I had a great time at the Pegasus half-marathon, except for the freezing hundred minutes stuck at the starting point on one side of the bridge before the race started, when I had to escape the cold and the wind by staying between two edges! Great start over this historical (if since rebuilt) bridge (much shorter than the Golden Gate bridge!) accompanied by bagpipes, if not from a large band!, not too many runners to pass over the first kilometre thanks to the division into several waves, even though I was not strategically located close enough to the starting line, and quickly falling into a sub-4 pace that I kept for most of the race. Great that my family was there at the arrival line. Despite the proximity to the Channel and the lack of protection through the half-grown wheat fields, the wind was not too much of an hindrance and the 110m overall climb was dispersed enough over most of the race hence never impacting my pace for long. A major plus, the final 5k’s were mostly downhill which helped a lot with this usually challenging part (even though I do not look particularly serene on the pics)! I essentially stayed with the same runners over the second half of the race, only for a few young ‘uns passing me in the last 300m within the stadium (which sits next to my high school, Lycée Malherbe). I was thus more than happy with my time (and with my higher volume training in the prior month, with a week at 100km), a minute faster than planned and two minutes earlier than in Boulogne, but did not expect any podium position in such a large and competitive race and only checked my ranking after getting home (my mother’s home) and showering, sort of “too late” for attending the award ceremony but I do not think I would have gone anyway. Next half planned in Argentan, end of September, where else?!
Archive for Normandie
D Day Pegasus bridge half-marathon [1:23:42, 90th / 4883, 1st over 55, 13⁰, 117+m]
Posted in Kids, pictures, Running, Travel with tags Caen, Courir en Normandie, D Day, glider, Les Courants de la Liberté, M5M, Malherbe, Normandie, Normandy, Pegasus bridge, road race on June 4, 2024 by xi'anhorse ghost [jatp]
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel with tags Argentan, Fall, France, horse, horse mutilation mystery, Normandie, sunrise, trail running on September 15, 2020 by xi'an
MiMo2020
Posted in Statistics with tags likelihood-free inference, mixture of distributions, Normandie, Normandy, Rouen, SIAM Conference on Uncertainty Quantification, Université de Rouen, UQ20, workshop on January 24, 2020 by xi'an
On 26 and 27 March 2020, the maths department of the Université of Rouen, Normandy, France, organizes a (free) workshop on mixture distributions. With the following speakers
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- Christophe Biernacki (Laboratoire Paul Painlevé, Univ. Lille 1 et INRIA)
- Vincent Brault (Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann, Univ. Grenoble Alpes)
- Gilles Celeux (Laboratoire de Mathématiques d’Orsay, Univ. Paris Sud et INRIA)
- Elisabeth Gassiat (Laboratoire de Mathématiques d’Orsay, Univ. Paris Sud)
- Van Hà Hoang (Laboratoire de Mathématique Raphaël Salem, Univ. Rouen Normandie)
- Hajo Holzmann (Philipps-University Marburg, Germany)
- Dimitri Karlis (Department of Statistics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece)
- Trung Tin Nguyen (LMNO, Univ. Caen Normandie)
- Andrea Rau (Département de Génétique Animale, INRA, Jouy en Josas)
- Pierre Vandekerkhove (Laboratoire d’Analyse et de Mathématiques Appliquées, Univ. Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée)
- Cinzia Viroli (Department of Statistical Sciences, Universita di Bologna, Italia)
Unfortunately, since this is my former department, I will not be able to attend as I am taking part into the SIAM Conference on Uncertainty Quantification (UQ20), on the very same days. In a session on likelihood-free inference.
a very quick Riddle
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, R with tags Egyptian fractions, Gros-Horloge, jatp, Normandie, riddle, Rouen, The Riddler on January 22, 2020 by xi'an
A very quick Riddler’s riddle last week with the question
Find the (integer) fraction with the smallest (integer) denominator strictly located between 1/2020 and 1/2019.
and the brute force resolution
for (t in (2020*2019):2021){
a=ceiling(t/2020)
if (a*2019<t) sol=c(a,t)}
leading to 2/4039 as the target. Note that
catching my train with no training
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel with tags Abidjan, Caen, Courir en Normandie, jatp, La Prairie, La Rochambelle, Les Courants de la Liberté, Normandie, road race on October 22, 2019 by xi'an
