May 26, 2012

Flight destination: Corsica

I often use a version of Eleanor Rooselvet‘s famous quote “do one thing that scares you everyday“. It’s not that I try to do something that scares me, but something which either brings me out of the comfort zone or that I simply would tend to procrastinate.

Today’s scary thing is flying together with my friend Asier and his flight instructor, Jean-Louis, to Corsica. Prior to taking the decision of joining this “adventure” about 2 months ago, I had barely made 10 flights amounting to less than 8 flight hours… in the last week I was learning with my instructor, Thierry, the basics of flight navigation, the use of charts in flight, the use of VOR, etc., in order to profit the most from this experience. It definitely feels less scary now. And then, I’ll always have Jean-Louis by my side at the time of piloting the airplane. I’m happy to be stretching the comfort zone.

In the previous days I also learnt a lot with Asier on how to plan the route, noting headings, altitudes, radio frequencies, air spaces, aerodromes, etc.

Planning the flight to Corsica.

The head of the MBA I studied in Seville used to describe it as a “experiences accelerator”; in the context of flying this trip to Corsica (a group activity of the Airbus Aviation Society I belong to) really feels like such an experience accelerator.

If everything goes well, we’ll be in Propriano (LFKO) before 15:00. Then we could have one or two days of visiting the island, either by car… or by plane. Ajaccio, where Napoleon was born; Bonifacio; the dolmens close to Ajaccio… I’ll keep you updated when we’re back :-) .

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May 25, 2012

Where do you come from?

WordPress introduced a feature showing the geographical origin of the visits to the blog back in February (find below a map offered by WordPress – the host service of this blog). After 3 months, I decided to take a look at those stats.

Readers’ origin map provided by WordPress.

In these three months the blog received slightly above 7,700 visits; over 2,000 came from the United States and above 1,300 came from Spain (my country of origin). The top ten countries of origin summed up 75% of the visits (USA, Spain, UK, France, Germany, Canada, NL, Australia, Ireland & India). Following the famous “80/20 rule” or a Pareto distribution, the top 20% of the countries of origin summed up 85% of the visits (out of 117 countries).

Pareto distribution of blog readers per country of origin.

Finally, I had the curiosity to analyze the origin by world region. For this purpose, I compared the proportion of readers to the proportion of world population, internet users and internet penetration per region (internet users/population).

Blog readers, world population, internet users and internet penetration.

Europe, mainly due to Spain (my family and most of friends’ origin), is overrepresented (higher % of readers in relation to internet users). The other two regions overrepresented among readership are North America and Oceania, this must be due to the fact that most of the blog’s articles are written in English. Those three regions are also the ones where internet penetration is the highest.

China. In the last 3 months my blog only received 8 visits from China, that is 0.1% of the visits. China with over 1.3 billion inhabitants represents almost 20% of the world population; it counts with over 500 million internet users, over 22% of  the total; and the internet penetration is above 38%. China is clearly underrepresented among the countries of origin of the readers of the blog (0.5%). Shall I start writing more about China or in chinese language?

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May 24, 2012

In search of paradise

After visiting Seychelles with Luca (or part of them; 3 islands out of 155), I had two discussions with my sister and a friend about which islands would be more paradisiacal…

Seychelles, Maldives, French Polynesia, Galapagos, Hawaii… feedback is welcome in order to target more efficiently future holiday destinations (always bearing in mind that Torrelodones is in another league).

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May 22, 2012

Engaged

Some of you already know it, to the rest: Luca and I are engaged.

Finally engaged.

The wedding is foreseen sometime in the Spring 2013. News will follow.

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April 24, 2012

Aerogeek dentist

Some time ago I wrote about the impact of Airbus in the employment in the Toulouse area. Some weeks ago I went to a dentist in Blagnac, a village close to Toulouse (where Airbus is in fact based). There I could see how Airbus is impacting Toulouse area in other ways. I then tweeted the following with the picture below attached:

Waiting room seats.

What I missed in that first visit was the geek details of the cloth covers of the seats. Take a closer look in the pictures below…

"Briteeth" Airways.

"Lufthanzahn".

Definitely, my dentist must be another aerogeek.

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April 22, 2012

Ballot papers in France

Today there is the first round of the Presidential elections in France. According to the latest polls, it seems that Hollande is going to win with Sarkozy coming second and the two going to the second leg of the elections.

After my flying class today, I took the opportunity to go to one of the “bureau de vote” installed at the city hall in Capitole square. As I did 7 years ago while living in Aachen (then with the election between Merkel and Schröder), I wanted to check first-hand how the voting works here in France.

Well, it is very simple and very much like in Spain, even simpler. There were just 10 small stacks of ballots, one stack per candidate. The ballots are much simpler than in Spain. Just white papers with the name of the candidate. No name of the party, no fancy logo of the party. The envelope: simpler as well, just a small blue envelope reading “République Française”, nothing mentioning like “Presidential election 2012″, first or second round…

French Presidential election 2012: Ballot papers.

It raised my attention that there were many isoloirs, these cabins with curtains where you decide which ballot you place in the envelope. There are those as well in Spain. I did this detour today with a colleague coming from the Spanish Basque Country, he mentioned that in his village people also uses those cabins. However, in the village where I come from in Madrid, people almost never uses them. While I agree that their presence is a must, the need to use them is sad.

Finally, the rest of the process is the same. The voter comes to the table, hands her ID to the president of the table, the name is checked in the list and the voter places her vote in the urne.

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April 17, 2012

Paris 2012: my first sub-4-hour marathon

During 2000 and 2001 I ran 3 marathons in Madrid. The best time I achieved then was just slightly above 4 hours, 4:00:41. Then I didn’t train much for them and I paid for that during the races.

Running in Paris (@ km ~26)

Last Sunday, in Paris, I ran together with my friend Serna and my brother Jaime my 5th marathon. For this one I had a training plan to go through for 17 weeks. That training plan amounted to over 1,100 km running, and a series session per week. I started a bit late with it, then I had trouble in the adapation to the new soles, injures… in the end, during the last 4 months I ran almost 500 km, or about 45% of the plan and did only 5 days of series.

Even if I was under trained, I managed to recover from the injure about 2 months before the race. I run as much as I could during the weeks following the recovery: 330km in 7 weeks, including 4 consecutive Sundays with a run over 20km in each of them.

The result: I completed Paris marathon in 3h45’35″, just at my target time before starting. My first sub-4-hour marathon. You can’t imagine how happy I am for that.

Some curiosities related to the race. You may find the route we followed in the diploma below. Some of the views while running were superb (Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde, Les Champs-Élysées, Place de la Bastille…), even if when running a marathon you don’t get to enjoy much the views. In the diploma you will see as well two times and positions. This is due to the fact that it took me 11 minutes to reach the starting line. Positions are calculated taking into consideration net times (deducting time to starting line, “real”) and arrival order (“official”).

Paris 2012 diploma.

You can also see below a small graphic prepared from the info recorded by my Garmin. There you’ll see how until km. ~29, I managed to run below my target pace to achieve 3h45′ (that was 5’20″ per km). There are some kilometers before km. 29 in which it took longer, that is due to stops (“WC”) or slowing down to take drinks at every 5km. From km. 30 it was hard to maintain paces even below 5’30″. In the last 12km I burnt the 2-minute buffer I built in the first 25km.

In order to keep the rhythm in the last kilometres, it is extremely important not only the long runs (I got the one and only “muscle warning” at km. 39) and the series training, the famous Yasso’s to keep “speed” and endurance.

Pace (mm:ss) per km.

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