500 Mile Challenge

At the start of the year I was looking to give myself a small running challenge to motivate myself into increasing my running both in number of runs and length of run. After chatting to some friends I decided to go for 365 miles in a year which was achievable but also allowed for some time off due to holidays and any possible injuries.

I decided to mention it to the guys I regularly go running with (both better runners than myself) and they decided it was a good idea but 365 was a bit too easy. The 365 mile challenge was replaced with the 400 mile challenge. We decided to log this on Endomondo so we could track each others progress but found that someone had already posted a 500 mile challenge. This led to the 365 mile challenge becoming the 500 mile challenge.

It worked out at roughly 9 miles a week which is a mile more than what I usually do after completing two 4 mile runs at lunchtimes. It was good motivation so we upped our normal run to 5 miles so that we would be completing 10 miles a week on average. So far I am just about on track but I had to clock ~70 miles this month to make up for the short fall I had in January due to the birth of my son.

I also bought some new trainers for some extra motivation and finally ditched my 10 year old asics that had about 1000 miles on the clock. I went for the asics fuji es trail shoes as most of the running I do is on tracks in the forest. The shoes are really comfortable and have the usual asics excellent fit and are a lot lighter than my old shoes. 

For trail shoes they are great with good grip but the only gripe I have is that they should really be a lot more waterproof to be true trail shoes. 

T-SQL Replace String

On a recent project I was tasked with writing a simple string replace function for T-SQL.  On the surface it seemed a fairly straightforward task using either PatIndex or charindex.  However, some of the specific requirements proved problematic.  There could be multiple replaces of the same text throughout the string, the replacement text may be the same as the text to find and the word may contain numbers and underscores. 

Using patindex in a loop seemed the best way forward to deal with the multiple replacements and the numbers and underscore characters.  The other problem was that I had to step through the original text to do the replacements so that if a text was replaced with the same text then the function wouldn't get stuck.  I achieved this by using sub string to get the remaining text after each replacement.

@OrigString varchar(8000), 
@LookFor varchar(1000), 
@ReplaceWith varchar(1000))

returns varchar(8000)
BEGIN
DECLARE @findIndex int
DECLARE @lengthLookFor int
DECLARE @lengthReplace int
DECLARE @totalLength int
DECLARE @tempString as varchar(8000)
DECLARE @counter int

SET @OrigString = '(' + @OrigString + ')'

SET @lengthLookFor = LEN(@LookFor)
SET @lengthReplace = LEN(@ReplaceWith)
SET @totalLength = LEN(@OrigString)
SET @tempString = @OrigString
SET @counter = 0

DECLARE @stuffindex int
SET @stuffindex = 0

DECLARE @substring int
SET @substring = 0

WHILE PATINDEX('%' + @LookFor +'[^a-z0-9]%', @tempString) != 0
BEGIN
 SET @findIndex = PATINDEX('%[^a-z0-9]' + @LookFor +'[^a-z0-9]%', @tempString) + 1
--SELECT @findIndex as 'findIndex'

 set @stuffindex =  @findIndex + @substring 
 if(@counter >0)
  set @stuffindex = @stuffindex - 1

 --SELECT @stuffindex as stuffindex

 SET @OrigString = STUFF(@OrigString, @stuffindex , @lengthLookFor, @ReplaceWith)
--SELECT @OrigString as 'outputstring'

SET @substring = @stuffindex + @lengthReplace
--SELECT @substring as substring

SET @tempString = SUBSTRING(@OrigString,@substring,@totalLength - @findIndex)
--SELECT @tempString as 'tempstring'

SET @counter = @counter + 1


END

SET @OrigString = SUBSTRING( @OrigString, 2, LEN(@OrigString)- 2)