Last week, I received this new book of Deborah Mayo, which I was looking forward reading and annotating!, but thrice alas, the book had been sabotaged: except for the preface and acknowledgements, the entire book is printed upside down [a minor issue since the entire book is concerned] and with some part of the text cut on each side [a few letters each time but enough to make reading a chore!]. I am thus waiting for a tested copy of the book to start reading it in earnest!
Today, I received the Norse Farce cups I had designed with the help of Thomas! While just as easy to replicate on sites like Vistaprint, I have a few left in case some Og’s readers are interested!
A fairly good race in Argentan, despite (relatively) hot weather that saw the winning time increase by two minutes and a half. (Last year’s winner actually lost 3 and half minutes on the same track). Gaining 18 seconds over my time from last year was thus a significant achievement. This was my 17th—or 18th including one I ran on my own as it had been cancelled—Argentan half-marathon. The first half [of the half] was a bit unpleasant under the relentless sun, and each wee slope made me miss my 3:52 kilometre goal. But very few runners passed me for good after the 5th kilometre and reaching the forest part was a blessing, providing shade and cool. A single runner passed me there, although I had not slowed down, and I did not realise it was another runner in my V2 category as I could have tried to keep up. The last kilometres were indeed much smoother than in previous, thanks to a change in my training where I increased the number of long distance trainings. And presumable thanks to the previous week abroad when I trained twice a day. Anyway, I was still surprised to end up as the second V2, 15 seconds from both the first and third V2 runners. Which got me a nice Timex watch as a reward! And a pretty ugly cup… [Thanks again and again to the photographs of Normandiecourseapied for their free pictures!]
(Warning: not much of interest to anyone there, as I am posting about a local race I ran!)
Today, I ran my annual Ministry of Finances race. This year, I had the choice between 5km and 10km, so I picked 5km if only because I dislike running two identical loops (and also because I am running a 10km on Sunday in Caen). I was in reasonable shape so managed to get to the head of the race at the start, avoiding the crowd in the narrow paths of Bois de Vincennes and stuck to my 8th position for most of the race, until I got passed by the female winner close to the 4th k, and I ended up first in my category in a rather slow 19:01. So I brought back to the office a rather large (and necessarily ugly) cup… This year I did not even bother to take split times at each km tag as I knew they were most unreliable: for instance, I did 3:09-6:49-10:20 for the three first ones. Anyway, this was a rather pleasant race in a cool weather and prior to a strong rain shower that would have left us drenched. My INSEE Paris Club running team managed to get 5 first positions (out of 16) and 10 cups out of the 48 cups delivered for the event! (As in the past years I then had to rush from the stadium to attend a seminar at CREST, where I must acknowledge my attention span varied at times…)
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