A Hot Half

Ran the Adachi Goshiki Sakura Half Marathon today. Adachi is an area of eastern Tokyo where the Arakawa river is, goshiki means five colors and sakura are cherry blossoms. I guess they have five kinds of sakura along the river.

Three other club members and I ran it and it was hot!! I was aiming for about 1:45 — 5:00/k pace, but assumed I would slow down after 15k, which is exactly what happened. Finished in 1:46:56, not bad, considering the heat (24C, bright sun) and that I hadn't run for 6 weeks in Feb/March and hadn't trained much for the race.

It was a nice race - maybe 300 in the 10k, 5-600 in the half. Lots of enthusiastic staff and pacers for about 7 different groups from 4:00 to about 7:00 per k. The pacers helped me a lot. The course was a 7k out and back, run 3 times.

Photos: With 5:00/k pacers and then starting to drift behind them at 16k.

Japan's First Parkrun

Thought you might be interested to know that the first parkrun in Japan was held on April 6.
It was held along the Tamagawa river, a little ways south of central Tokyo.
It was well attended - 343 people - and was a success, except that the first 20 runners got mis-directed and only ran 3k. 343 was quite good, since it wasn't promoted much to the Japanese running community - mostly on Facebook to English speakers.
My club had 30 people there.
It's too far from my house for me to go often (and I don't like running in the morning), but anyway, it's nice that parkrun made it to Japan.
Oh, and Paul Sinton-Hewitt, the founder of parkrun, was on hand for the first event, so that was cool.

My hamstring has healed - no pain at all for the past 3 weeks. I have a Half on Sunday, which I'll be able to run, but not at a quick pace. Too bad, as I had hoped to be in good shape for it, but happy that I'll at least be out there.