long ajax call breaking knockout binding

I am creating a personal website using durandal and knockout with the below code to bind a edit blog page. Everything worked great and I was able to bind the text area with the returned text of the ajax call.

Once this was done I was curious if a long response from the webservice would break it, so I put in a Thread.Sleep(1000) into the service and now I cannot get it to bind the returned text to the text area. Any suggestions on how to get this to work???

side-note: I dont think this has to do with the durandal framework but I thought I would include that I am it

javascript

define(['services/logger', 'services/wysiwyg'], function (logger, wysiwyg) {

var postObservable = ko.mapping.fromJS({});
var vm = {
    activate: activate,
    post: postObservable,
};
return vm;

function activate(routeData) {
    var id = routeData.id;
    $.ajax(
        {
            type: "GET",
            url: '/api/blog/get',
            data: { id: id },
            dataType: "json",
        })
    .then(function(data){
        ko.mapping.fromJS(data, postObservable);
    });

   }

});

    public class BlogController : ApiController
    {
        public IBlogRepository _blogRepository;
        public BlogController(IBlogRepository blogRepository)
        {
            _blogRepository = blogRepository;
        }

        public BlogModel get(int id)
        {
            //Thread.Sleep(1000); <-- breaks when uncommented!!!
            return ConvertToModel(_blogRepository.ById(id));
        }

        private BlogModel ConvertToModel(BlogPost b)
        {
            return new BlogModel { DateCreated = b.DateCreated, Title = b.Title, Content = b.Content, Id = b.Id };
        }
    }

html

<section>
    <div class="row">
        <textarea class="sceditor span12" data-bind="html: post.content"></textarea>
    </div>
    <div class="row">
        <button type="button" class="btn offset10 span1">Cancel</button>
        <button type="button" class="btn btn-primary span1">Save</button>
    </div>
</section>

An ajax call is an asynchronous task so you should return a promise. Doing it that way will make Durandal wait until the ajax call finishes.

return $.ajax(
    {
        type: "GET",
        url: '/api/blog/get',
        data: { id: id },
        dataType: "json",
    })
.then(function(data){
    ko.mapping.fromJS(data, postObservable);
});