I ran my annual 5k in Malakoff on Saturday, recovering from my flu in a much milder climate than last year. Thanks to the flu, I was out of breath after the first K and did poorly (3:38-3:58-3:53-4:00-3:54, ending in 19:26…) I still finished second in my V2 category. This was the first time I was running a race with my daughter, who also finished second (and last!) in her category. (It was about 15 degrees (C) warmer than last year and I think it helped towards fighting the leftovers of the flu! The radio was playing the 6th Brandenburg concerto again, on the way back. Groundhog Day syndroms…?!)
Archive for 5K
39ièmes Foulées de Malakoff
Posted in Running with tags 5K, groundhog day, Insee Paris Club, Malakoff, veteran (V2) on February 17, 2013 by xi'anNo Gertrude Cox 5k in Vancouver!
Posted in Running, University life with tags 5K, Gertrude Cox Scholarship, JSM 2010, MCMSki, Squamish, Vancouver on June 16, 2010 by xi'anI got the news this morning
“We will not be having the race this year due to the difficulty in finding a place and a group to set up the race.”
which means I will not compete in the 21st Gertrude Cox 5k. Very sad, as I was looking forward to it… Of course there is an attractive ultra-marathon (55k!) at the same time but this is out of my league! (Brad Carlin told me there will not be a ski race at MCM’Ski III either for insurrance reaons. How disappointing!) There is nonetheless a 10k in Squamish, starting at 8:30 in Squamish on Sunday August 1st. Sounds attractive as I also plan to go cimbing there…!
5k (-2c)
Posted in Running with tags 5K, Malakoff, semi-marathon on February 13, 2010 by xi'an
I survived my 5k race today in Malakoff despite a cold wind that lowered the temperature way below the forecasted -2C… Taking off my long pants and my sweater to run with a single layer thus required some mental arguing!!! Unsurprisingly, I did not end with a great time, 18:52 (18:59 official time), but this was to be expected given my two weeks of 35mn footing per day with no split session. I thus ran the 5k at my regular speed … for a semi-marathon! Good training anyway for the climb two weeks from now in Scotland. My next race in sight is the 5k in Robinson where I started to hurt last year. If it does not take place during the Warwick meting… (I just checked and it does!)
Back on tracks
Posted in Running with tags 5K, IPC, Malakoff, race, training on February 11, 2010 by xi'anAfter resting for almost four months, I thought it was time for a test about the recovery of my legs towards a new year of running. So about two weeks ago I started a new cycle of soft training, with a maximum of 45 minutes per session and no fast session so far. The result is that I feel much better, less tired, and that my sciatica pain has not increased a bit. (Plus, running back in the local park gets me to see unusual birds due to a cold spell (like a heron, a grebe and a couple of cormorans… Ans also red squirrels which I thought were hibernating!) I will run a local 5K race on Saturday to check about a faster pace (if slower than last summer, for sure!). And to join again my fellow runners from the Insee Paris Club (IPC)!
JSM 2009 impressions [day 3]
Posted in Books, Running, Statistics, University life with tags 5K, Bayesian non-parametrics, Gertrude Cox Scholarship, JSM 2009, MCMC, Use R on August 5, 2009 by xi'anThe day started very early with the Gertrude Cox Scholarship 5k race, since my wife and I had to leave the hotel at 5:15am to catch the first metro to the RFK stadium. We met other runners in the metro and we all managed to get to the parking lot of the stadium. There were actually fewer runners than at the previous Gertrude Cox races I ran (like the first one in 1989 in D.C.), maybe around 40 of us, and the track for the race was one loop around the huge parking lot, not inside the stadium quite obviously. We started at about 6:20am in a warm humid weather and I managed to keep track with the two leaders for about one kilometer (3:38) before setting to my own pace. I stuck to a third place for the rest of the race, ending up in 18:28 about 30 seconds behind David Dunson and more than a minute behind the winner, in what felt like more than 5k.
The first session I attended was the Medallion lecture by Allistair Sinclair who talked about exact convergence speeds for MCMC algorithms in combinatorics. While the talk was beautifully organised and quite broad in reaching to the audience, I must admit I ended up being disappointed at the lack of connection with the MCMC developments found in Statistics, especially the huge corpus of work by Gareth Roberts and Jeff Rosenthal. This is another illustration of the gap between computer scientists working in combinatorics and applied probabilists, even though they are using the same tools. In the afternoon, I went to the Savage Award Finalists session, where the four finalist were presenting their PhD thesis work. Interestingly, they all have some Bayesian features in their work, albeit from different perspectives, and David Dunson managed to give a great discussion on those four theses at the same pace he ran the morning 5k! Later that day, at the SBSS (Section on Bayesian Statistical Science) mixer, the Savage Award was given to Lorenzo Trippa from Milano, now at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Texas A & M, for his extensions of Polya tree models.
I was mentioning the new books in the Use R! series in the previous post. I spotted yesterday a book by Phil Spector on Data Manipulation with R that I immediately bought because Phil’s material on R available on the web has been quite helpful in writing Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R. (Hence the free cap!) Note that he should not be confused with the music producer Phil Spector, who worked with the Ramones and is now in jail! I incidentally spotted two copies of the paperback version of the The Bayesian Choice
