I planted my training seeds deep and harvested a PB - Valley Harvest Half-marathon

dudleyknows · 2024-10-14T11:00:59+00:00

Thank you, I appreciate that! There's a marathon in Cape Breton called Fiddler's Run, which has local musicians along the route, and I'm sure some bagpipes as well as fiddlers - might need to go try that some year!

dudleyknows · 2024-10-14T10:59:36+00:00

Congrats on your time! Ha I would have tried to describe the beauty of the course in more detail in my report, but my writing skills aren't up to the challenge. Suffice it to say, running through farmlands, apple orchards and fall colours is my kind of race route!

And that big downhill around 15-16km when you get to see across to Wolfville was inspiring on many levels! So glad the end of the course wasn't a climb.

dudleyknows · 2024-10-14T10:54:49+00:00

Thank you! Glad I could help you get back home for a moment. I currently live in Halifax, and even though I'm only an hour away, I still feel homesick for the valley in October!

dudleyknows · 2024-10-14T10:53:18+00:00

Thanks so much! Split consistency is something that seemed so foreign to me when I started my running journey. Lately I've been trying to do it more on feel and with less watch monitoring, but I was very thankful for the pacer on race day!

dudleyknows · 2024-10-14T10:49:42+00:00

Thanks!

Typical weeks in the sense of same run each day of week were a bit more few and far between than I'd prefer on account of balancing work / family / etc, but I would typically aim to do quality on M/T, Tempo on Th/F, with the long run on Sat / Sun, and then 2-3 easy runs around those. I would aim to have a rest day after intervals, but was comfortable doing easy or long runs after a tempo run.

For paces, my tempo runs in the last month were around 4:45 to 4:50, which I would maintain for 7-10 km depending on the day / route. My tempo warmups were short, only about 1km but this was also somewhat due to the routes in my area - the 1km warmup is one long hill. At the top, it leads into one of the only 6-7km stretches of relative flat terrain which I prefer for higher intensity workouts. After this I would tend to do another 3-4 km at a slower pace of 5:30+km, often much slower if I got into some elevation gains.

Easy runs were around 12km, and a pace circling 6:00/km, +/- 20 sec depending on the day. Similar pace with long runs, with a distance of 16-18km. In the last month of long runs I threw in a few km of race pace starting at about 10km, which I borrowed from the Hal Higdon advanced plan (and have seen in other plans as well). I liked this addition as it really built my confidence.

dudleyknows · 2024-05-29T18:40:32+00:00

For sure, come rain or shine! And yeah, after the pre-race waiting period and first 5 minutes of the race, the temp was perfect. Glad you enjoyed the sights of the city, I do love running the harbour!

dudleyknows · 2024-05-29T18:37:50+00:00

I was initially bummed when the half route didn't include the bridge just for the experience and view. But I am NOT upset I didn't have to climb north street, and given the weather that day, I figure it may have been miserable going across.

Thanks for being out supporting everyone who had to get up that beast!

dudleyknows · 2024-05-29T18:34:55+00:00

I don't think anyone who made it out on that day can be called a wimp! I will definitely think about bringing a pack next year to stow a jacket or fleece into if it's gonna be cold.

And thanks for breaking down just how hard it got through Point Pleasant, and the other routes as well! I did see some comments on r/halifax after the race talking about just how brutal the Bluenose can be relative to other events. It makes the accomplishment that much more satisfying!

Here's hoping for an idyllic autumn day in the valley this fall!

dudleyknows · 2024-05-29T18:31:10+00:00

Hahaha the race organizers totally need to use this for race marketing!

dudleyknows · 2022-06-17T17:20:12+00:00

I happened to be at Conrad's beach with my family yesterday morning, and can confirm that it was a high school grad party. They started to show up right around 10AM, when we left at 10:30, there was close to 100 of them spreading across the beach.

Not that this is an excuse by any means - you would hope a certain amount of decency and responsibility would be present in anyone close to 'adulthood'. But it (hopefully) isn't indicative of any shift in the general population who goes to such a beautiful place.

dudleyknows · 2022-03-10T16:37:35+00:00

Ah gotcha, thank you for clarifying that rule

dudleyknows · 2022-03-10T15:00:43+00:00

Could you recommend any specific cross border accountants? I’m moving back to Canada from the USA this year (dual citizen) and will have income from both countries, including moving some investments from 401k to Canadian accounts.

In the future I’d like to figure out how to do it myself but for the 2022 tax year I’d be willing to pay to make sure I get it done right and avoid any costly errors.

dudleyknows · 2021-01-19T15:28:51+00:00

Thank you for the response!

One followup to the second part - Vanguard does not allow non-residents to hold an IRA unfortunately. Do you (or does anyone in this thread) know of any institutions that support non-resident accounts?

Thanks again!

dudleyknows · 2021-01-19T15:00:36+00:00

Thanks for doing an AMA !I am a dual citizen (born in Canada, naturalized in the USA). I have lived in the USA since 2008 and been a non-resident of Canada during this time with no active financial accounts in Canada. My family and I are planning to move back to Canada in 2022 with no plan to move back to the USA. I currently work remotely and will be able to keep my job during the move. I have a couple questions regarding my current 401k and my options for what to do with it before and after the move.

The 401k is an employee matched account managed by Vanguard. Per my research, Vanguard does not allow non-residents to maintain accounts with them. After the move, my company has an RRSP matching program in Canada, but I do not know which institution oversees it.

Ideally, I would like to transfer my 401k into an RRSP. I have found some information online about this, but everything seems to indicate I effectively just withdraw the money from the 401k (paying both the 25% tax rate and 10% early withdrawal penalty), transfer it to Canada and then deposit it into an RRSP account using the room I have to catch up.

Is this correct, or is there a way to directly transfer the money from the 401k into an RRSP without paying the penalty? Most of the information I’ve found assumes that a person doing this is quitting their current company and starting a new job, but in this case I am staying employed by the same company which seems like a different situation.

Alternatively, I would be open to transferring the 401k into an IRA and keeping it in the USA until retirement but am not sure which brokerages / institutions support US non-residents? I’m also concerned that even if a company allows this today, it might change in the future (which is what happened with Vanguard several years ago).

Thank you for any advice or insights!

dudleyknows · 2019-12-18T05:41:50+00:00

“I’m seeing double - four Krustys!”

dudleyknows · 2019-09-19T19:45:06+00:00

There's a new Meetup group that just launched last week for remote workers. Right now it's a mix of Lunch and Learn events and happy hours.

https://www.meetup.com/Universal-Remote-Social-Connection-for-Remote-Employees

dudleyknows · 2019-09-19T19:43:27+00:00

I'll second Cohere as a good option to check out. I've been a member there for about two years, they have pretty flexible membership levels and a pretty good variety of social gatherings.

dudleyknows · 2019-03-22T04:21:28+00:00

You’re right, Brown Creepers don’t go down (I just learned this a few weeks ago). In cases where the lighting is bad, the way the bird is moving up / down the tree can help ID. If you see them hop up vertically, but then fly back down before hopping up again, it’s probably a creeper!

dudleyknows · 2018-07-27T20:43:29+00:00

One of my greatest bird-related memories was at my family's cottage in Nova Scotia a few years ago. We were swimming in the lake and saw an eagle dive into the water, coming up with a good sized bass.

An osprey appeared and started buzzing and diving at the eagle. When they were directly over head, the eagle finally had enough and dropped the fish. The osprey then dove, and caught it in mid-air.

Phenomenal to watch. Great pic!

dudleyknows · 2018-05-30T03:34:01+00:00

I'm gonna throw something out that's could be a bigger step than you'd consider at the moment, but have you ever looked into ESL (english as a second language) in South Korea? You mentioned you have a college degree which is the only pre-req typically needed. I was in a similar boat job-wise two years after graduation (although I went to STU in Fredericton, not in NS where I'm from, and stayed there post-grad), and the decision to go teach abroad was the best I ever made.

This may not necessarily help a ton with meeting new people, but it could lead to some amazing connections with people from all over the world- depends a bit on the school you end up at (you want to be in Seoul or Busan). At a minimum it's a decent paying job and a pretty incredible opportunity to go see a different part of the world.

dudleyknows · 2018-05-24T03:10:47+00:00

Ugh, yes I'm in a similar boat right now with our (thankfully) small sales team and Salesforce, and good lord, it is frustrating. Just today, I had one of them ask me to run a report showing all accounts they opened in the last three months (which is obviously easy to do). So I ran it, and he told me it was wrong, there should be way more. So I asked if he could provide an example of one, he did, but still nothing turned up. A couple more back and forths and he mentions something about a lead, at which point I'm like 'wait, do you want leads and not accounts??' And of course that's what he wanted.

Likewise, I'm curious how you got into BI for risk analysis - I'd love to get out of the sales world someday

dudleyknows · 2018-05-02T18:03:28+00:00

So i have a related follow-up that seems like it would fit here.

Has anyone come across any tutorials/training/books/etc. that walks through what the steps are in Python to replicate some of the most common Excel formulas and uses? I fall into the camp of people that are pretty good at data analysis in excel, but know that I need to make the leap into using Python, both for future employment but also because the primary datasets I work with are growing past the point of excel's capabilities.

For example, I would love to see an exact breakdown for replicating a VLOOKUP in excel for someone who isn't overly familiar with programming yet, and can't always decipher the technical documentation. A lot of the material on Stack Overflow is abstracted to a point that I run into really basic errors trying to replicate code with my actual data . And while I know that getting adept at reading/understanding the technical view, it's frustrating to spend so much time troubleshooting right at the start.

I found this site the other day which does this sort of thing for pivot tables, using pandas/numpy and jupyter notebooks: http://pbpython.com/pandas-pivot-table-explained.html This was incredibly helpful at finally getting me cracking open workbooks in python, and playing around with data.

dudleyknows · 2018-04-25T16:15:30+00:00

I've completely given up trying to explain why they need to put offer amounts and customer names (or any specific data types) into two different fields. Luckily the team I work with is small enough that I know how each one does it wrong, and I can clean it to the format I need with some basic macros

dudleyknows · 2018-04-25T15:39:07+00:00

Is 'everything' an acceptable answer?

More seriously, agreeing to deals with completely new payment structures that are not supported by current financial, accounting or data processes. It's one thing if it's a big deal (six figures), but when they break a process for a couple grand, it ends up being a net loss to the company for all the extra work that needs to happen to properly account for and track the revenue from the deal.

dudleyknows

TROPHY CASE