In this post, I’ll share some of my training data leading up to the Chicago Marathon. The source of the data shared in this post is from Strava, which I used to log all of my runs during training. In order to analyze the data, I first used the Strava API to pull my data, and I wrote some Python to created the graphs shown in this post.

Strava profile // Athlinks profile

Background and Goal

I had some experiences running in high school before deciding to run a marathon, so I was familiar with consistently training for something. Although, the marathon is so different from high school racing distances, that I still felt a little overwhelmed by the whole process. I didn’t exactly know what a “good” marathon training plan looked like, so I aggregated plans and advice from around the internet. Here is a spreadsheet of my rough outline of a training plan. I stuck to it for the most part, but I stopped filling it in around mid-August when I got injured and wasn’t sure if I would be able to run the marathon.

This was my second marathon, and my goal was to hit the qualifying times for the Boston and NYC marathons, 3:00 and 2:54 respectively. I ended up placing 433 out of 45,852 participants with a time of 2:43:10 at the Chicago Marathon on October 13, 2019.

Training

High-level stats

• Total number of runs: 86
• Total miles: 762.3 miles
• Total time spent running: 14 hours 29 minutes 29 seconds
• Average run distance: 8.86 miles
• Average run-time: 1 hour 20 seconds
• I trained in a total of 5 main locations Northwest Arkansas; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; New York City, NY; and Lincoln, NE.

Charts ‘n Stuff

Unfortunately, embedding dynamic charts within a Medium post doesn’t look great. So, the charts below are just screenshots of the charts I generated via Python.

The chart above is a funnel series chart representing the amount of distance that I ran on any given week. My biggest week was just over 60 miles, and the plan was to continue building up. But, I started getting pretty intense shin splints, so I toned it down and took breaks on weeks 11 and 14. Unfortunately, I then had a pretty rough hip injury and had to stop running for 5 weeks. At that point, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to continue running, so I ran 1 mile during week 18 to test things out. Luckily, I was able to start running again 2 weeks before the marathon for some final training.

The chart above represents all 84 of my runs in training for the marathon. The runs are displayed in chronological order by date, from the left to the right. Further, there is a correlation between the distance of each run and the dot size. Most of my runs are concentrated between 5 and 10 miles, but I also had a significant number of runs from 10–15 miles. If I didn’t take a break from mid-August to mid-September, I imagine a higher number of runs would be in the 10–15 mile range.

Training Heat Map

I spent the summer in Boston, Massachusetts, so that is where I did the bulk of my runs. Below is a heatmap of all my runs throughout the Boston area. The thicker the line, the more runs I did in that area.

On a side note, I loved training in Boston. I did most of my runs along the Charles River that runs between Boston and Cambridge. There were always people out exercising or hanging out along the trail, so it was a great and encouraging environment. If you are ever in the area, I highly recommend going for a run/walk/bike ride.

The Race

First — here are a few fun photos from my weekend in Chicago.

My finishing time sounds impressive, but it’s just that — a time. In my opinion, the interesting part is how the race plays out. A marathon, or 26.2 miles, is a long way to run. People undergo a lot, mentally and physically throughout the race. But, that’s also why I think the marathon is such a special distance. It challenges people in ways they might not have expected. Additionally, no two races are the same, so you never know what you’re in for when you line up on the starting line.

Overall, most of the race went really well. I found a small group to run with early on and was hitting about 6:00 min/mile until 30 kilometers. At that point, I slowed down to about 6:15 min/mile until mile 24. Mile 24 is definitely when I “hit the wall.” From that point on, I was in quite a bit of pain, and I slowed down to around 8–8:30 min/mile until the end of the race.

Ending Thoughts

Overall, I am happy with the way that training and the marathon went. Yes, it would’ve been better if I didn’t take a 5–week break from mid-August to mid-September because of a hip injury. But, I had a solid fitness base from the rest of my training and was still able to accomplish my time goal.

I also had a lot of fun training for and running this marathon. Until the next one!

Thanks for reading — I hope you enjoyed 🙂

Jacob Shiohira

japan, south korea, taiwan, china, vietnam, canada, chile, spain, ireland, uk, india, germany — to list a few of the countries

got up close & personal with mt fuji, aka 富士山

did an awesome homestay

saw the imperial palace!

explored yokohama — favorite place

stopped by the cup noodle museum

got the chance to explore with old friends

celebrated a pseudo-thanksgiving

…until next time Japan ✌️

Note: This post describes my first week at Amazon, but it is important to note I am a single intern describing my personal experiences. Thus, the views presented here are my own and do not represent Amazon as a whole.

Hi, my name is Jacob Shiohira, and I am interning at Amazon in Seattle, WA as a Software Development Engineer Intern in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cryptography. One of my main goals this summer is to do a better job around documenting the process and my experiences — both for myself to reflect upon and prospective Amazon interns to learn what interning at Amazon is like. I have not decided on the frequency of my posts (weekly updates versus updates for major milestones), but I will figure that out as we go. Without further ado, let’s get started!

Week One: Arriving in Seattle & First Days at Amazon

Comparable to internship programs at other companies, Amazon groups intern start dates based on when the students finish school. My May 7th start date was the earliest start date of the summer, so there were only about 100 other interns that started on the same day. There will therefore be many more waves of interns starting throughout the summer.

My early start date meant that I finished finals week just 2 days before flying out to Seattle (May 5th). The transition was both quick and exciting. I drove home after I finished my last final, had a day to pack, and flew out at 6:30 AM the following morning. I was welcomed to Seattle by clear, blue skies and unobtrusive shadows cast by golden rays of sun.

As soon as I landed, I took a Lyft to my apartment for the summer in downtown Seattle. Companies allow interns to choose between corporate housing and a stipend. There are pros and cons to both options, but I took the stipend, allowing me to choose where I wanted to stay for the summer. I am living with a friend and my freshman year roommate from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Jacob. He is working for Microsoft this summer. It is interesting because we are both double computer science and mathematics majors, so we often refer to ourselves as Jacob-Squared, or “the other Jacob”. Anyways, we chose to live in the Mill at First Hill. It is a short 10-minute walk from Pike’s Place with beautiful views during my walk to work.

The not-so-luxurious part about this option is that our apartment came completely unfurnished. So, our apartment still looks pretty sad, but it is slowly coming along — thanks to Amazon Prime! Naturally, as college students, my roommate and I opted for some cheaper furniture options from Amazon, and had some fun while furnishing our apartment.

Starting at Amazon: Truly Day One

My first day at Amazon (although it is famously always Day One)

I am incredibly lucky to be a part of this large team of outstanding missionaries who value our customers as much as I do and who demonstrate that every day with their hard work. As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. Our approach remains the same, and it’s still Day 1. — Jeff Bezos

mainly consisted of new hire orientation (NHO) — breakfast, presentations about Amazon’s leadership principles, expectations for the internship, and lunch. I enjoyed Amazon’s very organized processes before my first day because I spent no time filling out paperwork. NHO was a great opportunity to meet some of the other interns and a few Amazon employees. The opportunity is one of the best part of internships. There are students from all over the country that come to a single place for 3 months, and it is a great way to converse about a variety of topics. Additionally, it can be surprisingly fun to hear other peoples’ stories — yes, even the software engineer interns talk to each other ;) After finishing NHO by early afternoon, I picked up my laptop (you already know I am #TeamMac), backpack, and accompanying cables. Fortunately, the IT Services team at Amazon had already delivered and setup my monitors. All I had to do was show up at my desk and plug in my laptop! Since I’m in the AWS organization, I was placed in the building named Port 99. Amazon is famous for giving all of their buildings unique names that tie into the company history. I was escorted to my building by a recruiter where I then met my team, manager, and mentor; and learned more about what the team and my project for the summer.

Settling In: The Rest of Week One

On Tuesday, I spent most of the day setting up my MacBook and desktop for the development I will be doing this summer. The process was a little confusing but overall cool. I was even able to learn about quite a few of Amazon’s internal tools and technological infrastructure along the way. I then had SDE bootcamp on Wednesday and Thursday to help with the transition of new developers to Amazon. We learned what it means to be a SDE along with many of the tools and processes we will encounter. The speakers and instructors were all Amazonian veterans, so it was fun and quite insightful to hear them speak about their experiences. When I wasn’t in bootcamp, I rounded out the week by meeting with all of the members of my team because I wanted to get to know them a little better and also learn more about what the team has worked on, is working on, and plans to work on in the near future. All of my team members are so nice, incredibly smart (like, reeeeeally smart), and have interesting backgrounds. It is not always possible to do this sort of thing, but I definitely recommend doing something similiar for anyone starting an internship. Interns usually only spend 3 months at a company, so the sooner you can dive in, the better. After all, your team members will be the ones that you will be asking for help when you need it — notice I did not say if. ;)

Tips for Week One of an Internship

The start of an internship can be exciting, overwhelming, and busy. However, it is really important to establish a solid foundation that you (as an intern) can build on the rest of your internship. So, here are a few things to consider doing during the first week:

• Complete all suggested (or required) onboarding
• Fill out W4s and payment information — getting paid for your work is always good
• Become familiar with some of the general development environments, infrastructure, and build tools. You will use them throughout the summer, so the sooner you can understand them, the better.
• Definitely talk with your manager about setting up weekly one-on-one meetings to discuss progress, ask questions, etc.
• Work with your manager or mentor (if you have one) to define project goals, expectations, and timelines. It is beneficial for all parties involved to develop a shared understanding of these things to help you be successful and hopefully receive a return offer at the end of the summer if that is your goal.
• HAVE FUN! It is not everyday that you have the opportunity to start an internship, so it is important to enjoy the experience, meet other interns and full time employees, and just take everything in.

Outside of Work — Exploring Seattle

Throughout the week, my roommate and I had some time to explore Seattle. One of our mandatory stops (per my request) was to stop by Amazon Go because who doesn’t want to try shopping at a store without cashiers!? We tried our best to trick the system, but Amazon correctly identified our purchases despite how many items I picked up, added to my bag, and later put back on the shelf.

Throughout the week, my roommate and I spent some time just walking around downtown Seattle since it is so close to our apartment. One of my favorite things to do in the city is just start walking. There is so much to do and see in this city that having a planned outing can interfere with some of the most unique aspects of the city. So, we would often just left our apartment with no idea where we were going.

Friday finally came, and we spent some time just walking around Seattle. We started in South Lake Union (SLU) near Amazon’s campus and made our way all the way up to Gas Works Park just in time for sunset. Here are some of the fun photos along the way.

Wow! You’ve made it to the end of week one with me. Thanks for reading — I hope you enjoyed seeing and hearing about what it is like to start an internship at Amazon in Seattle. I look forward to sharing more my summer experiences.

Cheers!

Time on this Earth is unarguably our most valuable resource as humans. Everyday, we make thousands of decisions about how to spend our time. From work to exercising to reading to hanging out with friends, we allocate a little bit here and a little bit there that all adds up.

I’d like to focus on just one of the small areas in which people choose to spend our time: work. Most humans spend an astronomical amount of time at work. It’s been said that the average person spends just north of 90,000 hours working over a 50 year period. With the recommended 8 hours of sleep a night, that equates to approximately 21% of a 76 year life spent working. Thus, it makes sense that you should seek work that you enjoy, work that matters. A big problem is that it is not always that simple. For many, there are often obstacles that stand in the way from pursuing what we once dreamed of as children. Maybe those alone are enough motivation to keep pushing and working.

At this point in my life, I am fortunate to not have many external obligations. So, as I continue pursuing my education, working on projects, and trying to better myself, I find myself sometimes becoming weary. It is sometimes easy to lose drive and motivation about what we do. The thing that always helps me reevaluate and put things in perspective is the why. I describe the why as the underlying motivations driving why we do what we do. For some, the why might be financial success, philanthropic endeavors, or simply making a difference. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, puts it,

We spend far too much time at work for it not to have a deeper meaning in your life.

Whatever your why is, let it be your energizing factor when you become tired. Often times the what at a specific time is simply a means to the end, and that end is the why.

In most industries, internships are notorious for a summer’s worth of work on projects of minimal importance. At the very most, people expect companies hand interns proof of concept projects. It’s a little bit different in the technology industry, but still — there’s a lot of trust that has to be placed in interns before letting them ramp up to a project and contribute to an ongoing project alongside full time employees. That is why I was so surprised this past summer when my mentor told my pod (myself and the two other interns that I worked with) that our work might get pushed to production by the time we left. Microsoft is an insanely large company, so I expected to work on a small project that might or might not make a difference. I believe it says a lot that the team we were on had faith in us from day one.

The Project

I worked on the Graphics team within SiGMA, which stands for Silicon, Graphics, and Media. My team was a small subset of the overall Graphics team that worked on PIX. PIX is a performance tuning and debugging application for Windows and Xbox game developers. There are many IDEs that provide good ways for developers to test and debug their code, but that was not necessarily the case for Windows and Xbox game developers. PIX was born. However, it’s not always desirable to manually test and debug via a user interface. So, PIX created a command line tool to automate jobs and ultimately increase productivity. My pod and I had the specific task of designing the features in PIX’s command-line tool to do the following:

• Extract the screenshot (which was recorded when the original GPU capture was taken) to a PNG file
• Save out the contents of a rendertarget or depth buffer after playing back a capture

If you don’t know much about graphics, then those might not make much sense. I know I definitely didn’t understand and realize everything that went into those two things when I started the summer.

The Challenge

My pod and I did not have any experience working with graphics and 2/3 of us did not have any prior C++ experience. In addition to those two things, we had just 12 weeks to learn more about those and gain familiarity with the PIX codebase. I was quite worried at first because the project and all the knowledge we needed to learn seemed quite daunting, but our team was so helpful in helping us whenever we needed. My podmates and I worked incredibly hard, and our efforts ended up paying off when we completed our project. Shortly after we left, the code for our project was pushed to production in the PIX product. Pretty cool!

If you’re curious, head on over to the PIX blog to learn more about this awesome product! Shout out to the two other interns I worked with this summer — Osvaldo Armas and Rebecca Chen.

Final Note

For any university freshmen and/or sophomores reading this, I definitely recommend applying to the Explore program. Interns have the opportunity to gain experience in both Product Management (Program Management at Microsoft) and Software Engineering. It’s an amazing program at an amazing company. If interested, check out more information here.

It’s hard to translate my entire summer experience into a brief summary — the experiences, the mentorship, the frienship, and more are all pieces that made the summer so great. Anyways, I wrote a bit about my experience and made a video to recap the summer.

Life of a Microsoft Intern

I’ve tried to sum up the best five things (though, there are SO many more) about being a Microsoft Intern. Then, you can find my recap video toward the end of the post.

1. Unparalleled access to any Microsoft employee: I had heard that going into the summer that FTEs (Full Time Employees) love interns, but I hadn’t realized how true this is. Essentially, if there was someone at the company that an intern wants to meet, there is a high likelihood that a cold email would usually trigger a timely response. Granted, there are exceptions — Satya and the rest of the top level executive team often have schedules packed full of meetings and travel that is planned many months in advance. That being said, there were many FTEs that were more than willing to fit me into their schedules so that I could meet them and learn more about what they did. If an intern wanted to meet most CVPs (Corporate Vice President), it could definitely happen with some planning.
2. Opportunity to work on products that millions (maybe billions) of people use: Most people see products like Word and Excel as, well, products. I really enjoyed getting to meet employees of numerous teams around Microsoft that were so excited and passionate about further improving products and enhancing user experiences. Meeting and interacting with those FTEs definitely inspired me to work harder. Depending on the team and the project, interns have the opportunity to contribute to products that SO many people use. I know I always freaked out a bit when I actually thought about just how many people use some of the products fellow interns and I worked on. There are interns working anything and everything from the Windows kernel to the Hololens to the Microsoft Office suite. In my case, I was on a team within the Windows & Devices Group that was building out a beta product, and the code my podmates and I wrote actually shipped and is on MSDN. I never thought I would spend 12 weeks at Microsoft and leave as an official author of Microsoft production code!
3. Making friends very similar yet so different from you: The first person I met when I walked in the door for New Employee Orientation (NEO — one of the many, many acronyms you will encounter as a Microsoft intern) was from a university in Paris. After that, I continually met fellow interns from all over North America as well as overseas. Even though the majority of interns were from diverse backgrounds, we all bonded over our quirky spirits and afinity for technology. One of the best parts for me was that I was in a hotel with ~80 other interns. We all had our own rooms, and breakfast was served daily. It was essentially a very nice dorm except we all said “good luck at work” instead of “good luck in class” each morning. It’s pretty cool that we really only knew each other for approximately 12 weeks, yet everyone grew quite close.
4. Exploring the PNW for a summer for almost no cost to you: Microsoft provides great transportation benefits as well as multiple options for housing. This means that interns get to live it up for relatively cheap despite the Seattle area being a bit pricey. However, there were always free events going on throughout the city. Keep in mind — nature is always free ;) Some of the best things I did with other interns was hike, go to CHBP, eat bomb sushi, explore SAM, watch a cool parade, skydive, and so much more. I even met Russel Wilson (Quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks) during an afternoon trip to the Seattle Nike store!
5. Intern Perks + Pay: When it comes to quality of intern life, Microsoft interns live pretty large! Not only do interns get paid insanely well, they have the opportunity to attend really cool intern events such as a summer long speaker series of high level FTEs, intern boat parties, game nights, hiking trips, and of course — the Signature Event. The 2017 Signature Event was at the Future of Flight where Daya and The Chainsmokers performed. As if that wasn’t enough, all interns received freeeeeee Xbox One S consoles as a cherry on top of the event!

I previously mentioned that I made a video to recap my summer as a Microsoft intern. Check it out & hopefully it gives a bit more insight into what it is like to be a Microsoft intern!

I’m not saying that interns at other companies don’t have great experiences. All I know is that Microsoft university recruiters and intern program coordinators work incredbily hard to make sure that interns get the full Microsoft + PNW experience. To anyone else lucky enough to receive an Microsoft internship offer, get ready — you are in for the summer of a lifetime.

Cheers!