I saw a fun video on YouTube recently in which some runners attempted to do two parkruns in one day. I don’t mean run the same parkrun course twice, I mean they ran one parkrun at one course and then drove to a different course and ran that one too. The challenge was to do […]
Category: fun
Running Around: an R package to analyse Garmin running data
In my previous post, I shared my annual running stats which were generated in R using summary data from Garmin Connect. The code I use to generate these summaries was beginning to get a bit unwieldy, so I have now rebased it into a package. GarminCSVr – is an R package to look at running […]
Running Around: 2025 running dataviz in R
In this post I’ll use R to recap my running data from 2025. Previous round-ups are here (2021, 2022, 2023, not sure why I didn’t post one for 2024…). I had a goal of running a total distance of 3650 km in 2025. In truth, after running 3500 km in 2024, I decided to aim […]
What’s In The Box: Wrapped but not streamed 2025
I’m a music fan who is anti-streaming and instead I stubbornly maintain a large music collection. At this time of year, streamers receive a round-up of their year’s listening in a “wrapped” report. Not wanting to miss out, I set about rendering my own annual round-up using R! If you’d like to see a pick […]
Choose Your Fighter: data-driven selection of the best marathon
Running a marathon is a big deal. It takes a lot of time to train to run a good time, and it takes a while to recover. So, if you’re chasing a marathon PB (personal best) time, you need to choose which Marathon to target wisely. How can we use data to help our decision? […]
Pledging My Time VII
Here we go again! I ran the Mainova Frankfurt Marathon 2025 and wanted to look at the race results. How can we do this using R? I couldn’t see an easy way to download the data, so I used R to scrape them. Note that these times are currently provisional, but they give us a […]
A Pace Far Different: finding best running pace with R
If you are into running, chances are that you will be chasing your PB (personal best) times. This post is about using R to search for your PBs, and to monitor them over time. Usually runners target four distances for PBs: 5 km, 10 km, half marathon and full marathon. It’s likely that a PB […]
What’s In The Box: Albums of 2024
It’s getting towards the end of the year so it is time to assemble a list of my favourite albums released in 2024. I have sporadically posted lists like this in the past. These twenty albums were the ones I liked the most (and the ones that I thought other people might like to hear). […]
Running Around: 2023 running dataviz in R
2023 has been a great year in running for me. Previous running round-ups are here (2022, 2021). My two main goals for 2023 were to run 3000 km and also to run 50 HM-or-more distance runs. I managed both with a couple of weeks left. I also bagged new PBs for 5K, 10K and half […]
All The Right Friends II: clustering papers using Google Scholar data
In a previous post, I looked at how Google Scholar ranks co-authors. While I had the data available I wondered whether paper authorship could be used in other ways. A few months back, John Cook posted about using Jaccard index and jazz albums. The idea is to look at the players on two jazz albums […]