Changes in Latitudes

The most sun we saw in San Sebastian - lasted for about 10 minutes. This beach is called Playa de la Concha. This week I was invited by my new employer to join the research group on a trip to San Sebastian, Spain. The aim was to have a meeting to discuss priorities and a mini-symposium with some Spanish collaborators. Only some of us managed to make it to San Sebastian on Monday. The plane we were supposed to take to Amsterdam had engine issues, so our boss did his best to figure out a solution. He went alphabetically, so I was lucky to be in the first group out (after sitting in the Bergen airport for 6 hours). Twelve of us managed to make it to Spain by midnight on Monday (Bergen - Copenhagen - Brussels - Bilbao - San Sebastian (bus)). The rest would eventually make it by Tuesday afternoon and late Tuesday night. Tuesday was meant to be a meeting about plans for the  new employees (3 of us in total) and discussing the upcoming surveys. However, since the others had...

March 29th was the half-marathon in Madrid that I got from Marius for Christmas. It was my fourth half-marathon and I trained a solid 15 weeks to earn a new personal record. Prior to this race, my personal record was 1:47, set in Lisbon in March 2013...I was around 30 seconds shy last year when I ran in Bergen coming in at 1:48 - I forgot the exact seconds. We had a few days in Madrid before the race, but I will write about those later when I can get the pictures from Marius' camera. The course looped the northern part of the city and finished in a very nice park. There were nearly 17,000 runners, and I definitely blended in with the crowd. Marius was much easier to spot with his blond hair. Even though I wore my American flag shorts, there were so many people that it would have been difficult for Marius to spot me through the crowd. So I encouraged him to do his workout and keep an eye out for me at 10:45am.  The course was not flat, like I had thought it would be. Rathe...