My older sister, Ronia, is fresh out of college and working in the lovely city of Miami... lucky me! She works for the company Restaurant Brands International, which is the corporation that owns Burger King, Tim Horton's, and Popeyes. At the end of the summer when she arrived in Miami, I set a google flights alert for flights from State College to Miami. One day I got an email saying that the flight price had dropped a hundred dollars or so, and I decided to go for it. After all, I don't have to pay for a place to stay! So I took off for Miami from State College on Friday afternoon, and arrived in time for dinner that night. I was there all day Saturday and Sunday, then flew home to State College Monday morning. All in all I only missed one class, and felt that the weekend was a nice break from the dreary weather and daily grind in State College. On Saturday my sister and I made a turkey. Yes, that's right, just like Thanksgiving. She found an 18 pound turkey at the grocery store for $3 so we spent the morning getting that into the oven. It was the first time we had ever done that without parents, or at all, and it went very well. The turkey tasted amazing. After the turkey adventure we hung out by the pool at her apartment complex. Ronia fell asleep so I went to the pool bar to watch college football Championship Saturday. My kind of paradise. In the evening we took a trip to Wynwood Walls to see the murals. Wynwood is a graffiti art museum in the open air, and it was so fun to walk around and see the amazing work. After Wynwood we headed to Little Havana where we got dinner at a Cuban restaurant. With the travel restrictions on Cuba these days, I guess this is as close as I am going to get. My food was great, the atmosphere was cute, and it was great to be out with my sister. Below is a gallery of photos from Saturday evening. You can scroll through the photos using the control in the upper right of the photos. Sunday was beach day! We headed to Key Biscayne, which is apparently where the locals go. It was 85 and sunny with a light breeze. The sand was clean and white, the water was clear and blue. What else can I say? On Sunday night after the beach my sister helped me do some nerdy things. She is the in-house nerd, and I had dozens of data points from running that I wanted to graph. So we teamed up and she helped me with my excel spreadsheet a little bit. For context, I have paper records of every run I have ever gone on and recently put those data points into a spreadsheet. This was so that a) they would be safer and cleaner to read but also b) I could make graphs out of them and gain insights. Above is the main graph I wanted to see. I was curious if I had become a faster runner since I started in the summer of 2011. I have become faster on average, going from the 9:07 min/mile range down to 8:30 min/mile. While it is not a massive improvement I do see two very positive things. First, I have become more consistent. The data is aggregated much closer together in 2018 than it was in previous years. I know my pace, and I commit to it every run. Second, my runs have gotten longer. So while I have lowered my average pace, I have also increased my average distance. You can not see this on this particular graph (just trust me!). In 2011, 2012... I would never run more than 2 miles. These days, I would never go out for less than 3. So I guess in conclusion I have gotten stronger. But what I think is super cool is that I'm 21 and just beginning on a life of training, with hopefully many hundreds of runs to come. I can't wait to look at this data many years down the road (pun intended).
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