Marathon Morning

On Sunday morning I will wake up at about 6am. I'll immediately take a shower to get my muscles warm and my body feeling clean. I'll eat the same thing I've been eating before all my weekend runs for the last month: toast with a wee bit of butter, an Organic Food Bar, and a piece of fruit. I want energy, but not so much as to weigh me down. I'll stretch while I'm eating and also try to induce enough bathroom trips so that's not an issue during the race.

I'm supposed to be at the race start an hour early (they say 1.5 hours, but I don't listen well) so I'll leave the hotel with Mariko around 7:30am. We're only a couple subway stops away, fortunately. Last year finding the start was pretty easy - I only had to board the train and then follow everybody. I'll be wearing my running clothes under a full set of disposable clothes because the temperature is going to be 5-7C (41-45F). I'll carry with me a numbered plastic bag containing everything I will need after the race: food to eat right away, warm, dry clothes, different shoes, camera, etc. I will split off from Mariko at the "runners only beyond this point" sign, where I will make my way to the appropriate truck to drop off my 'finish line' bag. From there I have to get to my starting position.

Runners are designated by lettered group (from A-K) based on expected finish time. I am in group B, which has a 'special' section that requires two checkpoints (they actually check your race number) to reach. Then I get to wait for 45 minutes. I will spend half that time peeing in the bushes (portable toilet lines take too long), then I will enter the assigned section with my fellow B-people. At 9am, 10 minutes before the start, we'll start jockeying our way forward to gain a couple extra meters. With five minutes to go, they'll release the barriers at the front of all the sections so we B people will be able to push up behind the A's. People are pretty cool and there isn't actually any squeezing. With about three minutes left, everybody wearing pants and extra shirts will remove those clothes and throw them to the sides. The sidewalks are staffed with tons of volunteers who walk back and forth with big plastic bags and collect all the clothes. Presumably they donate them to charity. I should note here that the start is incredibly organized. Runners are forbidden from the sidewalks, so there's no unfair 'line cutting' that goes on. You can only get into the starting area for your letter and that's where you stay until you cross the start line. It's important in a serious race to prevent 'line cutting' because our official time is what matters for things like Boston or New York qualification. The official time starts when the gun goes off, so if it takes me a minute to cross the start line (or, in the case of a K person, 15-20 minutes!) that is included in my official time (as opposed to my chip time, which only measures my time between the start and finish lines).

At 9:05am the wheelchair race begins, at 9:10am the 10k and marathon begin and it's a big show with important dudes and pretty girls. Last year it took me exactly a minute to cross the start line, then I figure I lost another minute waiting for the runners ahead to stretch out and the pace to pick up. That'll take about a kilometer, so my first 5k split will show up a little slower (two minutes?) than the pace I want, which means I will have to make up this deficit later. More later in the week on the goal time and the splits necessary to get there.

Why I Like Running

I like that running is simple. I wake up, put on my little running wardrobe - with shoes and shorts being the only specialty items - step outside and go. I have nearly maxed out my accessory possibilities by utilizing an mp3 player and a heart rate monitor. And because there isn't much to running, it doesn't have to be expensive.

[my socks don't know that they look bad, they just keep on truckin']

Running can be done anywhere. If it were up to me, I'd show up every morning for a rowing practice, or go cross-country skiing or cycling. But all of those require specialized conditions, equipment, or teammates - none of which I have. But I can always run. Living on a small island in Palau, in the middle of Washington, DC, or here on another small island in Japan, as long as there are roads or trails there is running. (And I will argue that with only 14 kilometers of roads, cycling here is not a sane option.)

[My 2009/2010 shoe casualties. The leftmost pair will be worn in the marathon. I've finished off seven pairs of running shoes in three years. Anybody want some free size 11.5/29cm shoes?]

Running is cardiovascular. I believe strongly that breathing hard and elevating my heart rate is the best exercise I can get. Weightlifting or walking (unless it's 2500 miles at a time) aren't for me. It hurts more to struggle at the high end of a workout, but my day feels better for it. I also like that in running it is so easy to step up the difficulty. I can always run faster or choose steeper hills once my body acclimates to the current pace.

Gmaps Pedometer and Measuring Distance

Quick note: Today I signed the paper to stay here a fourth year.
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Last week my friend Vaughn sent me a link to Gmaps Pedometer, which is an awesome way to measure runs or rides on roads. I'm not sure how accurate the service is, but I bet it's closer than my guessing.

There are two roads on the island that I can run. Prior to now I have estimated those route distances at 13k (6.5k out-and-back to the far end of the island) and 8k for the western loop. Gmaps tells me the long route is actually 12.23k and the loop is 7.85k. There's also a new route I added this year, as seen in the map below:


The 3k out-and-back (6k) piece has relatively little comparative elevation gain/loss to the very hilly 8k and 13k routes. This makes it an important training run since the Tokyo Marathon is mostly flat.

I've been running the 6k piece for months, only guessing at the distance based on my end time. But recently I had to do a fast pace run on it and I came in at 25 minutes, which seemed too fast for the pace (6k is 4 miles, if you need to do the math). This cast a lot of doubt on my distance estimation abilities. But then Gmaps came along and told me my route was 5.73k. That's not 6k, but it's not as bad as I suspected my error was.

Five more days to Tokyo. I'll be making running-related posts all week so either stay tuned or stay away...

Whale Watching

I went on four whale watching trips this weekend, holding to my promise to go on as many trips as possible to try to get some breach shots this year. It worked. As we were returning from Saturday morning's [breachless] trip, we encountered a lone whale that was going nuts:






He breached somewhere around 17 times (I lost count) in 10 minutes before another boat came onto the scene. Since that boat hadn't yet seen a breach we let them have him:


Upon returning to the port I found another boat leaving on a trip. I took a minute to use the bathroom before hopping on that boat (with no lunch) for the afternoon trip.




I did the same thing today, literally stepping off the morning boat and walking over and back onto an afternoon boat. Not so much breaching today (just one at the very beginning), but I had a better chance of getting good whale photographs from a boat than from my apartment!

A Picture From the Archives

I went fishing last July from my kayak. It was a desolate year on the water fishing for anything but marlin. Mostly I just wanted to be outside; I'd kinda forgotten that a fish might actually strike. Then a barracuda did. It jumped a lot and created much excitement. When I landed the fish I wanted to release it because I don't like barracuda. But the hooks were embedded in a mouth full of long, sharp teeth. So I kept it to give away.

Back at the bike I struggled to figure out how to get the fish back 3km across the island. At about 16 pounds, it was too heavy to just carry. Fortunately the bike is rigged up for such encounters, so I just strapped the barracuda across the back.


I'd stopped taking a camera along on my fishing trips because I'd given up on catching anything. But on my way home another fisherman stopped and took some pictures of me. The next week I gave him my flash drive and asked for copies. I got the pictures back last week.. seven months later.

Next Superbowl Party at School?

A couple weeks ago I wrote about some new electronics all my schools would be getting (and that I was a little frustrated I couldn't get $150 to buy some useful English books). This week the gear arrived:

[Aka's school, which has 27 students, received eight new computers and nine 52" televisions]

[When I walked into the computer room today everything was
set up and the room smelled like a new car]

[Yugo, the only student in his class, is dwarfed both in size and value by his new tv]

Yugo's teacher speaks English pretty well so I was able to have a conversation with her about the new equipment. She started in with "What a waste of tax money!" I asked what she intended to do with the tv and she said she hadn't come up with anything yet. She also told me the televisions cost $5000/apiece and were funded federally. She ended the conversation by pointing at the windows and saying "all I really want is curtains..."

More on the Stuck Deer

These are pretty crummy videos taken with my cell phone, but it gives you an idea of the situation as we first encountered it. The deer was probably under 100 pounds, but he was a force to be reckoned with so long as his body wasn't tied down.