Dividends

It's been long enough since my last post that basic settings have changed. Oh, how old habit die, and die some more.

Been a funny few months. Moved to back Montreal, fighting a very, very, very, annoying injury, ran the Toronto Waterfront half in a terrible time, and started a new postdoc. The postdoc, unlike the race, has been great. I got to visit China in November; specifically the Sichuan and Guangxi provinces.

Good lord, has it been two months?

No, it's been longer.

The unimaginative excuse is that I've been quite busy. Busy enough to procrastinate writing something new, at least. Clearly I was doing something during these past ten weeks.
Maybe I should break it down into recent months.

May: Joggling, back to normal running, packing, applying, Cabot Trail-ing

After my five minutes of fame joggling 5k at the Bluenose, I decided it'd be nice to return to normal distance running. That meant doing tempo workouts and strides, all the usual kind of stuff. Workouts went well, though no races to test the waters until June, or so I though.

Out of nowhere I get a message that the Western Team ("Dennis Fairall's Retirement Party") is looking for another man to race the Cabot Trail Relay. The nerve in my leg was just subdued enough to run, so I did. Too much to describe; but long story short, we came in second to Maine-iacs, who broke the course record by five minutes. This is the third time I've come in second on the Cabot relay, so getting quite used to it! 

Started collecting many, many boxes for my eventual move to Montreal.

Ongoing application for jobs I was completely unqualified for. Turns out PhD isn't a magic bullet, save for being called doctor, which no one does (thankfully).

June: racing, conferencing, networking, more packing, and driving 

Ran the Penguin 5k in 15:55, coming in second. Not a fast day, but got my motivation up from where it had been.

The very next day, the 99th annual Chemistry Conference began in Halifax, which I attended, gave a couple of talks, and networked. Ah networking, linking people to other people. What a tangled web we weave.

Packed all my belongings and drove from Halifax to Montreal. So long and thanks for all the fish! (Oh, but I will be back...)

July: moving, lifting, moving, writing, Tely 10-ing, vacationing, data-ing  

Over course of several weeks my wife and I unpacked many belongings, and had a mini garage sale to remove the excess. All kinds of other silliness took place, including hosting friends out of town mere days after moving in. Also lugging a refrigerator, stove, washer and dryer up two flights of stairs...

Decided I want to become a data scientist, more officially than whatever it is I do right now. So I applied to the Data Incubator, a NYC-based organization hoping to train more people in the field. Despite not knowing Heroku, nor many of the programming languages/platforms out there I'm supposed to know, I made it to the finals. Probably botched the interview, but that's the way it goes sometimes. Lucky to have gotten that far and got me curious about machine learning.

Flew to St John's and raced Tely 10. Art Meany and Biped Sports both predicted I would come in 4th, so naturally I had to come second. Third time coming runner-up, which might be some kind of record(?) Oh but there was good competition (Fewer taking his 9th title), a lovely after-party, and a $500 cheque, so happy to participate!

Finally, I am trying to work remotely on research project stuff. It's harder than I expected. Mostly requires means of not distracting myself, which I am an expert in of late, especially when there are actual things needing attention (usually I need to invent them). But my paper is nearly published (literally any day), so that's exciting.

August: things, more things...

Looking for new opportunities in August. Including research positions, more data science, and lab stuff.

I'll be racing Natal Day on Aug 1st, and just signed up for the Truro 21.1 km trail race on Aug 28th. Fun plan: after half marathon race, I'm taking a 20-hour train ride back to Montreal. Why not.

Joggling 2.0

CTV interviewed me and Michael Bergeron about our recent joggling shenanigans. Guess I should at least share the video on my own site. Michael, by the way, has done many races and at this point should count as seasoned athlete of this niche sport.

Context: Back in March I finally decided to deal with a nerve-related injury in my leg (weirdly parallel to Reid's situation, minus Olympic standards and all that). It's healing, very very slowly. Once I started running more in April, I needed something to focus myself other than sub 3 minute kilometers. Joggling had been in the back of my mind for years, so figured why not.



Long story short, I'm running joggling the Bluenose 5k this Saturday. Not sure how it will go in practice. All I can say for certain is a 17 minute 5k is more than doable without juggling balls (PB for roads is 15:08), but this adds a hell of a new twist. My joggling PB is 17:28, and the world record is 16:51. Last week I joggled a 5:10 mile on the track (no drops!), so it's certainly possible. Given this will only be my third joggling race, in any eventuality there ought to be room for improvement.

UPDATE (May 22, post race)

I completed the 5k Bluenose in a time of 17:42. That's about 45 seconds slower than I'd have liked, but it was a hot day; times were about a minute slower for everyone. Oh well. On the plus side, I did beat my 'rival' Micael-Lucien Bergeron. And since it was an 'out and back' style race course, past the turnaround we definitely provided entertainment for the jogging masses.

Some new updates

Looks as though I haven't updated this page in about a month. Technically, I have been writing, except they've been appearing on Canadian Running. Check them out if you'd like.

Conference:

I'm going to present some of my research at the EGU in Vienna in exactly one week. Check out my abstract here. I'm flying out Tuesday night, and hoping to see some of the city and culture. Thanks to Duolingo, I'm now 4% fluent in German, yay!

Montreal 5k:

Originally I was going to run 21.1k in Montreal,  but since the conference is eating up the chance for proper training, plus since I'm slightly injured with a forever tight hamstring. So it's the 5k for me (turns out lots of sitting and running do not cancel each other out). Also my wife Heather is running the 5k and raising money for the MOSD (Montreal Oral School for the Deaf ) on her personal fundraiser page.  You even get a tax voucher if you happen to contribute.

Finally, Stocks and options:

I'm learning a little more about stocks, and to a lesser extent options. It began with Jason Kottke's blog citing theBlack-Scholes as among the equations that changed the world, and realized I have never heard of it. It is useful (apparently) with options traders, who need to know what a 'good' price is for a call/put option. I had never understood options trading either. Figured it wasn't too late to learn.

Basically if you try solving for the brownian-type motion of stock movement, normalized to one-year periods, you get their famous equation, which is:

Where C is the option price, S is the strike price, sigma is the volatility, r is the interest rate if you bought a bond of some sort, and t is time. The sigma value is known as the implied stock volatility (IV), it might range from 0% (rock-steady) to 100% (stock could lose all or double its value in a year's time). Normally it takes some doing to calculate the number. What struck me as interesting is how interest rates are so low you can almost ignore them, hence setting r = 0 makes good sense. Doing so, you get a simpler equation:

Moving cities

I'm moving to Montreal in the summer. The reasoning is simple enough: my wife found work there, and my postdoc position is close to 4 years old now. As much as I loved working my Halifax-based project, postdoc work is -almost by definition- temporary. All good things must come to an end. In the meanwhile, I'll aim to do more road races in Halifax, and hopefully the Calgary half in May.

I have already experienced Montreal for six years, though fewer if you count the first two were shrouded by cultural ignorance. Growing up in Ottawa, when you first see what a real city looks like, at first you don't know what to make of it. Happily Ottawa has gotten a lot better since I left it in 2005.

Not sure what my job will be in Montreal, but it's time to move regardless. Good thing there's lots to do either way. So all my life has been spent in three Canadian cities. Hardly worldly, but each has afforded me a slightly new perspective. Each city holds their stereotypes, some true, others are blatantly false.

Misconceptions, clarifications:

Small-town Hockey Phenomenons

There is a book on my shelf, Passionate Minds, full of interviews of top scientists in their fields. Chapter 5 contains an extended passage from biotechnologist Leroy Hood that caught me.

...important were the opportunities that I had in the form of three outstanding High School teachers in a very small town in northern Montana...what was unusual about these teachers is they all cared about students as individuals...Maybe this is a consequence of just small towns, but if you're good in a small town, everybody knows it and you have enormous self-confidence about, gee, this is wonderful, I can really do all these things.

His second observation moves from my later talking points, but it's worth noting nonetheless:

I get [the best students] from small towns...Or I get them from places like New York City where, if they're number one, they know they're the best. I never got anybody that was any good from suburbia...There isn't a push to excel; there isn't the positive reinforcement.

My intrigue lies mainly in that first quote. But ironically enough, scientific talent is rather hard to quantify. I had the idea had to search where all the best scientists come from. But that fell flat, as the concept 'best scientist' is too subjective (and often too historical; Newton, Einstein, etc). Contemporary lists of sorted scientific talent are rare, and I hate using h-indexes (as secretly everyone does).

Sports is another matter. Rankings are all modern, and critics do not shy away from choosing favourites. I live in Canada, and, moreover, hockey is a sport at which Canadians excel. Consider the number of Canadians on the all-time points list (only 3 of the top 20 are from other countries). Roughly half of the league is Canadian; it was notable when at the 2015 season debut, it was revealed slightly less than half of the NHL was Canadian the first time, ever. Hence we dominate both in quality and quantity.

Since I am more familiar with Canadian geography than other places, I chose NHL to use as an example finding out, where exactly does the talent come from.

Update, etc

It appears I haven't been writing much lately. But appearances, they do deceive sometimes. Long story short: I got offered a chance to be part of the Canadian Running Magazine online posts.

I've already written print pieces for them, but soon I'll have my name added to their blog roll too.
UPDATE: here is is. It's not a full-time gig, but it does give me incentive to stay on schedule. I tend to thrive on deadlines, and wither without.

If all goes to plan, the piece I wrote a few days ago will appear on their homepage (about correlations between indoor race times and XC). I'll then upload my version of the same piece later on. There will be a lag between the two, but eventually there will be no difference save for the latest post.

My life is relatively simple by most standards. Although my take on running is perhaps more complex. Unlike most bloggers encamped in the field of training or pure analytics, I'm somehow part of each. By example, I'm racing an indoor 3000m tomorrow, but today I'm playing with data.  So it goes. They feed well off each other, and somehow running analytics comes easily to me.

What will I write about for CR? Perhaps regional and temporal trends in Marathon Canada's data. Looking forward to the running USA 2015 annual report (coming in March). I'm interested in learning more about drugs and doping, though finding good data there is a challenge. And I want to try more joggling this year.

What I will do is continue browse the world of athletics data, seeking interesting tidbits. A distraction of late is my interest in markets and stocks. There's so many numbers and I've never explored them much until now. With markets down across the board and the Canadian dollar undervalued (compared to its PPP), seems like an interesting time to invest. Mostly it's a new curiosity, and partly practical planning the future. Nevertheless, it won't stop me from writing here. Cheers.

Chicago marathoners: where do they come from?

In an apparent mini-series of marathon maps, today I plotted the travel origin for runners of the 2014 Chicago marathon. I colour-coded separately for states, Canadian provinces, and international countries. Hover over each region to find out how many travelled from that location in order to race.

Why did I choose the Chicago marathon in particular? Two reasons:

1) It's a large, international-friendly race, which makes such a global map worth plotting

2) There's a comprehensive Google spreadsheet for all the data, which is not always easy to find.

I'm not sure if you can learn anything too deep from this data. I was maybe a little surprised just how many racers are local; 42% of all Chicago marathon runners come from the state of Illinois. On an international scale, an unexpectedly large contingent of Brazilians came to race (361), more than from any single European country. No jet lag, which is a plus, but I thought those from Brazil had tougher visa conditions than Europeans to travel stateside, but perhaps that doesn't matter for a race like this. Also there are many marathon races to choose from in Europe, with comparatively fewer in South American cities. Anyhow, it reminds me I'd like to go visit Argentina again sometime soon.

A global map of major marathons

Using a newly-uncovered online tool called CartoDB (thanks Alex!), I assembled a map of all the marathons available at arrs.net based on location and number of participants (in 2014). Some have a participation number of '0' because the actual number wasn't available to me.

My criteria was a minimum 50 500 runners, and/or a winning time (male) of 2:40-ish. I've included marathons that don't fit this criteria if they happen to be in an interesting place (such as Easter Island). Certainly there's also a few I've missed. Among those listed, it's surprising how many marathons can be found deep inside Siberia. Conversely, only a handful of registered marathons exist in the Rift Valley a.k.a. the heart of running. Might one even claim an inverse relation to marathon density and local talent?

Since it did not take much additional effort, I also included PM_2.5 concentrations (μg/m³) at each marathon location. The WHO determined breathing values higher than 25 μg/m³ are 'less than ideal'. Perhaps factor that into your next 'destination' marathon (and if you'd like to see more discussion and a ranked list of clean-air marathons, check out the piece I wrote for Canadian Running).

Without further ado, here's the map. Click on individual races to get more info.

In case the above map does not survive, here's a static image:

Cross country nationals and other unrelated things

My last race of the year, the Canadian XC championships, is complete. Hosted atop Kingston's Fort Henry on a cold but windless day, it felt a suitable end to the season. A very minimalist race, as XC tends to be, but well organized. My only suggestion for next year: buy some Drones to get a fresh race perspective. AC: I guarantee this will boost your numbers.

I placed 45th overall (out of 120 finishers) with a time of 31:40. The course was muddy (7 races had gone before ours), and included some sharp U-turns and rolling hills. Certainly a competitive race, perhaps the most competitive I've ever encountered. There were 20 runners who ran 31:00 or faster, and 50 who ran under 32. On paper, more than half the field had distance PBs better than mine.

Despite the *apparently* low placing, I was pleased with the result given how rarely I dip under 32 minutes for 10k, even on flat roads. Guys running within 10 seconds of me have dipped below 14:30 for 5000m. Good company, if a little crowded!

Factoring in the tricky conditions, the afternoon start, my low 1:09 half PB in October, I really ought to run both a 30:xx 10k and sub-15 road 5k sometime very soon. Or am I getting too old? (I turn 34 in a few weeks). No, not yet given Colin Fewer beat me by 9 seconds and he's 5 years my senior. There is time to be had.

As for personal stuff, that's all to say.

Doping, athletics, and the Olympics

A spectre is haunting Athletics. Ok, so there has *obviously* been a lot of media attention on the Russian doping scandal. It boils down to an East German-era doping program alive and well in modern Russia. They even were brazen enough to dump all the evidence in the form of stored samples.

Taking a step back, the precipitator to this story was Hajo Seppelt investigative report, released in German, then quickly dubbed into English. Most importantly it implicated Kenya, Nike Coach Alberto Salazar, and the Russians.

Dick Pound, and WADA collectively, are considered the official whistleblower in this story, which is neat because a) they're an organization actually doing what they're mandated to do, and b) headquartered in Montreal, doubly impressive given how that city has its share of bribery scandals. In a nice play of feedback, Hajo then commented that WADA should be given more power.

IAAF responded with a timid press release on the situation. They are in the awkward situation of either knowing very little about any doping coverups, which is bad, or a lot, which is worse.

Browsing online there is ample opinion floating about. Steve Magness is severe on IAAF and it's leaders:

People are going to try to use Russia as a scapegoat. It's much easier. Don't be surprised if the IAAF or any organization under attack singles out Russia and claims that they were a rogue nation...The problem is widespread. It's in the U.S., UK, Europe, Africa, every where. Don't delude yourself. Don't think this is a one-off issue. It's not.

Cathal Kelly from Globe and Mail is more casual about the situation

Dick Pound has called for Russian athletes to be banned en masse from the Rio Games next summer. It makes a good headline and no sense. Thanks to that state-sponsored conspiracy Pound helped publicize, there is no hard evidence left on which to base such an unprecedented penalty. That was sort of the point....Russia will be in Rio. No amount of western garment-rending will change that.

So the big shots should be kicked out and we should do as Nick Willis suggests

IAAF, the future of our sport hinges on your response to this. Let's blow it up, and start again from scratch.

— Nick Willis (@nickwillis) November 9, 2015

Or clearly if something is valuable enough, some will inevitably cheat to have it. Hence some percentage of cheating is unavoidable, right?

Half marathon, XC, and other races

After the race, Heather and I enjoying the valley view

On Thanksgiving Sunday I awoke at 5:15 am, ready, more or less, to finish the last of three races in the first annual RNS Performance series*. Race number 1, the Lung Run 5k was won in May with a time of 15:08 just ahead of Cal DeWolfe. Race number 2 was the Natal Day 6 miler, which I lost to Matt McNeil.

Neither Cal nor Matt were registered for the Performance series, so I knew going into the last race it was pretty likely I would win outright. Still, I had no plans to run slack. But neither was I sure it'd be a solid race. Strange thing about running is that the language used to describe your body, legs, mind, etc are in their infancy. Doesn't help either that the feelings you have before doing well seem eerily similar to ones before a lousy run. It can sometimes come down to voodoo and the like.

My goal for the race series had always been to run it under two hours. In other words 5k + 10k + 21.1k = 36.1 km of running, so to complete that in two hours means averaging 18 km/h. My cumulative time until Sunday morning was 47:22, well within reach, balanced by knowing too that a sub 73 minute half is never 'trivial'.

Racewalking: The hidden flight path

Anyone who has watched racewalking intuitively knows it's different from running, hence it has as much credibility as classic technique in XC skiing, or the butterfly stroke event in swimming. And anyone who's tried race-walking knows it's very hard to do well, painful (especially the shins) and frustrating (especially if you get DQd moments before finishing). For most of its contemporary existence it has been a maligned sport.

What are the technical differences between walking and running? According the official rules,

• Racewalking is a progression of steps so taken that the walker makes contact with the ground so that no visible (to the human eye) loss of contact occurs.  

• The advancing leg must be straightened (i.e., not bent at the knee) from the moment of first contact with the ground until in the vertical position.

We know there is a flight phase with each running step. Walking, by contrast, both your feet should never both leave the ground. Rule #2 is less intuitive but in fact a better way to differentiate running versus walking. Interestingly this rule only came into effect in 1995.

There are another technical differences. For instance in a runner's mid-stance phase, i.e. when the foot swivels under the hip, the body's centre of mass (COM) is at its lowest. For walkers, because of the straight knee, their mid-stance COM is at its highest point. I only mention this because because I find that both running and walking, when you really think about them, are weird, complex movements.

Returning to rule #2, it is easy enough to visualize (and enforce) to make it a fair visual criteria in a judged sport. However there is a fundamental problem with Rule #1 that I will now explain. There is already plenty of research that observes a flight phase in race walking. For instance in a recent (2014) literature overview, Pavel et al note

From an overall view, race walking athletes seem to adhere to the ‘straightened knee’ rule, but at race speed they do not observe the ‘no-flight time’ rule. 

Admittedly flights times spoken of are small; Pavel estimates between they range 0.01 and 0.05 seconds. But those small flight times add up. Moving at 4 m/s, a single 1/100th second of "flight time" can earn a bonus distance of 4 cm (after all, distance = speed x time). So in a 50 km walk race, given a stride frequency of 3 steps/s (180 steps/min), one takes over 37,000 steps. That tiny flight time and 4 cm per stride adds up to a total distance gain of 1.5 km! Importantly the human eye cannot visually process a flight time of 10 milliseconds yet a race walker is less likely to win without this clear flight-time advantage. Indeed, in one study flight times were found positively correlated with speed.

Video of a race-waller leaving the ground (at 0:13):


Unlike some judged sports where small "cheat" advantage stay small (such as making a single illegal V-shape move with your skis in classic racing), because of the cumulative effects of undetectable millisecond flight times, we now know a completely honest race walker is at a permanent disadvantage over one who can eke out a bit of air time for each stride.

Rum runner's relay and the personal trophy

On the weekend I was part of the winning team for the Rum Runner's Relay (A Few Good Men). The team award has gone to HRC (Halifax Running Club) for ten years straight so yes, we are breaking history.

Ultimate prize: A rum barrel! (sadly it contains no rum) 

Since my time in Halifax is growing limited (assuming I find work in Montreal next spring), it was a good time as any to experience part of the coastline on foot from the HRM to Lunenburg. Beautiful weather and a fun 12-hour day overall. I'd like to be back, if possible. We'll see.

Science of running: a hierarchy

Listening to Steve Magness' podcast on the topic of Systems vs Process methods to coaching got me thinking about my own take on the subject.

By and large I agree with Steve's message, which boils down to acknowledging coaches can't expect long-term development from their athletes if they follow a pre-ordained workout recipe. This makes perfect sense, as so many factors go into choosing a proper working, to declare your original plan unassailable is tantamount to fortune telling.

But I was irked (as always) when Nassim Taleb's cursed Swan quoted. It is true that "One cannot understand a macroscopic system by appealing to its components in isolation" when making final decisions. But it is also true that isolating certain components can be helpful. That's why we have the Large Hadron Collider. That's why our minds do not benefit from unnecessary multi-tasking. That's why workouts often focus on one type of running (easy, tempo, distance, speed).

Isolation is, in essence, good. Then as athletes grow in complexity, so do the workouts. Each workout component is equivalent to a keyed note. The totality of multiple workouts with many such keys is music.

To illustrate this complexity, I made a diagram with the various internal levels within each of us. To avoid over-generalizing I focus on running.

A season summary: Tely 10, Calgary, and more

I'm not as much a fan of posting too many details about my own races. My favourite thing is to take a step back and see a larger picture. But as this season has been a busy and productive one, it seems disingenuous to ignore all people and places that have been part of 'my' running this season. My season started in April (not counting two indoor 3k races), and is taking a pause in August. In fact right now I'm on a work trip, writing this in Indiana of all places. First to boil down the facts, here's my races from the season.

 My 2015 Spring-Summer Road Races

Date	Location	Distance	Place & Time	Rating*
April 25	Grande-Digue	15 km	2nd in 48:45	★★★★
May 2	Lung Run	5 km	1st in 15:08 (PB!)	★★★
May 23	Cabot Trail Relay (Leg 17)	18.7 km	2nd in 1:02:05 (PB?)	★★★½
May 31	Calgary Half Marathon	21.1 km	8th in 1:09:14 (PB!)	★★★★
June 21	Halifast Track Event	5000 m	1st in 15:15	★★
July 10	Antigonish Highland Games 5 Miler	8 km	2nd in 25:32	★★★
July 26	Tely 10	16 km	2nd in 51:04 (PB!)	★★★★
Aug 3	Natal Day 6 Miler	9.6 km	2nd in 31:15	★★★

*Rating (out of 4 stars) is a subjective combination of my feelings about my performance and the race itself. At the end of the day, it's hard to disentangle the two.

Some of the best season news is that I had no terrible races and no serious injuries. I never came close to dropping out or running hurt (running sore, well yes). Must be all those training heuristics I use (FYI: I don't keep a mileage log). Also one thing is for certain, I got real comfortable finishing behind the winner. On top of that, both of my victories were only 10 seconds ahead of second, so there was a real possibility of landing 7, let alone 5, runner-up positions. Fun fact: I finished behind a Matt (McNeil + Loiselle) a total of 4 times. Matts are fast!

Estimating Calories from random foods

Every piece of food you buy in Canada is equipped with a Nutrition Facts label.

This label presents an data total Calories, Fibre, Fat, Sodium, Carbs, Protein and micronutrients per serving. Of those, only protein, fat, and carbs contribute meaningfully to total calories. There are some odd trends in the labelling practises. For instance "Fat" and "Carbohydrates" have a "% Daily Value" (%DV) associated with them, but not protein. This is odd, since recommended protein intake is much easier to estimate a priori than either carbs or fat (more on that later). It's also odd that %DV of total calories is not given, since fat and carbs (whose recommended percentages are given) make up the bulk of food calories. Yet so much data is given, seems we could figure this out. Is it possible to reverse engineer the nutrition data given, make some simple assumptions, and sneakily obtain total recommended daily calories?

My Goal: using only the packaging of random food items (and one assumption about protein intake), I will determine the tacit daily caloric intake made by Health Canada.

(Questionable) ideas for promoting road races

In the USA, for the year 2014, total marathon and half marathon participation numbers are at an all-time high. There are almost 100 races across the US with more than a thousand participants. All good news so far.

We've come a long way from the niche sport that was marathon racing 40 years ago; total numbers have since increased 20-fold. There is no reason to suspect a collapse of the system, as races require little capital investment compared with, say, a soccer stadium or an NHL-worthy ice rink. But there are hints that 2015 will see an absolute peak in race numbers. This could lead to a small, but noticeable, chain of events.

Drugs in sport: a manifesto of sorts

Here are some propositions for putting drugs in context with the broader definitions in sport.  There are no hyperlinks to news articles. There are no equations. There are no scientific articles and few drugs are actually mentioned in context. We assume the drugs work as prescribed. Anyone reading this far already has opinions on the matter of drugs in sport, therefore I am avoiding superfluous quotes from other op-eds.

I am searching for beginnings, rather than ends to the conversation on drugs in competition. We already know 'getting caught' is 'bad'. But why? What starting point brought us to this conclusion? These are seven propositions that seem, collectively, like as good a starting place as any. Basically I have assembled collection of (what appear to be) generally-true statements about drugs. Some statements are trivial, others contentious, some others vague. I'm curious what others see in them.

So here are the seven propositions for what we consider when bettering oneself at a sport:

Bluenose weekend by the numbers

This year I didn't participate the Bluenose race weekend. Instead I watched from the sidelines to see others finish. In terms of local races I'm going to run Cabot Trail, with its strong tradition of international attendance and community support based around Baddeck, NS.

My goal this weekend was to watch runners I knew personally, and to see this year's contingent of Kenyans including World Champion Abel Kirui (it's an interesting story why he's in Halifax, for there is no prize money or appearance fees in these races). Little surprise Kirui won the half marathon by over 15 minutes (and while not, I suspect, running his hardest). 

But besides playing spectator, I was also interested to see how Blue Nose attendance would fare. To get right to the point, below are the 5/10/half/full finisher totals from 2004 to 2015. I do not include the kid's 2/4k runs. Although they do generate money for the race, it is unfair to call under-12 runners "competitors". It is more straightforward to count only those who've registered themselves.

Annual participation in the Bluenose race weekend.