles doing the Mobot after his 5,000m win last night and the man himself with Mr. Bolt…

London does it best…!

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Yes we’re there.  London 2012 is here now and we’ve got another amazing week to go.  The last 7 years of planning, moaning about costs, getting the transport infrastructure sorted out, training for all the athletes, buying (or in most cases trying to buy) tickets and everything else Olympic related has finished and we’re now celebrating in great British style.

The opening ceremony was something else.  A great show, showcasing the amazingness that is this great island country and less of the spectacle that Beijing 2008 was.  Some parts maybe missed if you’re not British but they were genius!  The Mr. Bean bit had us in complete stitches.  Classic.

We had our own Olympic party to watch the ceremony and all got into the spirit of it in true British style…

And then the games began.  Unbelievable achievements everywhere for all countries.  Some stunning events – including gymnastics (what these guys can do with their bodies defies belief), weightlifting (how much can they lift?), athletics (my favourite) and much much more.  The training, focus and everything all the athletes put into it, is a real inspiration to us all.

We had tickets to see the rowing early in the week which was amazing.  Standing seats (?) only but a great atmosphere.  Seeing the boats going past along the 2km course is very cool, with the crowd cheering for them.  Living in Twickenham we were lucky enough to see the cycling time trials come through here – over and done with in 8 seconds (going past you) but again great to see.

      

Paralympic athletic and judo tickets also for us, so more amazingness to see in a few weeks time.

Mrs. Noble managed to see the Olympic torch coming through Richmond – exactly where I was working until the end of last year (typical) and then again going up the Thames to the Olympic Park for the opening ceremony.  Daddy was working so didn’t get to see them!

   

We headed up to Heathrow Airport the week before the Olympics to spot athletes coming in and we did.  We got to see the teams for Australia (rowing), Japan, India (table tennis), UAE, Mongolia, Estonia and a few others.  Very cool to see them arriving.

On the opening weekend we had to venture up into London – without event tickets (on the off chance that we could have bought some – fat chance, the whole ticketing system and process has been a complete and utter shambles; you couldn’t do it worse and whoever built – ha! – the actual online system needs a severe talking to; but that’s for a different post – to be titled something about why testing and planning is important).  And complete with friends up from the South coast.  Great fun, getting the buzz everywhere.  No tickets, not even close but good to be up in the middle of it all.  And seeing our great British armed forces on patrol – filling in brilliantly where G4S abysmally messed up – was the ultimate in re-assurance.

   

Our London 2012 mascots are everywhere in London and all very nicely themed.  Now I’m working in the city (near Bank) I’ve done some great great runs around the city at lunchtime and even better to Vauxhall – part of the way home – in the evenings.  The run across Tower Bridge, along the South Bank, across the Millennium Bridge (what was the wobbly bridge), past London Bridge, past Waterloo and the great London Eye is unbelievable.  What a run past some of the greatest sites in the world.

Amazingly the London transport system is doing very well under the immense pressure that this many more people brings.  There are signs at all the train stations pointing you in the right direction to the different Olympic venues, tube train maps have been updated showing you the right stops to get off at, Olympic volunteers are everywhere to help and daily updates are sent out (by e-mail) to let you know busiest stations that day.  It’s all working and well…

Go Team GB.  An awesome achievement so far and more to come.  14 gold medals (as of now) and 3rd in the medal tables behind the USA and China (both much much bigger countries in terms of land sizes and populations).

A great stat below from a friend on Facebook today…

London doesn’t get much better than this.

The 45 minute barrier has been cracked again!

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Back to the running theme.  Only 3.5 weeks until the British 10k.  Here’s a quick reminder of the route of the race…

It goes past some of London’s best known (and best) sites and we’ll be able to wave (quickly) at the Queen in Buckingham Palace on way past.  With all the roads closed running along routes like this, it’s special and reminds you what a cool city London is.

For more details on the route and history around the places see below…

It’s going to be a busy race – with some 25,000 runners expected but they’ll be a real buzz about.  The Olympics starts here only a few weeks after and part of the route is the same as planned Olympic Marathon route – very cool.

It starts at 9:35 I think – so not too early.  It’s always a joy commuting up to central London for that time on a Sunday morning though – and typically there’s a normal Sunday train schedule running (i.e. not very frequent).

I’m aiming for a finish time of around 43 minutes on the day.  It may be difficult to start at the right pace depending on people traffic but the overall time is do-able.  I did a great 10k run (on the local roads) a week after the London Marathon and got just under 45 minutes.  A few others since then a bit slower but then a great great run yesterday (same route) and 30 seconds faster.  Sub-44 or even sub-43 is a possibility!

The winner last year came home in just over 29 minutes – that’s insane and awesome.  At the 4 minutes 35 seconds per mile pace again.  Which means they’re 2 miles ahead of me then – 30% of the race.  Amazing!

I’m really looking forward to this run and pushing myself.

Royal Mail show us how it should be done – London Olympic tickets

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Despite the fiasco about booking tickets for the London 2012 Olympics and the lack of thought that seems to have gone into the whole way the tickets are sold to UK residents (and how user friendly the systems aren’t and how the system couldn’t handle the demand for tickets, I could go on but that’s not what this blog post is about), the tickets we did get have arrived.

A very nice package, with tickets and a bit of information about the event.  It’s for rowing, which is over in Windsor, so not London, but they’ve very kindly included 4 travelcards for us to use on the day to get to the event in London.  Hmmmmm.

And they’re standing area only but the cheapest “seats” or tickets so not too unexpected.

Don’t get me wrong, I may sound not too positive about all this but I am.  It’s going to be an awesome summer in London and as I’ve said in previous posts, this is London’s year.  Plus with the Jubilee celebrations this weekend, it really doesn’t get much better.

I was at a conference in London this week about the online Olympics and the technology behind the scenes is incredible.  Never have there been games before where the demand for online media has been so great.  Back in 2008 for the Beijing Olympics, social media services like YouTube, Twitter and even Facebook were still growing up.  In 2012 it’s a completely different story, social media is pretty much everywhere and being used in all sorts of different ways, by consumers (of all ages), brands and everyone else.  The demand on the back-end infrastructure for storage, distribution and more is going to be unprecedented.  The task of forecasting what to expect will have been no small feat, and no doubt is still changing and being fine tuned.  The plans around redundancy and how to fix problems – with the technology – will be something else.  What the BBC have planned is fantastic – their Sports page on their web-site is the centre piece and the experience you’ll get on all devices – personal computers, tablets, mobiles, smart TVs and anything else, is going to be so good that it will almost (maybe not quite) be a better more immersive experience than actually being there!  That annual license fee we pay in the UK for the BBC doesn’t look too bad.  The planned 24 live better than HD (as we know it) simultaneous video streams is impressive to say the least.  This really is the first global online digital Olympics.  Right up my street – in both ways!

The BBC have got it right, lots they’ve learnt from that amazing service that is the BBC iPlayer and other global British broadcasts they’ve done – the Royal Wedding last year for example.

But the ticket system and booking events, we’ve not got it quite right.  One shining light here though – and the subject of this post – is Royal Mail.  That amazing British institution that just works so well.  Where else in the world can you post a letter or anything for that matter and know it will arrive anywhere else in the country pretty much the next day.  Yes the prices have just gone up, but it’s still worth it.  Interestingly as well, a postman I was speaking to only this week, said it’s one of the few services you still pay for before they deliver and actual give you the service.

Having had a few e-mails from the Olympic organisers about when roughly to expect the tickets to arrive, you kind of sit back just waiting and hoping.  This morning, I got an SMS message and e-mail from Royal Mail telling me the tickets would arrive today.  They then arrived care of our very friendly local postman Mick, with a big smile on his face.  Signed for with the mobile pad he had and then literally less than one minute later another SMS message and e-mail confirming they’d been received.  Now that’s proper service and a very very good use of the latest technology.  Keep it up Royal Mail, another reason Britain is brilliant.

What to do next and have you recovered?

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That’s it all over – all those months of training and 26.2 miles around London all done.  For charity, for fun, for your own PB, just to say you’ve done it or for a million other great reasons.  5 days on from the big event, the aches and pains just about gone, walking normally, going down stairs freely and back maybe doing a few easy runs!

The first few days are difficult and the legs don’t work as well as they should and stairs are very painful.  It’s amazing how different a 23 mile training run is to the actual 26.2 mile race.  For all my training runs over 20 miles, just showered and stretched after each and then carried on as normal and no issues the next day.  But add just 3 more miles and race conditions and it’s a whole different ball game.  When I did the London Marathon first back in 2009 it literally took about 2 weeks to recover.  This time 5 days – so something in the training worked.

For the recovery a number of things you need to do:

  1. Move – don’t just sit down and do nothing.
  2. Raise the legs – when you can when you are sitting down.
  3. Massage – to help those muscles, as soon as possible after the run.
  4. Ice packs or ice baths – haven’t tried these myself but people swear by them.
  5. Nutrition – water, carbohydrates and proteins.
  6. Active rest – do some easy exercise soon.

Number 6 is what seemed to be the transition point for me.  Legs – just legs nothing else really – very sore, until yesterday when I went for an easy 4 mile run with my gorgeous wife (owner of Snowballs in Summer).  Very easy and slow pace.  And after that legs pretty much back to normal.

Some great other links for articles on post-marathon recovery are:

How are your legs?

And then once recovered, what do you do next?  Training for these babies is full on and gives you a real focus.  Running 4+ days a week and doing more and more miles and seeing improvements along the way, really gives you a boost and focuses the mind.  So when it’s all over, there’s a gap – at least for a bit.  For a lot of people if you don’t enter races that often, what now?  Enter another race.  This year is London’s year and there are lots of great running events on.  One I’d only just heard about is the British 10k London on Sunday 8th July – a week or so before the London Olympics and covering part of the planned Olympic Marathon route.  Covers a lot of the great sights you see on the London Marathon and the Royal Parks Foundation 1/2 and “only” 6.25 miles (10km) and 25,000 people – so a great crowd running through normally busy roads in central London.  See the route plan below:

Even better as well as the ballot places, there are guaranteed places for a bargain price of £50 – only £18 ish more than the ballot place.  What a deal.  I couldn’t refuse and got myself a place last night.  A very different distance to the longer runs and needs different training.  Need to figure that out next and what sort of time I want to try and aim for.

And the event video from 2011…

Don’t forget of course the ballot for the Virgin London Marathon (VLM) 2013 opens on Monday 30th April – next week – and the number of ballot places are expected to fill up very quickly.

The final countdown – 7 days to go.

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It’s the final countdown…

And a reminder of the classic Europe song from 1986…

This time next week it will be over for a few, nearly over for others and a little to still go for a lot.  The London Marathon 2012 – the year of the London Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.  What a great year to run 26.2 miles around this amazing city in the biggest charity fund raising event there is with 40k other people!

The training’s nearly done – 15, 17 or 21 weeks hard running.  Now in the final taper stages.  Stretching lots.  Sleeping nicely.  Eating well with a few extra carbs.  And all getting ready for next Sunday – 22nd April.  With a visit to the London Marathon Expo this week to pick up your number and bits.  It’s all getting exciting!

I still need to remind myself what time it starts on Sunday and then recap on plans to get up, eat and get up to London with Mrs. Noble and the kids and my mum & dad in-law as the Noble support crew.

The plan for me for the final 7 days looks like this…

  • Sunday – easy morning karate session; done without injury.
  • Monday – rest day with stretching and core exercises.
  • Tuesday – 6 miles at marathon pace (mp).
  • Wednesday – 1 mile warm-up, 2 miles at 30 seconds faster than mp , 1 mile cool down.
  • Thursday – TBC maybe a slow 4 miles.
  • Friday – rest day with stretching and core exercises.
  • Saturday – 2 very easy miles just to keep legs moving.
  • Sunday – it’s race day!

And still going for the last week of charity donations for Whizz-Kidz.  It all helps with the great work that they do for the children that they look after.  All donations still very very gratefully received – just go to my Just Giving page.

2012 – London’s year

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That’s 2011 finished and a week since Christmas.  Despite late starting with running last week – with Christmas Day and Christmas food getting in the way – I picked up and did 20 miles over 3 runs.  Last run just before lunch on New Years Eve – 4 miles at just better than 7 minutes 15 seconds per mile (a nice pace).  And a new last run of 2011.

The serious marathon training starts now with the mileage picking up fast.  25 miles planned over 4 runs this coming week.  Still need to think about 3 or 4 or even 5 runs a week and what the optimum number is.  A bit more research and thinking needed.

130 ish miles done in December.  And all at around the planned marathon pace – getting used to running at that pace, so the plan may be working!  Longer ones needed now to make sure I can hold it.

2012 promises to be an amazing year for London – the London Marathon in April, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June and then the London 2012 Olympics over the summer.

The London New Year’s Eve fireworks set the bar last night showing what London can do and what the celebrations this year will be like.  An awesome display last night and absolutely now best in the world.  11 minutes long and costing a bargain £2 million – click here to see the full video on the BBC News web site – it’s very impressive.  Could be seen and heard all the way from Twickenham where we are.

A very Happy New Year to you and here’s to 2012 bringing everything you wish and hope for, and more.