Blog Fail

So I think I should start with a visual representation of my blogging history. Naturally I chose to make an Excel plot of my five posts so far and added a fourth degree polynomial fit, which is shown below (Figure 1).

Look at that nice R-squared of 1. Pretty impressive, I know. For now just ignore all of the improper and misleading aspects of this plot and data analysis. As you can see, this trend is not looking good for my loyal, avid readers (who definitely still exist). So to catch up on the last/lost month of activity, here are a few highlights of my September adventures in Norway. Don't be scared by the length of the post since there are many pictures. As a side note, this weekend I tried out orienteering, but I'll save that October pleasure for another post.

In mid-August I signed up for the decathlon hosted by my running club (NTNUI Friidrett club). Over the course of two days I confirmed that I am pretty terrible at throwing a variety of objects and jumping in a variety of ways. I destroyed my abs trying to pole vault and seriously thought I would injure myself in the 110m hurdles. On the bright side, although I don't know what scoring system was used, I think I scored points in every event.

Facebook provided me with a couple of pictures that really capture the awkwardness of the hurdles. The first has been described as an "epic kung-fu pose," which is probably a good call. Based on the first picture one might think that I was going to ninja kick the hurdle (or that I'm being tased), but the second picture suggests otherwise. It actually looks fairly decent as long as you ignore my trail leg tucked to the inside rather than the outside. Also please note that I'm wearing my training shoes. Not the best for a decathlon, but running spikes were not my priority while packing for Norway.

A week after the decathlon, I ran the Oslo half marathon with some of my NTNUI Friidrett teammates. A few of us are in the picture below. I ran with one teammate or another almost the whole race, which was awesome. I started with Paulo and Andi, but we eventually all became separated. By 5km I found Hilde (who you might remember from my Trondheim half marathon post (yes I just linked to my own blog and am now using nested parentheses)) and we stuck together for pretty much the remainder of the race. This was the most crowded race I've ever been in, and from start to finish we were wading through a stream of people. Despite this, Maddy, who is a Fulbrighter in Oslo (and St. Olaf alum) that I met during orientation, spotted me and cheered for me by name. She didn't even know I was going to be running. Long story short, I ran a 1:28:35, which was a 7:59 improvement from Trondheim. So if I naturally decide to do a linear fit of these two data points then... Anyway, it was a happy day. You can find more info if you search for me and then click on my name on the results page. There is even a plot of my pacing with varying horizontal scale that is almost as misleading as my blog fail plot. Almost.

Paulo, Andi, me, and Joachim at the start

Finally, as of a little over a week ago my computer refuses to turn on. My computer genius friends think it's the logic board, so fixing the computer will be too expensive but I will try to save the hard drive. The real trick will be trying to find a replacement while here in Norway while avoiding Norwegian prices and the 25% VAT on electronics shipped into the country. As a shameless plug, does anybody traveling from the U.S. to Europe in the near future want to volunteer to transport a computer? Just kidding. Kind of. (But really, I'll travel almost anywhere in Europe to meet you.)