I am resurgent.

I am dormant, asleep, until needed.
Like a bear in winter’s embrace, I wait.

Patient.

Still.

This is not the end; it is only a pause.

Once I was, and soon I will be again.

I am resurgent.

I am dormant, asleep, until I am called upon. Like a bear, I hibernate through winter, gathering strength.

Once I was.

And I shall rise again.

Hail to the New Year

Winter has always seemed to understand something about disappearance.

Trees shed everything ornamental. The landscape empties itself. Animals vanish underground. Lakes freeze over and pretend, convincingly, that nothing moves beneath them.

And yet very little is actually dead.

It is waiting.

Perhaps that is why I have always liked winter.

There is an honesty to a season that makes no effort to appear hospitable.

Cold is cold.

Darkness arrives early.

The trees do not apologize for being bare.

For a while, I stopped writing.

There wasn’t a dramatic decision behind it. I simply began to wonder what the point was.

Words accumulate. Pages disappear into archives. The internet swallows another essay and asks for another million before breakfast.

Eventually, the blank page became easier.

So I left it blank.

For a while.

Then it snowed.

Not much. Just enough to alter the familiar outlines of things.

There is something strangely theatrical about snowfall. The same road, the same buildings, the same branches — and suddenly somebody has redrawn the world overnight.

I stood watching it and thought about dormancy.

And return.

Creep

Around the same time, I found myself listening again to Radiohead’s Creep.

It is a strange song to survive as long as it has.

Its basic ingredients are hardly obscure: admiration, alienation, envy, desire, self-consciousness, the uncomfortable distance between the person you are and the person you imagine you ought to be.

Maybe that is precisely why it survives.

There is a particular kind of beauty that can make a person suddenly conscious of themselves.

Not merely romantic beauty.

Talent can do it.

Confidence can do it.

Someone walking into a room apparently possessing whatever invisible quality you have spent years unsuccessfully trying to manufacture can do it.

For a moment, they seem illuminated.

And you become unusually aware of the shadows.

That tension sits at the center of Creep: the yearning to be extraordinary coupled with the suspicion that perhaps you are not.

I think most people understand that feeling better than they admit.

We spend tremendous amounts of energy constructing acceptable versions of ourselves.

Faster.

Smarter.

Funnier.

Stronger.

More attractive.

More successful.

More interesting.

Special.

And underneath all of that improvement lies an inconvenient question:

What happens if the finished product still doesn’t feel like enough?

The Heretic

That question followed me into Heretic.

I watched the film twice.

Hugh Grant’s Mr. Reed is fascinating because he is both intellectually magnetic and deeply unsettling. He speaks with the confidence of someone who has spent a very long time arranging the universe into a system only he fully understands.

The result is dangerous.

But also compelling.

What interested me most wasn’t whether his arguments about religion were ultimately correct. The more interesting idea was his obsession with originality, repetition and control.

How many supposedly new ideas are old ideas wearing different clothes?

How many convictions are inherited rather than discovered?

How much of what we call identity is simply an elaborate remix?

The film uses Creep as part of that discussion, and the choice works almost too well.

A song about feeling fundamentally out of place appears inside a story populated by people attempting to explain precisely where human beings belong.

Religion.

Doubt.

Control.

Belief.

Fear.

The desire to understand the machinery behind everything.

Perhaps that is why the film stayed with me.

Not because I found some grand answer inside it.

Quite the opposite.

It reminded me how seductive grand answers can be.

A World Made of Mirrors

There are moments when reality feels extraordinarily solid.

Cold pavement beneath your shoes.

A steering wheel beneath your hands.

The first sting of winter air entering your lungs.

Then there are other moments when everything seems slightly artificial.

A stage set.

A simulation.

A world made mostly of mirrors.

I have always liked stories such as The Matrix for that reason.

The fantasy isn’t merely that reality is false.

The fantasy is that somewhere there is a curtain you can pull aside.

A red pill.

A hidden door.

One moment of revelation after which everything finally makes sense.

Reality, unfortunately, is less cooperative.

Even if the universe is a simulation, the alarm still goes off tomorrow morning.

Gravity remains surprisingly committed to the bit.

Bills retain their remarkable sense of purpose.

And winter remains cold.

Perhaps knowing the true architecture of existence would change less than we imagine.

Midnight

The arrival of 2025 found me driving.

There was no dramatic countdown.

No champagne.

No great declaration about becoming a new person at midnight.

Just roads.

Traffic lights.

Long stretches of darkness.

A handful of cars moving through intersections as one year quietly became another.

I noticed the clock change.

11:59.

12:00.

2025.

That was it.

I kept driving.

There was something oddly appropriate about entering a new year in motion.

We place enormous importance on midnight, as though time itself recognizes the boundary.

But the road didn’t change.

The traffic lights continued their indifferent cycle.

Red.

Green.

Yellow.

Red again.

Eventually I stopped somewhere playing karaoke.

Someone sang Creep.

Later came Pink Pony Club.

I stayed for a while and listened.

Sometimes participation is overrated.

There are evenings when simply observing the strange parade of humanity is entertainment enough.

Then I stepped back outside into January.

The year had begun without asking whether anyone was ready for it.

Why Write?

That brings me back to writing.

I used to think writing required an audience.

Otherwise, what exactly was the point?

No one pays you by the paragraph.

The internet certainly isn’t suffering from a shortage of opinions.

And there are approximately seventeen billion more productive things one could theoretically be doing.

But that’s an unnecessarily transactional way of thinking about it.

Writing is useful because thought is messy.

Inside the mind, an idea can remain shapeless indefinitely.

On a page, it has nowhere to hide.

You have to give it a beginning.

Then another sentence.

Eventually you discover whether the thing you believed made any sense at all.

That alone seems worthwhile.

There is another reason too.

Memory is an unreliable archivist.

Entire years compress themselves into a handful of scenes.

A road at midnight.

Snow falling beneath a streetlight.

A song heard at exactly the right moment.

A movie that leaves behind a question you weren’t expecting.

Writing pins a few of those moments in place.

Not everything needs preserving.

Probably very little does.

But occasionally something deserves a page.

Perhaps that is what this is.

Resurgent

I don’t know whether I am “returning to writing.”

That sounds too ceremonial.

Maybe I’ll write frequently.

Maybe I’ll disappear again.

Winter doesn’t promise spring on a particular schedule.

It simply waits.

There is freedom in that.

Not everything absent is lost.

Not everything silent is finished.

Sometimes the machinery is still running somewhere beneath the snow.

And sometimes, after a long enough winter, something begins moving again.

So I’ll leave this where I began.

I am resurgent.
I am dormant, asleep, until needed.
Like a bear in winter’s embrace, I wait patiently.

This is not the end;
it is only a pause.

Once I was,
and soon I will be again.

[Brief interlude of silence]

I am resurgent.
I am dormant, asleep, until I am called upon.
Like a bear, I hibernate through winter, gathering strength.

Once I was.

And I shall rise again.

There are the obvious answers. I like racing. I like getting faster. I like finding out what happens when the body starts negotiating and you decide not to listen.

But there are other reasons.

Running has always provided a peculiar kind of escape. Not necessarily from a place, or even from a person. Sometimes you just want to put some distance between yourself and whatever happens to be occupying your head.

I’ve had periods when I’ve felt remarkably invisible. You can be surrounded by people and still somehow feel like a ghost among them. You talk. You make jokes. You show up. Yet occasionally you leave wondering whether you were really there at all.

Rejection is strange that way. After enough of it, the individual instances aren’t necessarily what bother you anymore. You start looking for a pattern.

And patterns are dangerous things to look for when you’re unhappy.

The mind is exceptionally good at turning this happened again into this will always happen. A bad afternoon becomes evidence about your entire life. Someone’s indifference becomes a referendum on your worth. Eventually you’re prosecuting yourself with evidence you collected yourself, before a jury consisting entirely of yourself.

So I run.

There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about physical exhaustion. The road doesn’t care who likes you. A stopwatch doesn’t ghost you. A hill doesn’t reject you. There is only the next mile, the increasingly unreasonable demands from your legs, and the little voice suggesting that perhaps this would be an excellent time to stop.

Sometimes I listen.

Often I don’t.

That’s the contradiction.

My legs have carried me away from some of the worst places my mind has taken me. They stand me up, quite literally. And my way of thanking them has frequently been to ask for another mile.

And another.

And another.

There is probably a lesson in there somewhere.

I thought about this after watching The Iron Claw. It’s a film about wrestling, ostensibly, but what stayed with me was something broader: what happens when identity, suffering, love and self-destruction become tangled together. What happens when the thing that makes you feel alive is also capable of consuming you?

Running isn’t wrestling, obviously. My life isn’t that movie. But good stories don’t need to resemble your life exactly to make you recognize something in yourself.

I don’t want running merely to be an escape hatch.

I want to run because I love running. Because a fast mile is exhilarating. Because there’s another road I haven’t seen, another race I haven’t run, another absurd number on a clock that I’d like to make slightly smaller.

Maybe that’s part of getting older: realizing that the things which carried you through difficult periods don’t have to remain attached to those periods forever.

Maybe running has always contained a little of the same idea I’ve written about elsewhere: dormancy, endurance, and eventually, resurgence.

I put it this way elsewhere in Winter Thoughts on Return:

I am resurgent.
I am dormant, asleep, until needed.
Like a bear in winter’s embrace, I wait patiently.

This is not the end;
it is only a pause.

Once I was,
and soon I will be again.

[Brief interlude of silence]

I am resurgent.
I am dormant, asleep, until I am called upon.
Like a bear, I hibernate through winter, gathering strength.

Once I was.

And I shall rise again.

I still run hard.

Probably too hard sometimes.

But these days, I’d rather be running toward something.

I’m working toward running a half marathon in every U.S. state and DC.

Before each race, I keep a simple tradition: carb-loading the night before — usually pasta. Whenever possible, I’ll also share memorable pre-race spots worth checking out.

For detailed destination race guides – including lodging, restaurants, airports, parking, weather, elevation, and race-morning logistics – visit Race Across 50 States.

This page is a running log of races so far — times, courses, travel notes, and a few thoughts along the way.

1. Virginia

Reston Half Marathon (4/21/2024)

First in AG. I was expecting at least 3rd — a nice surprise.

In the words of a volunteer on the sidelines:

“Gravity is your friend!”

Richmond Half Marathon (11/15/2025)

Fast downhill finish. Strong close over the final stretch.

Great course, great crowd — solid weekend.

Sentara Shamrock Half Marathon (3/22/2026)

The Sentara Shamrock Half Marathon is flat and fast, making it the perfect place for a PR.

Flat and fast was accurate.

2. Connecticut

62nd Annual John & Jessie Kelley Half Marathon (8/3/2024)

Summer heat kept me from breaking 1:30.

Well-organized race despite tough conditions. Volunteers spraying water along the course made a huge difference — grabbing water and dumping it on my head was necessary in that heat.

3. West Virginia

New River Gorge Wilds Trail Run (10/5/2024)

Top 3 at ACE Adventure Resort.

A true trail run — and I wore the wrong shoes.

Scenic course, and a ~5-hour drive from NoVA that was worth it.

First trail half marathon. Racing with a dead watch, no phone, no gear, and limited water was a good lesson in what to do better next time.

4. North Carolina

Charlotte Half Marathon (11/16/2024)

First sub-1:25. Also the debut of the Nike Vaporfly 3.

5. Arizona

Run Sedona (2/1/2025)

Two hours of sleep, hills, and elevation — still happy with the result.

6. Washington, DC

DC Rock ‘N Roll Half (3/15/2025)

A good summary of this race:

Monster Hill 👹 @ mile 8
completely destroyed me,
had me thinking I’d just hold on for sub-1:30,
and somehow still managed a slight PR.

7. New York

NYCRUNS Half — Brooklyn Ice Cream Social (8/23/2025)

Four laps around Prospect Park.

8. Colorado

Boulderthon (9/28/2025)

Happy to break 1:25 at altitude.

Hard race. ~5,300 ft — much higher than what I’m used to in NoVA.

Did a 10.5-mile shakeout on Davidson Mesa beforehand to acclimate. Still — they said “no hills”… not true.

9. New Hampshire

Smuttynose Rockfest Half Marathon (10/5/2025)

10. Tennessee

Nashville Half Marathon (10/25/2025)

Started late (~7:20 AM) due to long bib pickup lines.

Hilly course — but the downhills helped. Strong energy downtown, and a unique finish inside a baseball stadium.

~10-hour trip from NoVA — worth it.

11. Hawaii

Maui Oceanfront Marathon (1/18/2026)

First time in Hawaii — traveled with family.

12. California

Bay Breeze Half Marathon (2/14/2026)

Flat, but brutal — gravel, sand, bridges, wind, and bugs.

Cool temps (~47–50°F), but didn’t feel like it.

13. Arkansas

Little Rock Half Marathon (3/1/2026)

Hilly course, but a great race overall. Ran alongside another runner for much of it — strong finish and great crowd support.

14. Kentucky

Kentucky Derby Festival – Humana Mini-Marathon (4/25/2026)

A scenic and energetic first race in Louisville with strong crowd support throughout the course. Cool morning weather and a solid pre-race dinner helped set up a fast day and a new state completed on the half marathon journey.

15. Ohio

Flying Pig Half Marathon (5/3/2026)

First time racing in Cincinnati at one of the most well-known half marathons in the Midwest. Cold conditions and heavy congestion early on made the race challenging, but the course atmosphere, riverfront views, and crowd energy still made it a memorable experience.

16. Wyoming

Grand Teton Half Marathon (6/6/2026)

Beautiful mountain scenery and my first podium finish at altitude. Racing above 6,300 feet felt dramatically harder than the course profile suggested, but the views of the Tetons made every mile worthwhile.

Read the full Grand Teton Half race guide →

17. Montana

Yellowstone Half Marathon (6/13/2026)

High-altitude trail race with roughly 671 feet of climbing, rocky footing, and temperatures around 38°F at the start. One of the toughest half marathons I’ve run, but an unforgettable destination race.

Read the full Yellowstone Half race guide →

18. Idaho

Boise Half Marathon (6/20/2026)

A rainy race morning replaced the sunny forecast, but the downtown course was fast, walkable, and well organized. After two weeks of racing at much higher elevations, running at Boise’s lower elevation felt refreshingly comfortable.

Read the full Boise Half race guide →

As a grad student at George Mason University (GMU), I commute to Fairfax once a week for evening classes. Like many commuters, I need parking — but only for a few hours, usually 4–7 PM.

Buying a semester-long permit didn’t make sense for my schedule (or wallet). Instead, the daily parking permits turned out to be cheaper and more flexible.

The problem? I always procrastinated. I’d remember to buy a permit at the last minute, sometimes right before class. It was stressful, repetitive, and just annoying.

So, being a CS student, I did what came naturally:

👉 I automated the entire process.

The Idea

Every week, I needed to:

1. Go to the GMU parking portal.
2. Log in with my credentials.
3. Navigate through a bunch of menus.
4. Select the right permit.
5. Enter payment details.

It was the same steps every time. Why not let Python handle it?

The Tool

I built a small open-source tool in Python that:

• Automates login to the GMU parking portal up to the Duo Mobile 2FA step (which still requires approval on your phone).
• Selects the correct daily parking permit.
• Completes the checkout flow.
• Emails me a confirmation when done.

That’s it — no more last-minute scrambling.

📽️ Demo Video: YouTube

💻 Source Code: GitHub – GMU Daily Permit Automation

Tech Breakdown

At its core, this project uses:

• Selenium – to control a browser and interact with the GMU parking site.
• Headless mode – so it runs quietly in the background.
• Config + Environment variables – to keep credentials and payment info safe.
• Task scheduling (optional) – you could use cron (Linux/Mac) or Task Scheduler (Windows) to kick off the script automatically. I usually just run it manually before class.
• Duo Mobile 2FA – you’ll still need to approve the login from your phone. The script pauses at this step until Duo is confirmed.

Here’s a simplified example of what the login step looks like in Python with Selenium:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

# Start the browser (headless mode can be enabled too)
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

# Go to GMU parking login page
driver.get("https://gmu.t2hosted.com/Account/Portal")

# Enter username
username_input = driver.find_element(By.ID, "username")
username_input.send_keys("myusername")

# Enter password
password_input = driver.find_element(By.ID, "password")
password_input.send_keys("mypassword")
password_input.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

# (From here, the script navigates menus and purchases the permit)

The real project handles edge cases, payment, and confirmation, but this snippet shows the basic automation flow.

Lessons Learned

A few interesting takeaways while building this:

• University systems often don’t have APIs, so web automation is sometimes the only option.
• Security matters – never hardcode sensitive info; use config files or environment variables.
• Even small automations can save you from recurring stress (and are great coding practice).

Try It Yourself

If you’re at GMU (or curious about automation), you can try it out:

👉 GitHub Project

The README has setup instructions. Just remember: use responsibly — the tool isn’t affiliated with GMU Parking Services, and you should only automate your own account.

Final Thoughts

This project started as a way to save myself from procrastination, but it turned into a fun automation experiment. It’s one of those small quality-of-life improvements that adds up.

If you’re a fellow GMU commuter, hopefully this helps you too. And if you’re a developer, maybe it’ll inspire you to automate some of your own daily annoyances.

While Duo Mobile means this isn’t 100% hands-free, it still saves me from repeating the same web clicks every week.

As a runner and fitness enthusiast, sleep is essential for my recovery — and yet, it’s something I’m constantly working to improve. I aim for 8 hours a night, but my Apple Watch reports an average closer to 6.5 hours over the past few months, with some nights dipping as low as 5. Being a light sleeper doesn’t help either. I’ve experimented with wax earplugs to block out noise and blackout curtains to keep light at bay.

One thing I’ve wanted to automate for a while now is disabling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the devices near my bed — including both my personal and work MacBooks, my iPhone, and ideally even my Apple Watch (which I wear to track sleep). These devices all stay in my bedroom overnight, so minimizing potential sleep disruptors has become a personal experiment.

You might ask: why go through the trouble of shutting off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth automatically? It’s a fair question. This study raises concerns that Wi-Fi radiation may impact sleep quality and increase the risk of insomnia. And this video explanation discusses the potential relationship between wireless radiation and disrupted sleep. While scientific research on the topic is still largely inconclusive, I figured that if there’s even a slight chance of improving sleep quality by reducing exposure, it’s worth exploring.

So for the past several months, I’ve had an automation in place that turns off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on my Apple devices around bedtime — and in this post, I’ll share how I set that up in case you’re looking to try something similar.

Creating the Shortcuts

The first step involves opening the Shortcuts app on a Mac laptop or device. The easiest way is to hit Cmd + Space and search for Shortcuts.

The icon should look like this:

I’ve created two shortcuts. One called “Start Morning” to enable Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, and another called “Night Time” to disable Wi-Fi/Bluetooth and put the display to sleep, as shown below. They both use the “Set Wi-Fi” and “Set Bluetooth” actions, which you can find using the Action Library on the right.

Creating Automator Scripts

Next, I opened up the Automator app — the Cmd + Space works here too — and go to File > New to create a new automation. I need to do this twice, once for each action.

Search for the “Run Shell Script” action. Then in the settings, select /bin/bash as the Shell, and enter this code in the bash code block:

shortcuts run "Start Morning"

Here, "Start Morning" is the name of your first shortcut. If you named it something else, update the name here accordingly. The executable command shortcuts can also be run from the Mac Terminal app, and is simply a handy, automated way to interact with your shortcuts on the Shortcuts app.

Here’s a screenshot of this — you can name this StartMorning.app and save it to your /Applications folder, but here you can see I’ve saved it to under my iCloud Drive > Automator , for an important reason I’ll cover later:

Lastly, go to File > New again and search for the “Run Shell Script” action. Then in the settings, select /bin/bash as the Shell as last time, and enter this code in the bash code block:

shortcuts run "Night Time"

Replacing "Night Time" if you chose to use a different name for the shortcut. I’ve again saved this to my iCloud Drive, as shown below:

Now, there’s a few way to schedule these two automations on a Mac. You can either set up a cron job or, in my case, I chose to use the Calendar app. I got all these steps from an article a long time ago, but now for the life of me I can’t seem to find that article — I guess that’s one reason to bookmark an interesting site that you come across.

Scheduling with Calendar

Regardless, the next step is to open the Calendar app on your Mac.

Now, remember how I saved the Automator scripts to iCloud Drive, inside an “Automator” folder? There’s a reason for that. If you’re using just one Mac — say, a personal laptop — saving the scripts to /Applications works fine. But in my case, I use both a MacBook Air (personal) and a MacBook Pro (work). I wanted the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth toggling to sync across both devices.

After some trial and error, I found that Calendar events sync automatically across Apple devices — but local file paths like /Applications do not. So, if the script lives in /Applications on one Mac, the synced calendar event on the second Mac will break. By storing the script in iCloud Drive, both Macs can access the same path, and I only have to set up the Calendar automation once (in theory, at least).

First thing I did was hit the + button at the top to create a new Calendar event. I called the first one “Start Morning”, set it to repeat daily at 8:00 AM, and the important bit here is to expand the event, click on “Add Alert, Repeat, or Travel Time”, and then to go to where you see alert: None, click the dropdown, and go to Custom..., choose Open File and then in the second dropdown choose Other... . In the Finder window, locate and select the file location for the Automator script StartMorning.app that you saved in previous step. Next, though technically not needed, I clicked the dropdown to alert 15 Minutes before and changed it to At time of event.

You can see the event which turns on Wi-Fi/Bluetooth here:

Lastly, do the same for the “Night Time” event! I set it to repeat daily at 11:00 PM based on my sleep schedule, but feel free to adjust accordingly based on yours! I followed the same steps as above. I chose Open File and then in the second dropdown choose Other... . In the Finder window, locate and select the file location for the Automator script NightTime.app that you saved in previous step.

You can see the final event which switches off Wi-Fi/Bluetooth here:

And that’s it! All my Mac devices will effectively go into Airplane Mode at my sleep time at 11 PM, and wake up from Airplane Mode at 8 AM the next day automatically. Problem solved!

Scheduling on iPhone

Is it possible to schedule the same on an iPhone?

You betcha! It’s actually a bit easier, since you only have to set Airplane Mode, rather than Wi-Fi and Bluetooth individually.

I opened the “Shortcuts” app on my iPhone. I created my first automation, which runs on a schedule — at 11:00 PM, daily in my case — and the action I chose is Set Airplane Mode > ON. This is shown below:

Lastly, rather than turn on my iPhone in the morning at a specific time, I chose to create an automation with a trigger that runs when my phone is disconnected from power — since I wirelessly charge it overnight — and the action I chose is Set Airplane Mode > OFF. This is shown below:

Scheduling on Apple Watch

The final piece of the puzzle is my Apple Watch. Since I wear it every night to track sleep, I’d hoped to schedule Wi-Fi shutoff there as well. Unfortunately, even with the Shortcuts app, there doesn’t seem to be a way to automate Wi-Fi toggling on the Watch. For now, I’ve resorted to doing it manually: unlock the Watch, press the side button, and tap the blue Wi-Fi icon. Not ideal, but a small inconvenience — especially since everything else is automated.

Whether or not Wi-Fi exposure truly impacts sleep quality remains an open question. But for me, this setup offers peace of mind. And that, in itself, helps me sleep better.

Hope this was helpful — and if you end up building something similar, I’d love to hear how it goes.

Thanks for reading.

I ran my first half marathon. Then another. Then another. I broke four miles in Orangetheory’s Catch Me If You Can benchmark, finished on the podium at my first trail half marathon, and somehow lowered my mile PR to 4:38.

There are worse problems to have than too many good races to write about.

I originally wanted to document every detail of every one of them. But memories don’t necessarily become more meaningful just because every detail survives. Sometimes the better record is the shorter one: what happened, what stayed with you, and what you learned before moving on to the next starting line.

So, here are a few finish lines from the year.

Learning the Half Marathon

I ran my first half marathon on April 21 in Reston, Virginia, finishing in roughly 1:37.

It was also my introduction to an important principle of distance running:

Hills are evil.

The course had plenty of them.

I’d run 13.1 miles before in training, but racing the distance felt different. A half marathon is long enough to punish early mistakes and short enough to tempt you into making them anyway.

It also introduced me to the surprisingly complicated art of drinking from an aid station while continuing to run.

My early technique consisted primarily of:

1. grabbing a cup,
2. spilling part of it on myself,
3. attempting to swallow the remainder without drowning.

There has been improvement since.

The race also taught me something I’ve carried into almost every half since: the first few miles can lie to you.

When everything feels easy, running substantially faster seems perfectly reasonable. Several miles later, your body may submit a formal objection.

I would relearn that lesson in Connecticut.

Connecticut

My second half marathon took me to New London for the Ocean Beach/John & Jessie Kelley Half Marathon.

I had recently bought a red Tesla Model 3, and Connecticut became its first proper road trip. The drive north was long enough to teach me a few things about EV road trips, charging stops, and just how much longer a six-hour trip can become once reality gets involved.

We made a larger trip out of it and explored parts of Connecticut and New England before and after the race.

But race morning was the important part.

The Kelley Half started at Ocean Beach Park in New London on August 3.

Unlike my first half, much of the course was relatively flat.

Unfortunately, August had brought another opponent: heat.

As the morning progressed, the sun became increasingly difficult to ignore. Volunteers sprayed runners with hoses along portions of the course, and I became a very willing participant.

Aid stations became increasingly important too. At some point I discovered a technique other runners had already mastered: take a water bottle, drink what you need, dump some over your head, and move on.

Civilization advances through accumulated knowledge.

My larger problem was pacing.

I started aggressively and held something near my 10K pace much longer than I probably should have. It felt excellent.

Until it didn’t.

Somewhere after the halfway point, the bill arrived.

The second half turned into an increasingly stubborn argument between what I wanted my legs to do and what they were interested in doing. I slowed substantially and briefly walked more than once.

Eventually, though, the finish line appeared.

That tends to restore one’s enthusiasm.

I found enough left for a final kick and crossed in just under 1:32, a new personal best by several minutes.

Not the cleanest race I’ve ever run.

Still one of the most educational.

And Connecticut became another state checked off the list.

Four Miles

One of my favorite Orangetheory benchmarks is Catch Me If You Can, a 22-minute treadmill challenge that gradually eliminates runners who don’t reach increasing distance checkpoints.

Once you survive the final checkpoint, the remaining objective is simple:

Run.

I’d wanted to break four miles for quite a while.

The mathematics are unforgiving. Four miles in 22 minutes requires averaging a little under 11 mph for the entire effort.

Previous attempts had convinced me that four miles might remain tantalizingly out of reach.

On August 22, I tried again.

I spent much of the run alternating around 11–11.2 mph, treating 11 mph as “recovery,” which is a somewhat questionable definition of the word.

Twenty-two minutes later:

4.08 miles.

Four miles was no longer hypothetical.

I also finished first on my studio leaderboard.

There’s something satisfying about finally crossing an arbitrary numerical boundary you’ve assigned enormous importance to for no particularly rational reason.

That is, admittedly, much of running.

A Different Kind of Half Marathon

By October, I was looking for another state.

A trail race in West Virginia caught my attention: the New River Gorge Wilds Trail Run at ACE Adventure Resort.

I had several possible races that weekend, but this one offered something the others didn’t.

I had never raced a half marathon on a real trail.

That sounded interesting.

It also sounded like an excellent opportunity to discover several new forms of suffering.

I signed up.

My previous half marathons had at least given me a decent understanding of road racing. Trail racing immediately discarded much of that confidence.

The terrain demanded constant attention. Pace became much less meaningful. There were climbs, descents, uneven surfaces, and stretches where maintaining rhythm mattered less than simply finding the next good place to put a foot.

It was brutal.

It was also fantastic.

About halfway through, I took the energy gel I’d carried with me and became very thankful that Past Ritvik had possessed the foresight to bring it.

Eventually, after considerably more trail than my legs would have preferred, I reached the finish.

1:50:03.

That would have been much slower than my road half marathon PR.

It was also good enough for third overall.

That result reinforced something I’ve gradually learned about racing: a finishing time tells you very little without the course attached to it.

A 1:50 trail half can require far more from you than a much faster road race.

More importantly, I had finished my first trail half marathon and put West Virginia on the map.

I decided 13.1 miles was also approximately the maximum distance for which I wanted to make friends with that particular terrain.

For now.

4:38

Then came the mile.

The mile is a wonderfully unpleasant distance.

It’s too long to sprint and too short to settle in.

I had previously run exactly 5:00 while traveling. Since then, I’d lowered my PR further, but I wanted another shot.

On October 16, Orangetheory held the benchmark again.

For this attempt, I wore a relatively new pair of Nike Vaporfly 3s.

Carbon-plated racing shoes are peculiar things. They’re light, aggressive and slightly ridiculous, and the Vaporflys immediately felt much faster than my ordinary trainers.

Race strategy was simple enough.

Start fast.

Hold on.

Discover whether this was a mistake later.

I opened around 13 mph.

For the first several minutes, everything remained under control—or at least maintained a convincing appearance of being under control.

Then the usual negotiations began.

I dropped the pace slightly when my legs started objecting, tried several times to bring it back up, and saved whatever remained for the final stretch.

By then, the mile had ceased to be an athletic activity and become mostly an exercise in refusing to press the slower-speed button.

Finally, the treadmill crossed one mile.

4:38.

A nine-second PR.

And first on the studio leaderboard.

One comparison put the effort into perspective afterward: the pace I’d barely maintained for one mile was roughly in the neighborhood of the pace Eliud Kipchoge sustained during his famous sub-two-hour marathon exhibition.

I survived it for a little over four and a half minutes.

He continued for another twenty-five miles.

Running has a reliable way of making an achievement feel impressive and humbling at exactly the same time.

The Finish Line Keeps Moving

There were other milestones this year.

I ran about 120 treadmill miles during Orangetheory’s Marathon Month and finished first at my studio. I substantially improved my DriTri time. There were training runs, good workouts, terrible workouts, small PRs and probably several things I’ve already forgotten.

That’s part of why I wanted to write this.

Not because every workout needs to become a permanent artifact on the internet.

Most probably shouldn’t.

But some moments are worth marking.

My first half marathon.

My first destination half.

My first trail podium.

Four miles in Catch Me If You Can.

A 4:38 mile.

Individually, they’re just numbers and races.

Together, they tell me something more interesting: the ceiling keeps moving.

Every so often I reach a number that once seemed absurd, enjoy it briefly, and almost immediately wonder what the next one might be.

Perhaps that’s the real trick to crossing the finish line on top.

Enjoy the view.

Then find another starting line.

This is a story about more than just a race. It’s about rediscovering a long-lost joy, learning on the go, and pushing the body beyond what it thinks it can do. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to run 13.1 miles for the first time — the chaos, the adrenaline, the tiny victories — read on.

This month, on Sunday, April 21st, I participated in my first half marathon race.

There’s a lot to unpack there and talk about, and not sure if I’ll have the time or dedication to do it. But sometimes you gotta start somewhere, so here I go.

I signed up for the race on March 27th, about a whole month before the race. I paid about $100 for the registration, which certainly feels like I’m getting milked for all I’m worth.

The flyer for the race was being displayed at my gym for the longest time, and I figured, why not, it’s close to home and I’ve been thinking about when and if I’ll ever do a marathon lately, wouldn’t it be easier to train for and start with a half marathon first?

So anyway, that’s the story of how I signed up for my first half marathon.

A large impetus for signing up for my first half, was the passion for running that’s been rekindled in me recently. Ever since I started going back to gym, since I started Orangetheory, a little over a year ago now, the joy (and spark) of running has been alive in me again. It’s like re-learning how to use an extraneous muscle. Like riding a bike again. You never forget how that used to be. You just learn more about it, dive deeper into the sport, and introspect further and learn how your body handles it, and adapts to it.

Anyway, consistency is key, and I would give credit where credit is due - the gym I go, Orangetheory Fitness, has especially been inspiring me to helping me to stay consistent and motivated. Further, they have motivational work outs and benchmark challenges every now and then. For example, the 1 mile run, a 12-minute timed tread for distance, and a longer 22-minute run. More recently, they have something called Tread 50 workouts, which is just a 45-minute block where you have access to the treadmill. Which is great to try out something new, or to prep for an upcoming work out or challenge. It’s all up to you, but the idea here is that motivation is never lacking.

If anything, the benchmark challenges for running are fun, and well — challenging — and they inspire me to put my best foot forward.

They also re-kindle in me once again, the joy for running. This is actually a large part of the reason why I signed up for my first half marathon. To fully embrace my newfound (or re-discovered?) joy of running, and share that with others. I do love running, and I hope to continue it going forward.

One other thing. Running on the treadmill, believe it or not, is sub-optimal to preparing for a half marathon. For training purposes, it is indeed sub-optimal. So while I have been signing up for Tread 50 and challenging myself to run at base or base-push the whole 45-minute block, without stopping, it is lacking in something. Don’t get me wrong, it keeps me on my toes, keeps me active and in shape. It builds endurance and willpower.

What the treadmill does not build, is leg strength, or real-world experience. Experience with hills and just the feel of the stones and rough asphalt under your feet. That you’ll only ever get with outdoor running. Freed from the metaphorical chains, without the treadmill running belt to help you, you are effectively at the mercy of Mother Nature and the elements. The biting cold. Rain pouring down. Wind gusts battering you at over 10 MPH, slowing down your progress and grinding it to a near halt. Making your very bones shake. Causing your mind to falter in its resolution and drive. This is the sort of thing that one would only ever get exposed to by choosing to embrace the elements, and run outdoors.

So slowly, I have been building a routine in order to prepare myself and train for my first race. At the end of March, I ran roughly a 10K with a running group. An average pace around 8:30/mile. Cadence of 167 SPM.

Between March and April, I have been running at least a 10K outdoors, every week — and I hope to continue this routine, and this consistency, moving forward. Because if there’s anything that Orangetheory and working out has taught me, it’s that consistency is key.

Anyway — the next week, start of April, I knocked out another 10K outdoors, and averaged an 8:00/mile pace. Cadence of around 172 SPM. So overall, slightly improved from last time.

The following day, for the very first time, I did a longer run outdoors. I am talking over 10 miles. Prior to this, I had never run this sort of distance before, in my entire life.

I ran outside at the WO & D trail, which is close to me and was recommended to me by friends and family both. While I did 16 miles total, it looks like I only ran about 12 miles of that. I remember the reason why that was. I had got my new waist pack which was a gift from the fam. It had holders for mini- plastic bottles with little plastic sippy-heads (microplastics, yay!) and pockets which I could put my keys and phone in.

There were only two annoying things with my first long run outdoors:

• I had no idea how to use Strava, and I wanted to stream the run to Strava, which is some new app for runners. It took me too long to figure out.
• The strap for the waist pack was too loose. I tried to tighten it but it kept falling off and it was mighty frustrating.

Regarding the first point, I walked the first 2 miles because I was fiddling around with Strava and trying to record the exercise from within that app. I also started the outdoor activity on my Apple Watch. In hindsight, one thing I learned — Strava can auto-import workouts from the Apple Watch, so you only realistically need to record it on there, don’t need to do it twice as I did.

Regarding the second point, adjusting the waist pack was an eternal struggle, and I don’t know if I ever got it fully correct that whole 16 mile walk-run effort. After the first ten minutes, I wanted to just remove my waist pack and toss it to the ground, and stamp on it. I was that frustrated. But thankfully, after I did some last-minute adjusting, it stayed on, and didn’t fall off at least, even if it was kind of loose. So shrug, better than nothing, so I shrugged it off and started the run.

Plus, I needed the waist pack. For my AirPods case, and keys. Phone so that I could listen to music, since my watch didn’t have 3G or cellular. So given that my phone was bulky, it wouldn’t be possible to fit everything in my pants pocket and run with it. At least, it would be uncomfortable to run like that. So, in that sense the waist pack really delivered and came through. That’s not even considering the water. Water really helps to stay hydrated on a longer (over 10 miles) run outdoors.

So anyway, that first long run outdoors, my average pace was 10:57/mile, which was bad because I walked about 4 miles of that. Looks like I burned almost 2000 calories from that (1600 active calories), so there is a silver lining with that. All in all, I was out of breath near the end, and my legs were essentially destroyed after a run of 12 miles. This is why I had to walk the last 2 or 3 miles. Well, the reason I was forced to walk the last distance, actually is that I overshot when I was back-tracking or looping back. Went too far, guess you could say. So I needed to back-track yet again to get to where I had parked my car. In order to do that, my legs and knee was totaled, so literally I could not run, I could only walk (or limp) back. I contemplated more than once on taking an Uber back, but ultimately I just walked the half hour or so back. It wasn’t the end of the world. At least, mission accomplished there with that long run. Longest run I’ve run in my entire life leading up to that, was on that day.

Roughly 10 days after that, because I was having a hard time finding time, I went for a run at 7AM on a weekday. Yeah, that’s right. I wanted to wrap up around 9AM. So I ran pretty fast due to that. Here are the results in the screenshot below.

Looks like my best half-marathon time was 1:31:08, as Apple Watch claims. I don’t know if this is accurate or not. If so, it would be my fastest half marathon time ever, which is great.

Anyway, very tired after that, so I went back, drank electrolytes, whey protein to recover, and iced my knees.

On Sunday, April 21st, I had my first half marathon race, so here’s how that went.

First Half Marathon

On Sunday, April 21st, I had my first race ever, a half marathon.

The day before, I had the carbo-load meal at Davio’s in Reston. Portions were small, but it tasted great. They charged me close to $50 for that. But there was pasta, and there was carbs abounding. So not much to complain.

That day I went to sleep early like around 11am.

The day of the race, I woke up about 5:30am. Got ready, drank some matcha, had early morning banana, apple, and oatmeal with berries. Also had a honey protein bar. Then I got dressed, laced up my bright orange Hoka Mach 5 shoes, which a subreddit on Reddit had convinced me to wear, and off to the race I went.

It was less than a 15 minute drive for me to the race’s gathering point.

One thing I had desired in my first race, my first half for that matter, is a good distance for commute purposes. I didn’t want to fly, didn’t want to drive 4 hours for a race. So having a first half marathon so close to home, was a godsend for this reason. I didn’t have to worry about commute. I honestly could eliminate that issue as otherwise it would be another stress point for me.

Fast forward to the start of the race. If I remember, I joined the middle of the pack. I wanted to take it somewhat easy, but not too easy. I still wanted to challenge myself. So I tried to stay with some folks who seems like they were maintaining a 7:30-8:00/mile pace, which is a pretty respectable, but easy enough, pace to be running at.

Here is a photo of me on that race:

Most of what I remember from that race, my very first, is that I probably had ate a bit much, and also I seemed to lack energy, since potentially I had not carb-loaded properly. It’s always hard to estimate these things, especially for one’s first race. Also, I was for some reason thirsty, all the time. I didn’t carry my waist pack with me on this run, in an attempt to slash on unnecessary weight, and potentially gain speed and pick up the pace as a result.

That reminds me, it was about 45 degrees out that morning, but I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, and I saw lot of others wearing similar attire, so thankfully I was not alone. Some folks were even wearing sleeveless. Then again I saw lot of others in long-sleeved and even pants. Because 45 degrees is understandably chilly for some.

Anyway, going back to hydration. At around mile 3 or 5, some volunteers were on the sidelines offering water and gatorade, so I snagged one quick. I tried to drink while jogging, a mistake, as I spilled some on my shirt. I tossed it after I’d drunk most of it, but the damage was done. My shirt was soaked and I wasn’t too well hydrated. On top of that I had lost on pacing slightly, since I had slowed down. So turns out, bad idea overall.

Most of what I remember on that run, on my first half marathon, basically boils down to five things. One, it was a scenic run, as promised, lot of green grass and vegetation, and trees, and overall just a pleasant run. Two, the weather was perfect and it was a little bit chilly but that’s much preferred over humid any day of the week. Three, so many hills, and I was not prepared for them. Four, did I mention dehydration, as it always seemed as my throat was parched. Five, my lungs and mind were fighting me constantly, but my legs only after mile 10.

Let’s dive a little bit deeper into some points. Starting with the hills. The uphills were especially brutal, and even though there were hills on the WO&D trail, they were nothing like these. The uphill jog efforts really snuck up on you, and took their toll on me. The downhills were much better.

In the words of a volunteer on the sidelines —

Gravity is your friend!

That basically is a nod to the fact that downhill, running is so much easier. Actually gravity carries your legs faster and further than you could normally run unaided. This is actually the reason why some world records for the mile run were discounted — because the track in those cases were downhill, which is not fair since other competitors didn’t have that edge. Make no doubt, running downhill certainly gives you an edge, at least compared to running on flat ground, and most certainly when compared to running uphill. Long story short, running uphill sucks, running downhill is a godsend.

More on the dehydration aspect. I felt thirsty, like my throat was parched, constantly. At mile 3, I drank water. I drank gatorade again at mile 6, and same as last time I tried to drink while running, and spilled the fluids on myself again. At mile 11, I snagged gatorade, and gave in to my mind telling me to take a break, also because my legs were completely beat, and I just stood still and finished that cup of gatorade. Wasting a lot of time and crashing my pace, since I was immobile in one spot, but what can you do, when both your legs and mind are fighting you over your sustained efforts. Anyway, I estimate a total of 3-4 water or gatorade stops on my part. Too many frequent breaks I suppose, but for a first half marathon I suppose it can be forgiven.

Lastly, about my lungs and mind fighting me. I did try to keep up with the group, in order to pace myself better, and mostly I stuck with this one dude until about mile 7. He was a pretty good pacer, and we were both averaging about 7:20/mile. Certainly under 7:30/mile. It felt good to have someone to pace with, to run with, so I just decided to have a relaxed run in that manner, us alternating taking the lead, and the lungs issue was tabled for a while.

At around mile 7, I broke up and sped off in an (unrealistic) effort to catch up with the frontrunners, and also to challenge myself to push the pace, and get a decent finish time.

Another photo, ostensibly taken when I decided to “fly solo” at around mile 7-8:

This is more or less where I started having a “consistent” pacing issue, and at the same time started having a breakdown of my lungs and mind unanimously. The hard part was not starting at the distance readout on my Apple Watch every few minutes. Seeing those mile plaques or posters or whatever, on the race, pop up every mile as a benchmark, was actually more disheartening than reassuring. It felt like how much distance I’d achieved, and how much my lungs were burning and screaming at me, were totally at odds.

At around mile 9, my lungs were almost at my limit and I just wanted to throw in the towel. At mile 10, it felt like an eternity in coming, but at the same time, that’s when you’re supposed to realize that it’s only a 5K distance left. That is, 3.1 miles remaining. So I was supposed to speed up, because it’s only a 5K race now, but in reality I couldn’t. My lungs had been fighting me every mile of the way, and apparently now it was my legs’ turn to take over the battle.

It seemed unfair, for the legs to refuse to move at the same pace, to slacken and grow tired, but that’s exactly what ended up happening. Rather than speeding up for the last 5K distance, I struggled even with maintaining what I assumed was my 7:30/mile pace that I had going on. Maintaining that pace was the hardest part. Shouting down my mind that told me to walk it out, and punishing my lungs for fighting me by continuing the battle with them, seemed especially cruel but necessary.

Anyway, near the end, I almost got lost twice. Once when I didn’t know if I should take a right or go straight. Some volunteer sitting in a pickup truck told me to go straight after I asked. But again, that questioning wasted no small amount of time.

Finally, at last leg of the race, once I got on the track again, where the race was supposed to start and end, I again got lost. I saw “Finish” and supposed I should go left. I was shooed by volunteers and told to go right. Then I stopped prematurely, assuming I was done, only to be told to keep going, I have to go all the way to the “Finish” line.

If you’d ask me, this last part was not coordinated or handled well. Why is it so easy to get lost on that last home stretch, while on the track and you see the words reading “Finish”? I don’t know. It seems like it shouldn’t be so easy to get lost, but it was, for me at least.

Running the whole length of that track to the Finish line seemed like it took an eternity by itself.

You can see how tired and out of breath I was, and must have been, by seeing how I looked right before I punched through the finish line:

By getting lost twice and stopping for breaks to hydrate, I must have wasted about 2 or 3 minutes easily by that itself. But again, sometimes it’s the journey that matters more than the destination. Given that it was my first race ever, and first half marathon, I really was not expecting to break a PR or get first place overall — that would have been unrealistic at any rate.

You can see the joy etched on my face, of having finally finished that dreadful half marathon, and returning power back to – and releasing the noose around – my lungs and my blessed legs, that carried me so far. 13.1 miles, all the way to the finish line.

Anyway, I finished first in my age group, and fifth overall in the race.

I got a finish time of 1:36:41 for my first half marathon.

Here’s a splendid, dashing photo of me basking in my glory and victory, after the conclusion of the race:

Can I say it was worth it?

Absolutely, for the experience along. Even though that first half marathon, felt like a full marathon to me, it taught me some valuable lessons on endurance and leg strength especially, which I hope to fully utilize and learn from going forward.

Going forward, I will plan to incorporate some amount of long runs (at least 10 miles) outdoors, at a frequency of 2-3 weeks. This is just so that I maintain the endurance and leg strength that my first half marathon race has imparted to me.

One thing I enjoyed about my first half marathon is it enabled me to display and embrace my passion of running, and even after finishing it, the passion and respect for running has only increased, it has not reduced or stayed the same.

Going to cut it short here. I am proud of my achievement of my first half marathon, and hope to continue incorporating lessons I have gained from it, such as improved endurance and fitness. I aim to shoot for running at least a 10K distance outdoors once a week, and a 10+ miles outdoor run at least 1-2 times a month.

Participating in my first half marathon has imparted to me much-needed endurance and leg strength, and I hope to continue running, pushing myself, and next time around I hope to improve on my half marathon finish time. Also, here’s to hoping I don’t get lost or get frazzled by those hydration breaks in my next half marathon 😜.

Background

I’m trying to integrate Medium blogging into my personal site at myname.com.

That is, I’m trying to automate the process of publishing an article on my personal blog, and have the contents of the Jekyll-based markdown post – a .md file – be posted to the two other blogging sites I’m currently signed up on, medium.com and dev.to.

Towards that end, I tried to search online to see if there is such as a thing as a Medium API that allows me to:

• Publish and/or update a post for a user
• Retrieve a list of posts for a user

Turns out, only the first point is currently possible via the Official Medium API, and that too, it’s only partially satisfied – there is currently no route via the API to update a post on a Medium. One can only create a new post on Medium via the API, but that’s about it.

With the Official Medium API as it stands – which is no longer supported or maintained by the Medium team – one can only retrieve user info and create a post, they cannot do anything much more useful than that, for example it is not possible to retrieve a list of a user’s posts via the API.

How to Auto-Update a Medium Post

This is slightly tangential to the matter, but I haven’t expressed my discontent with not being able to automate the updating of a post on Medium via an API. I fooled around this with their API – for example using an HTTP PUT request - for way too long, and didn’t get anywhere with that at all. It’s a real shame that we can only publish new posts via the API, and that it’s not possible to update an existing post via an API.

In fact, this proved the impetus or drive for me to publish an online web tool that easily translates posts from markdown to medium, which I have published on my website:

https://ritviknag.com/markdown-to-medium

I made this above tool for myself, so I can take my personal blog posts, written in .md files, paste them in there and copy the output to Medium when using the editor to update an existing post.

Anyway, slight detour there…

All this to say that I was not able to find a solution via the API that worked for me, to list all the posts under a given user. The reason for this is purely for automation purposes, such that whenever I change a blog post – or .md file – on my website, I want to publish a new post to Medium, but only if there is not already an existing post with that same title. So basically, I want to avoid re-publishing a post every time I make an update to it – if that’s even possible!

My Search

My search led me to Google search for something along the lines of “medium api get all user posts”, which led me more or less to this somewhat informative article on StackOverflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/q/36097527/10237506

As the accepted answer says, the Medium API is only intended for Publishing and is not intended to retrieve posts.

A workaround that is suggested is to simply use the RSS feed that Medium offers, as such:

https://medium.com/feed/@username

For example, here is the RSS feed for my user:

https://medium.com/feed/@ritviknag

One can simply get the RSS feed via GET, then if it’s needed in JSON format just use an NPM module like rss-to-json and we’re good to go.

However, there is an issue with this approach, as another answer in the same SO post confirms:

[…] has a limit of the latest 10 posts.

So, there is a limit of only retrieving 10 posts for a given user using the RSS feed option.

Looks like we need another solution!

Unofficial Medium API

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention an alternate approach.

There is an Unofficial Medium API that someone has come up with. This is the link to it below:

https://mediumapi.com

Unfortunately, it’s not an insignificant commitment to sign up with that API. Take a look below:

As noted, there appears to be a subscription tier for using that API.

If I, as a developer, want to build an API wrapper around the Medium SDK to retrieve a User’s posts, using this option I would be forced into:

• Create a RapidAPI key for mediumapi.com, or directing users of the library to sign up on another site and acquire a RapidAPI key for requests to mediumapi.com.
• Rate limiting my library at 150 requests / month, assuming I want to hardcode and provide users with my RapidAPI key, in order to provide convenience and promote adoption of said library.

In short, this is likewise a disaster, albeit of different proportions. There is no way I can use a third-party, unofficial API, even though I have personally tested out this API endpoint and confirmed that it returns the correct and desired data.

Thus, the unavoidable road to the DIY project, begins…

The “Eureka!” Moment

To me, the lightbulb went off, when I was just bored and staring at a random Medium user’s profile, and I had Chrome Developer tools open and was just browsing casually through the Network tab.

The graphql endpoints, in particular, stood out to me:

If curious, the URL to that is https://medium.com/_/graphql, and it’s an HTTP POST request that gets sent.

Shortly after, I fired up Google search again and this time inputted keywords “how to use medium api graphql to fetch all user posts”.

The result was this highly informative post on using Medium’s GraphQL endpoint to retrieve Medium posts for a user:

https://medium.com/@mike820324/web-crawler-getting-medium-post-a6e52fd36fd6

I decided to implement the same logic in the JavaScript (Node.js + TypeScript) library I was writing, with an intent to publish as an NPM package to npmjs.com.

The hardest part for me was how to:

• Modify the GraphQL query to only return user post titles
• Paginate through the results, as GraphQL appears to have a limit of 25 results (posts) per request.

I managed to figure that out, even though it took me a long while.

By the way, I adapted the code from a fork of the Medium SDK for Node.js.

I made my own changes, and a lot of updates along the way.

Simply said, this was the very first TypeScript NPM package I had ever written. So there was a lot of learning curve.

The Result

The work was split into a few main parts:

• Porting over existing Medium SDK code from Node.js to TypeScript.
• The hurdle that come with publishing a TypeScript NPM package, such as setting up tsconfig.json to allow support for both ESM and CommonJS syntax simultaneously.
• Integrating pagination and GraphQL into the codebase.
• Best practices for NPM projects in TypeScript, such as setting up code quality checks and CI/CD automation – such as publishing package to a registry (NPM) automatically.

This project is the direct result of my hard work and effort:

https://github.com/rnag/medium-sdk-ts

Below is the package on the NPM registry:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/medium-sdk-ts

Install

The package can be installed with npm, or a package manager of choice:

npm i medium-sdk-ts

Import

The library supports importing via the newer, more modern ES Module (ESM) syntax prevalent in TypeScript code:

import {
  MediumClient,
  PostContentFormat,
  PostPublishStatus,
} from 'medium-sdk-ts';

Or, for CommonJS syntax in Node.js, using require:

const {
    MediumClient,
    PostContentFormat,
    PostPublishStatus,
} = require('medium-sdk-ts');

Usage

Now create a client for the Medium SDK:

// Access Token is optional, can also be set
// as environment variable `MEDIUM_ACCESS_TOKEN`
const medium = new MediumClient('YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN');

Retrieve User Details:

const user = await medium.getUser();
console.log(`User: ${JSON.stringify(user, null, 2)}`);

Publish a new Draft Post under your user:

const post = await medium.createPost({
    // Only `title` and `content` are required to create a post
    title: 'A new post',
    content: '<h1>A New Post</h1><p>This is my new post.</p>',
    // Optional below
    contentFormat: PostContentFormat.HTML,   // Defaults to `markdown`
    publishStatus: PostPublishStatus.DRAFT,  // Defaults to `draft`
    // tags: ["my", "tags"],
    // canonicalUrl: "https://my-url.com",
});

console.log(`New Post: ${JSON.stringify(post, null, 2)}`);

Retrieve a User’s Published Posts (using GraphQL endpoint, which does not require an access token):

// Get User's Published Posts
const posts = await medium.getPosts('@username');
console.log(`User Post: ${JSON.stringify(posts, null, 2)}`);

Or, to simply retrieve the user’s post titles only – note that this results in a slightly more simplified GraphQL query being sent:

// Get User's Published Posts (Title Only)
const postTitles = await medium.getPostTitles('@username');
console.log(`User Post Titles: ${JSON.stringify(postTitles, null, 2)}`);

That’s all for now!

I hope this post was informative. Feel free to play around with this NPM package I have published.

Again, here is the source code for it: https://github.com/rnag/medium-sdk-ts

If this library has proved useful in your automation efforts, please let me know via the comments down below, and feel free to also star the project on GitHub if you’d like.

As mentioned, this is my first-ever TypeScript library package I have published to NPM, so I would appreciate the support or feedback on it – do certainly let me know if there’s anything else I can improve on it.

My team has been building out a new web app in Express.js, and for local deployment and testing we use nodemon, babel, and Docker.

One of the burning questions we wanted to find an answer to - apart from the ultimate question of all life, the universe, and everything - is how can we mount our local (current) directory to the running Docker container, so that nodemon can listen for local file changes when we develop, and automatically reload or restart the (containerized) web server as needed.

Towards that end, I hastily Googled online for “Can Docker mount local drive and listen for file changes”, and even kicked this same prompt to my work-approved AI assistant (*wink* ChatGPT alternative?). Anyway, the responses from the AI prompt are recorded separately below.

By the way, this article is inspired by some other articles on that I found on the web while researching if such a thing is possible - e.g. mounting a local folder to a Docker container - including the following article on Medium, which does a good job of condensing the main points:

How To Mount Your Current Working Directory To Your Docker Container In Windows

As I and my team are developing on an (Apple Silicon-based) Mac, we don’t care too much about the docker run command being compatible between Mac and Windows overmuch.

However, I certainly agree that Docker is super handy for anyone wanting to write software in a Linux environment while still running a Mac (or Windows) computer.

Theory

Our Dockerfile - we use the same one for development and production - looks something like this:

# Start from the Node.js image for AMD64 architecture
FROM --platform=linux/amd64 node:latest

# Set the working directory for your Node.js app
WORKDIR /usr/app

ARG PORT
ARG NODE_ENV

ENV PORT=$PORT
ENV NODE_ENV=$NODE_ENV

# Some installation steps
...

# Copy your Node.js application files and the startup script
COPY . .
COPY start.sh .

# Make the startup script executable
RUN chmod +x ./start.sh

# Install Node.js dependencies
RUN npm install --include=dev

# Expose the port your app runs on
EXPOSE $PORT
EXPOSE 80

# Command to run the startup script
CMD ["./start.sh"]

We have a custom start.sh script we use to start our web server. This basically calls npm run start & within it - e.g. our npm script start.

The above Dockerfile basically expects arguments to be passed in during the Docker build step.

This allows us to pass in environment variables (and Bash script values) such as the PORT for the web server, and NODE_ENV for the web app - such as dev or production .

docker build \
  --build-arg PORT=${PORT} \
  --build-arg NODE_ENV=${NODE_ENV} \
  --tag ${TAG} \
  .

To the question of mounting a local folder to a Docker container, obviously we only want to enable this behavior when running in development mode.

That is, we only want to mount a local directory to the container into the location at /usr/app - the WORKDIR from the Docker instructions above - when we are in development mode, and we don’t want to mount anything when we are building a production Docker image, to later ship to Amazon ECR for example.

This is a great use case for the potential solution, which will be discussed below. Now that we have the theory in place of what we want to achieve:

• We would rather not update Dockerfile to mount a volume or a local folder.

• Not necessary (or desirable) to mount local folder to a volume when running docker build to create an image from a Dockerfile . This is because need to create separate docker build commands for development and non-development, which is harder to management.

• Ideal solution will be to update only docker run command. Which we only run locally anyway. We do not need to execute docker run for production, as generally for production we just push the final image directly to ECR via a shell command.

Goal

Now that theory is knocked out of the way, we understand that we prefer to update docker run command syntax, rather than touch docker build or Dockerfile itself.

Also, it is important here to go over the problem statement once more.

The goal that we are trying to solve is how to obviate the need to rebuild the Docker image every time an HTML, JS, EJS, CSS, or similar file in the current local directory changes.

The host’s current directory is the same that we are copying over to /usr/app on the Docker container, as specified in the above Dockerfile .

This can be a simple change because of renaming your project, or changing any of the code for the project itself. This is not ideal.

There is a way to mount a local folder as a volume on a Docker container. This will solve it for us, when we are running nodemon on the Docker container to listen for file changes on the /usr/app location on the container side. We can instead trick Docker to listen for local file changes instead - let us see how this is possible.

Online Results

When searching online for the prompt “Can Docker mount local drive and listen for file changes” - as this would be incredibly helpful for local development - I found the below articles to be helpful.

Also, note that the first result is from the official Docker documentation itself. This was helpful for me to determine if Docker can mount local drive and listen for file changes.

• https://docs.docker.com/storage/bind-mounts/

• https://medium.com/@kale.miller96/how-to-mount-your-current-working-directory-to-your-docker-container-in-windows-74e47fa104d7

• https://stackoverflow.com/q/23439126/10237506

In short, this appears to be a question of --volume vs. -- mount with a type:bind. The Docker docs (see first link above) mention that using --volume is the old style, and there is one important difference in behavior. Hence, using --mount explicitly going forward seems to be the safer (and more future-proof) approach.

However, note that either approach (--volume or --mount) should work for our use case.

Ask an AI Assistant

When I kicked the same prompt (more or less) to an AI assistant, this is what it replied with - rest of its response truncated for abbreviation sake.

Yes, Docker mount local drive to listen for file changes should certainly be possible.

Mounting a Host Directory in a Docker Container:

• You can use the -v flag with the docker run command to mount a local directory into a container. For example:

docker run -v /path/to/host/directory:/path/in/container my_image

• Replace /path/to/host/directory with the actual path to your local directory and /path/in/container with the desired path inside the container.

• This approach ensures that any updates made in the host directory are reflected within the container.

Wow, that wasn’t too bad. It got us more than halfway there. Honestly, if we want to use the legacy --volume option, we can just go with the AI suggestion. But to future-proof it, we can make a small tweak and use --mount instead, as we’ll see below.

The Trick

I’ve found the best, future-proof method is to use the --mount type=bind flag when running the docker run command. With this command, you can attach the local directory to your docker container at runtime instead of during the build process.

The --mount type=bind command takes a single parameter formatted like so:

src=<host directory>,dst=<target directory>

If we want to exclude any sub-folders in our <host directory> when mounting the local folder to the Docker container, we need to pass --mount type=volume with the full path to that sub-folder, and exclude the src argument, as follows:

dst=<host directory to not mount>

Example

It’s easier to understand the trick when put into practice.

Putting it all together, here I’ve created a scenario where I would like to:

• Mount my current working directory (/Users/rnag/Git-Projects/Work/my_project) into the alpine:latest image at the /usr/app location in the container.

• Make the run command compatible for Apple-silicon-based Mac’s, with --platform linux/amd64 .

• Exclude (skip) copying over the node_modules sub-folder in my current working directory, when mounting my current working directory . to the /usr/app location in the container.

We would do that as so:

docker run -it --platform linux/amd64 --mount type=bind,src=.,dst=/usr/app --mount type=volume,dst=/usr/app/node_modules alpine:latest

Or, prettified a bit more, for all you neat freaks (like me):

docker run \
  -it \
  --platform linux/amd64 \
  --mount type=bind,src=.,dst=/usr/app \
  --mount type=volume,dst=/usr/app/node_modules \
  alpine:latest

This should start up your container and attach your working directory. Now any changes you make locally (i.e. in your Mac or Windows machine) will be reflected in your Docker container!

In short, this will solve it for us, when we are running nodemon or similar on the Docker container to listen for file changes on the /usr/app location on the container side. We have successfully tricked Docker to listen for local file changes instead - what a win!

So, huge disclaimer, a lesser-known fact (who am I kidding, I’m not ashamed to admit it) is that I’m a bit of a ruby newbie.

That is, I’ve never cared to learn ruby before. Also, perhaps as a direct result of that, I am a little taken aback when a project asks me to install ruby and use tools that it provides such as bundler , because the assumption there is that I know what I am doing.

Just to set the record straight, I don’t know what I am doing when it comes to anything ruby .

Recently, a lot of stuff blew up and hell broke loose, when I inadvertently ran brew upgrade on my new Mac to update (or upgrade?) packages installed by homebrew.

But alas, I did not take ruby into account. A while back, I had installed ruby with homebrew:

$ brew install ruby

Homebrew, without my permission, apparently took it upon itself to upgrade the bundled ruby version - from 3.2.3 to 3.3.0.

Hell broke lose when I cd‘d into my project repo that I use for my website, and ran bundle to install fresh dependencies - which was needed, since ruby version was upgraded, so it was a fresh environment with no gems available.

$ bundle install

The error I received was something like this:

~/<user>/somewhere $ bundle exec jekyll serve
jekyll 3.9.3 | Error:  undefined method `[]' for nil
/usr/local/Cellar/ruby/3.3.0/lib/ruby/3.3.0/logger.rb:384:in `level': undefined method `[]' for nil (NoMethodError)

    @level_override[Fiber.current] || @level

This indeed was the specific error message I saw: Error: undefined method '[]' for nil

Searching online, you can see a whole slew of posts that mention this error, and apparently it only happens with ruby 3.3.0 and the jekyll version 3.9.3 that comes bundled with github-pages .

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77851863/bundle-exec-jekyll-serve-not-working-locally

• https://talk.jekyllrb.com/t/unable-to-install-jekyll-on-m3-macbook/8836

• https://talk.jekyllrb.com/t/error-when-executing-bundle-install/8822

Hence, while it might not bear repeating, it helps to clarify - upgrading jeykll version for a project is a no-go, especially when the project Gemfile relies explicitly on github-pages dependency, which itself relies on jekyll :

gem "github-pages", group: :jekyll_plugins

And yes, just to double check, the Gemfile.lock should show the lines that clearly show the dependency relationship between the

    github-pages (228)
      github-pages-health-check (= 1.17.9)
      jekyll (= 3.9.3)
    ...

To recap, if one installs ruby with brew and runs brew upgrade or similar and results in ruby@3.3.0 being inadvertently installed, this can break when attempting to work with projects that rely on a specific version of jekyll, especially ones that rely on github-pages gem for deployment.

There does not appear to be any solution involving brew and ruby alone.

Upon catching the issue that the mismatch b/w the two gems caused the build error when running bundle exec jekyll serve , I immediately tried some steps, that first involved installing csv , as apparently there was a warning printed to terminal since that doesn’t come bundled in ruby 3.3.0

$ bundle install csv

Then I tried to upgrade all gem versions in project by running:

$ bundle upgrade

That didn’t help, so I tried to specify both gems explicitly:

$ bundle update jekyll
$ bundle update github-pages

Still no dice, and I was at wit’s end by now. Manually upgrading either of those gem versions specified in Gemfile.lock didn’t help either. There was a dependency conflict if I upgraded jekyll, as github-pages relied on a specific version.

I also tried deleting Gemfile.lock file completely and running bundle again, but still no dice.

In short, this was exactly what they call “dependency hell”. I cannot change either gem versions, and hence this is basically a “SNAFU!” situation. As in, there’s no solution to be had that allows me to keep the up-to-date ruby version 3.3.0 for use with my project.

I even tried uninstalling and re-installing specific ruby version 2.3.2 via homebrew, but if you can believe it there still was no dice:

$ brew uninstall ruby
$ brew install ruby@3.2
$ echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/ruby@3.2/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
$ source ~/.zshrc
$ ruby -v
ruby 3.2.3
$ gem install bundler
$ bundle
<error>

I’ll be honest, I felt like tearing my hair out at this point. Sweat started metaphorically trickling down my back. Being a ruby newb, I was about to throw in the towel, and as a last resort maybe open up an issue on the project page for one of the gems, or post about it on a forum asking other users for help.

Now that I think about it, maybe ChatGPT could have helped me. Hello ChatGPT? Can you explain this error please, and suggest me a solution <paste stack trace>.

However, thankfully, that was ultimately not needed. I found a workaround that helps me to maintain ruby version across different machines, consistently.

After researching online for quite a bit, I found out that someone was using rbenv and decided to look into what that is. Turns out, it’s something similar like pyenv for python, or basically a version management tool for a programming language.

Feeling I was on to something at this point, and shrugging my shoulders after realizing I had nothing to lose, I decided to install it after all:

$ brew install rbenv ruby-build
$ echo 'eval "$(rbenv init - zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc
$ source ~/.zshrc

That got me therbenv command, but of course I wasn’t done there yet.

I have to install my necessary previous ruby version 3.2.3 with rbenv :

$ rbenv install 3.2.3

After installing a version with rbenv , you can set it either globally (so that ruby version is changed regardless of your location in terminal) or locally, so it will only affect a project after you cd into its folder.

I decided to do both, because the default ruby version that comes bundled with my new Mac Air M2 laptop is something like 2.x , which is hella old. And I’m clearly never gonna use the built-in one.

$ rbenv global 3.2.3
$ rbenv local 3.2.3

Now we’re cooking! To double-check that we got the new ruby version installed:

$ ruby -v
ruby 3.2.3 (2024-01-18 revision 52bb2ac0a6) [arm64-darwin23]

Great! Now that’s out of the way, we want to install or upgrade bundler, and then we’re good to go.

$ gem install bundler
$ bundle -v
Bundler version 2.5.5

If it helps, one might need to delete and re-createGemfile.lock by running bundle, especially if it says the gems were installed with another version of bundler :

BUNDLED WITH
   2.5.4

After that, you can run bundle exec or however you start up your project that relies on jekyll and github-pages , and then you should be all set.

If it helps, I’ve actually created an alias command jb , which serves that exact purpose in my case:

$ which jb
jb: aliased to bundle exec jekyll serve -low

It’s easy enough to add that alias in to bash or zsh shell configuration. To add it to zsh - my default interpreter - here’s what I did:

echo "alias jb='bundle exec jekyll serve -low'" >> ~/.zshenv

Then source ~/.zshenv to reload the changes in the current terminal window.

All said, this whole ordeal took me >1 hour of pointless debuggery. It was the exact opposite of fun. And, ideally not how I would have wanted to spend a Sunday morning.

However, the upshot is that the confusing ruby versioning hell along with two of the aforementioned gems - jekyll and github-pages - is now finally resolved, at long lost.

Here then was a lesson learned: manage ruby versions with rbenv instead of homebrew.

Praise be! Massive dependency hell solved, and headache (mostly) avoided. Hope this helps someone else out. Now go out there and get coding!