noctureine 2023 [16/6/23, 20h40, 10k, 41’54”, 29⁰, 48th/295, 1st M5/11]

47e cross de Sceaux [22:08, 31/226, 2/6 M5]

semi de Boulogne [1:29:33, 1243/8134, M5M 6/206, 8⁰+rain]

First time back to the Boulogne half-marathon since 2008! With clearly a much degraded time, albeit better than the previous race in Argentan. The route has changed, with a longer part in the Bois de Boulogne, sharing the road with the hordes of Sunday cyclists that pile up loops at high speed. But still a very fast one (with a record at 1:00:11 in 2013). The number has alas considerably increased since my last visit, with 9800 registrations, which makes running in the first kilometers a challenge with hidden sidewalks, parked cars and moppets, &tc. And a permanent difficulty in passing other runners, especially on a rainy day. (The only good side was being protected from headwinds.) Once on the road by the Seine River, I managed to pass a large group conglomerated around a (1:30) pace setter and moved at my own speed, till Km16 when I started to tire and realise I was alas missing some volume of training (as running in NYC was only a slow-paced jogging). Hence wasting about a minute on the final four kilometers… (Jogging back after the race to my car, parked 3km away, proved rather painful!) As the 1:30 time was my upper limit, I am still reasonably fine with the result (and the 4’14” per km) and hope I can train harder for the next race.

a first 5k [since last one]

“the U.S. census needs a different race question”, does it?

“The stated aim — at least for the last half century — [of the census race question] is to help policy makers and demographers assess whether members of different racial groups have equal access to housing, education, employment and other services, as mandated by law.”

A fairly interesting tribune in Science News on the U.S. census race question and the feature that people often self-identify with a category with “doesn’t always match the box someone else might have checked for them”. The discussion focus on failing to protect discriminated groups because people from said discriminated groups do not identify as members of said discriminated groups. Or, because of a genetic ancestry test like 23andme, people from non-discriminated groups do identify as members of a particular discriminated group, e.g., native American Indians. And while there is a separate question on whether or not the respondant is of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin, a third of those answering in the affirmative tick the “other race” box in the census. While the sociologist whose work inspired this article calls for different questions in the census, towards a better reflection of actual discrimination, nowhere is the notion of “race” defined or explicited in this paper. Which may be related to the fact that there is no scientifically accepted such definition, as discussed in this UN report. Except all of us belonging to the Homo sapiens sapiens subspecies and descending from common ancestors in Africa.

I thus wonder at the relevance at keeping such a confusing entry in a census: in several European countries including France, it is actually illegal to collect statistics about the race, ethnicity, religion or ancestry. Given the above confusion in the US census and no clear solution to redress the observed biases, discrimination should be fought on sounder bases…