God's own marathon

I'd like to post about brexit but there's been absolutely nothing of note going on recently - truly it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So instead of that, another race report.

Every year the British Masters Athletics Federation organises a Masters Marathon Championship event, usually as part of one of the autumn city marathons ("Masters" = veterans). This year it was in York, or more precisely the Yorkshire Marathon. England Athletics also organised an England vs Celtic Nations Masters Marathon match at the same event. It's all a bit of meaningless fun really but what with it being reasonably local and with nothing much else on, I decided to give it a go this year. I could have qualified for the England team (through being in the top 4 in my age category in Mancs) but offered my services to Scotland instead. 

Training was a bit desultory, I wasn't going to spend hot summer days trudging around on long runs so just squeezed in an abbreviated plan in the 12 weeks leading up to the event. It was never going to be a PB for me, and a half marathon in September where I barely broke 1:25 (about 3 mins slower than my best) confirmed this. Never mind, I had a smart Scotland (veteran) vest to wear!

Had been hoping to see a bit of York over the race weekend, as we had barely visited before, but the location of our Airbnb to the north, combined with the need to visit the start village on the Saturday afternoon to pick up a race bib, meant we didn't really have time or energy for much else. But we managed to find a decent pizza in the impressive old assembly rooms which was stuffed full with a bunch of mostly skinny oldish people eating unusually large dinners early on a Saturday evening. I don't think the staff knew what was going on. It wasn't quite as good a pizza as in Manchester or Leeds, actually, but seemed adequate for the purposes.

The airbnb was a bit further than I'd have liked to be from the start, but we had plenty of time to wander there in the morning mostly down a quiet cycle route. Loads of people were already stuffed into the starting pens - I've never understood why people want to spend so long standing around like that - and I hopped over the fence with about 10 mins to go and found myself among lots of England veteran vests. In what was an interesting novelty to me, the vets were all wearing race bibs with their age categories on their backs - this is what I'd had to pick up the day before - so we could tell who we were supposed to be competing against. This is a really good idea as usually when an old baldie hoves into view mid-race I have little idea whether they are a direct competitor or not and therefore whether I should try to beat them.

The race was fairly uneventful really - I wasn't that sure of my fitness so didn't risk going too hard. Unfortunately that meant that I got dropped just off the back of what would have been a useful group around the 2nd woman and ran most of the race solo which didn't help in what had become a steady breeze. Temperature was comfortable enough, we only had one very light spot of rain along with a bit of sun that never got too hot. For some reason there were a couple of pipe bands, subsequent web searching suggests they were probably local to York as I can't imagine why any would have come down from Scotland.

Went through halfway in just under 1:25, almost exactly the same as my recent half marathon, but slowed slightly for the second half as my lack of motivation and training started to tell. Nothing drastic though, and I finished in 2:52:52, nominally my worst proper marathon since 2016 (not counting the very mountainous Bentham race) but not really that bad considering. With the wind and lots of gentle undulations it didn't feel like quite as fast a course as Manchester, though runbritainrankings seems to think it was just as quick or even quicker. But that may have been biased by the number of vets peaking specifically for this event. Anyway it was a decent event and well organised apart from the minor annoyance of having to pick up the back bib in person rather than having it posted out as with the standard race number.

On the finishing straight I managed to find my pre-arranged flags and crossed the line waving them to a suitably mixed reception.

According to the results I was the 7th overall M50, but 5th in the BMAF championships (which you had to specifically enter separately) and the 1st member of the Celtic Nations team. Though these results don't seem to have been officially announced yet. I don't get a haggis as a prize or anything like that. Just an unfeasibly large garish pink t-shirt which has been donated to jules for her own sartorial experimentation.

My latest brexit prediction

Thought I'd better make a prediction before tomorrow's verdict: the Supreme Court will rule the matter justiciable, it will furthermore conclude that Johnson lied to the Queen, but it will not demand a specific solution such as reopening parliament or declaring that the prorogation was null and void. This option was not even discussed on the "Talking Politics" podcast I listened to over the weekend, and since they've reliably got everything else wrong about brexit for the past three years, it's a slam dunk.

No, honestly, though I do think it's a plausible outcome I wouldn't attach a very high probability to being right on this. The story of brexit has been one of unpredictable twists and turns, even if the final outcome is amply summed up in this pie chart:

And here's some more twitter fun:

They lied to you pic.twitter.com/LN5eunkjIc

— Brexit Bin 🇪🇺 🇬🇧 #FBPE #RevokeRemain (@BrexitBin) September 21, 2019

Probably takes a click to make the gifs/videos play. [Oh, the second one doesn't seem to work. That's a shame. Well, it was just a long list of brexiters pretending everything was going to be great a couple of years ago, and now pretending that they never claimed it was going to be great. Just the usual lying liars lying.]

Oh how I long for the days when a PM syphoning off 100k of public money to one of their mistresses qualified as a proper scandal. These days it barely rates a mention on the BBC, and only then after people have baited them for a day over why they haven't covered it.

Meanwhile the Labour party conference has managed to create an outcome that is even worse than anyone imagined possible, not merely sitting on the implausible brexit unicorn fence but choosing to do so through a show-of-hands vote that many think was called the wrong way or at least too close to call without a proper count. What a shambles.

At least the LibDems have got there finally. I can snark at how long it took them to get there but they are still well ahead of the other two parties.

Bracing for brexit

So, the Govt has decided to splash £100m of our money on telling us to do what it has signally failed to do for the last 3 years - get ready for brexit. Of course the main aim of this marketing campaign is really to soften up the population for the supposed inevitability of brexit at the end of October, and hoodwink them into thinking that if it "happens" then that would be the end of the matter, rather than the start of decades of negotiation, argument and recrimination over the subsequent arrangements.

I had a look at the govt site, and for a small and simple company such as BlueSkiesResearch, there are pages and pages of vague verbiage that mostly miss the point and nothing that explains whether or not we would be able to travel to the rest of the EU to work there as we did in Hamburg and Stockholm over the last few years. Probably the best strategy will be to just lie and pretend it's a holiday. Of course there's no guidance for that either but we can be fairly confident that this would be sorted out in time for our next trip (probably the EGU meeting in Vienna if any Austrian immigration officials are reading).

More consequentially, I've also applied for - and received - Estonian e-residency (jules has also applied, but a bit later so hers has not come through yet). This will enable us to establish a business over there within the EU and hopefully allow easy participation in such things as Horizon2020 and its successor funding programmes. I know the govt had promised to support existing grants but the point is to be able to apply in the future.

Of course an inevitable consequence of this - on top of the time and money wasted, which will amount to a few hundred pounds by the time it's done and dusted - is that our company will be paying corporation tax in Estonia rather than the UK. Just one more bit of pointless self-harm by the idealogues.

I've still got to go to London to pick up the id card, that's more time and money down the drain. Perhaps after visiting the Estonian Embassy I'll take a stroll along Downing Street and chuck a few petrol bombs at No 10. Only joking, I'll probably take a milkshake.

Of course the most likely outcome - as I have said consistently for over three years now - is that we actually remain in the EU after all, when this colossally stupid act of self-humiliation collapses under its own dishonesty and idiocy. In the meantime, the damage mounts up and whatever happens now, the harm will take decades to recover from.

Parcevall Hall

As it says on my Twitter profile (@julesberrry), I am a bad recorder player. This "skill" enables one to attend things like playing recorder weekends in big old houses with lovely gardens! The recorder is a nice quiet instrument so one really can't go wrong no matter how bad. But I still feel fortunate for not being a bad french horn player.

More winning!!

Where winning = doing something, anything, faster than James.

Last year I discovered why the Lake District is called that. I always thought it was a funny name for a bunch of pretty mountains and lots of cars. But it turns out there are all these big deep cold lakes, and you are allowed to swim in almost all of them! 

Ullswater 500m, 1 mile (1610m - don't ask me why it isn't a sensible 1500m!), and 3.5km swims were last Sunday.  The 500m (84 finishers) is perhaps the beginners event. The 3.5km is pretty much ironman practice distance and the standard was high. However, it was so cold that this event was reduced to 2.5km. The 1 mile was equally cold (11.8C brrrr.) but they made us do the whole thing! 292 people finished this one, including me and James. I got round 6 minutes quicker than James which makes the difference between us in swimming and running about the same, but the other way round! But somehow James came out more inspired. My race was a bit of a fist fight. Whereas a week ago at Leeds I was swimming among a wave of elegant, lithe, lightweight, coordinated, fit but middle aged women, when it comes to pure swimming, the big, the fat, the young and the male tend to trounce lightweight middle-aged elegance! I was completely unprepared for being half overtaken by thrashing behemoths doing front crawl who then collapsed into breaststroke for  few strokes thus entangling all their kicky limbs among mine. The way out is to kick violently, but this does take quite a lot of energy. Next time! Still, a reaction of annoyance rather than panic is encouraging I suppose. I am still not sure how to overtake these people, however, as it is really hard to get around widely flailing limbs in a packed field, and trying to draft behind them doesn't really work. 

The sociopaths have taken over the asylum

Just in case anyone was in any doubt about the nature of the swivel-eyed loons who will shortly be picking our new PM....

[jules' pics] World triathletes

James kindly blogged my amazing triumph in the British Triathlon Championships... the triumph being not dying during the event and also BEATING HIS MARATHON TIME!! (hurrah!)

Here are the real ones. 

Cycling (not the lead group)

Running

Georgia Taylor-Brown won in the end (she is in second in the running pic here). Katie Zaferes was second, and Jess Learmonth was third.

Some men also did it later on.

2:46:41

jules has taken up triathloning. I'm a rubbish swimmer so am not really tempted. The cycling and running bit would be ok but there's not much fun in doing a race where I start by half-drowning myself and giving everyone else a 20 minute head start. Anyway she has done a couple of shorter pool-based events over the last couple of years but enjoys open water swimming so wanted to do one of those, which are more often the full Olympic distance (1500m swim, 40k bike, 10km run).

Leeds of course is the centre of the UK for triathlon, with not just the Brownlees but also the women's team (who are probably better than the men these days) mostly based there. So doing the Leeds triathlon was the obvious choice. As well as the UK age-group championships there was an international elite event following (part of the ITU World Triathlon Series).

We started out with the traditional pizza, which was very good but so small we had to get some more slices.

The morning was bright and sunny but quite cold. Compared to Windermere where we had been practising, the water was apparently not too bad at 15C.

One of these pictures contains jules, the other is the wave in front of hers.

This isn't jules, who had apparently just swum past without me noticing. She didn't want to wave in case she got accidentally rescued! She was a little faster than I'd expected and you really can't tell people apart in the water when they are all wearing wetsuits and hats. So I missed the fun of watching her struggle to get out of her wetsuit in transition.

A massive collection of very high-tech bikes. Together with jules' one. All surrounded by high fences and patrolled by security guards all night as you had to leave your bike there the night before.

   

Not much evidence from the photo but she was actually running in this pic! (It was uphill to be fair). And having been following her round the course, I didn't quite have time to get into the grandstand proper for the finish, due to the circuitous route and closed roads. But her hat is just visible over the barrier. There was also a live stream on the BBC website...ah here it is with no sound.

jules had worked out that she might be able to beat my marathon time....and sure enough...

She's been wearing the medal non-stop since the weekend! So I've got my work cut out over the winter to win back bragging rights....

The risks of financial managers, part 2

With reference to this post.

Unknown commenter pointed out the issue with portfolio E in particular, that although it had an expected gain of 5% per year, investors who persist with this portfolio over the long term would probably lose more in the bad years than they would gain in good ones. Sounds contradictory? Not quite. If you do the sums, you will see that the expected gain over a long sequence of years is generated from a very small probability of a extremely large gain, together with a very large probability of losing almost all your initial investment. The distribution of wins and losses is binomial (which tends towards Gaussian for a lot of years) but in order to come out ahead the investor needs to get lucky roughly 3 out of 5 years, and the probability of this happening will shrink exponentially (in the long term) as the number of years increases because it's moving further and further into the tail of a Gaussian.

As an extreme version of this, consider being invited to place a sequence of bets on a coin toss where the result of a T means you lose whatever your stake was, but H means you get back 3 times your stake (ie you win 2x stake, plus get your stake back - odds of 2:1 in betting parlance). This bet clearly has positive expectation, each pound bet has an expected return of £1.50, so if you want to maximise your expected wealth then rationally this bet is a great offer. If you start with a pound in the pot and do this 20 times in a row, betting your entire pot each time, you either end up with 3^20 pounds (with a 1 in a million probability, when you get 20 heads) or else you lose everything (with 999,999 in a million probability, when a tail turns up at any time). (2^20 is actually 1,048,576 which is close enough to a million for many purposes and can be a useful rule of thumb to remember). The expected gain at the end of the 20 bets is about £3400 but the vast majority of players will end up with nothing. Would any of my readers pay £1000 for the right to take part in this game? 

In fact, for most people, most of the time, increasing wealth by a factor of 10 doesn't really make life 10 times better, but most people would be very averse to a bet where they could lose everything they own, including their house and the clothes off their back, even if the expected return was positive (eg betting the farm on the coin toss as above). A standard approach to account for this is to evaluate uncertain outcomes in terms of expected utility rather than expected value, and a utility function which is the logarithm of value is a plausible function to use.  One typical implication would be that the subject would be ambivalent about taking a bet where they might either double or halve their wealth with equal probability. The expected value of the bet is positive of course, but expected utility (compared to the prior situation) is zero. It should be noted that no-one really behaves as a fully rational utility-maximiser in realistic testing, but it's a plausible starting point widely used for rational decision theory.

This logarithmic utility maximisation idea leads naturally to the Kelly Criterion for choosing the size of the stake in betting games like the coin toss above. The point is that by betting a proportion of your wealth (rather than all of it) you can improve your return in terms of expected utility. Note that the log of 0 is infinitely negative, so losing all you own is best avoided! In 1956, Kelly proposed a formula for the stake which gives the maximum expected gain in logarithmic terms. The Kelly formula of (p(b+1)-1)/b, where p is probability of winning and b is odds in the traditional sense, implies a stake of (0.5*3-1)/2 = 0.25, ie you should bet a quarter of your wealth on each of the "triple or nothing" coin tosses. After the first bet, you will have either 0.75 or 1.5 pounds etc, so you either gain 50% or lose 25% and if you were to have an equal number of wins and losses you will more than triple your money in 20 bets. A smaller win in absolute terms, but a much better outcome in terms of expected utility and the majority of players who follow this strategy will make a profit.

So what does this have to do with the investment portfolios? Returning to the investments, each portfolio can be considered a bet where you stake a proportion of your wealth with a particular odds and 50% chance of winning. Eg with portfolio E the investor is betting 0.48 of their wealth with odds of (1.06/0.48 - 1):1 = 1.21:1. Kelly says that with such odds and a 50% win chance, you should really bet only about 9% of your wealth, which would return either 0.91 or 1.11 which gives a small gain in log terms. Of course the investor doesn't get to choose their stake here, but it still provides an interesting framework for comparison. The 5 investments have the following implied odds, stakes, geometric mean returns and Kelly-optimal stakes respectively:

A 1.6 0.07 1.02 0.18
B 1.7 0.10 1.03 0.12
C 1.6 0.16 1.02 0.18
D 1.4 0.27 1.00 0.14
E 1.2 0.48 0.91 0.09

C has a better return than A (having the same odds and a closer to optimal bet) but the rounding conceals it. B is better than either due to having better odds and a near-optimal stake. D is useless and E is worse than useless in these terms, implying a massive bet on rather poor odds which means most of the time you'll actually lose money in the long run.

It is fair to say that not everyone necessarily wants to maximise the expected log of their wealth, but I was surprised to see investment strategies proposed that were actually loss-making in log space. It's also true that investment E has the largest gain in purely expected value terms, but it would require an extraordinary appetite for risk to take it (rather than tolerance or indifference). And this wasn't a single accident, the other similar question had no fewer than 3 out of 6 options having the same property. I actually wonder if it's partly due to a cognitive error due to presentation. One of the questionees said that they wouldn't be bothered by a 40% loss one year if they could expect a 60% gain the next. If that was written as dividing their investment by a factor of 1.7 one year and then multiplying it by 1.6 the next, it might seem less attractive! 

The risks of financial managers

The following question is a slightly reworded version of a real question in a real financial management company's risk questionnaire that was provided to someone locally. I've tried to be fair to the financial company while making their question a bit less vague, they actually had two similar questions which cover this issue in slightly different ways.

"You have the choice of placing your investment in one the following 5 portfolios, ranging from low to high risk. For each portfolio, you can assume the return over each consecutive year (edit: was 5 years) takes one of two possible values, with 50% probability of each outcome. Which portfolio would you prefer for your investment?

A: 50% chance of either +11% or -7%

B: 50% chance of either +17% or -10%

C: 50% chance of either +25% or -16%

D: 50% chance of either +37% or -27%

E: 50% chance of either +58% or -48%"

So, which option(s) do you like, and why?