Gareth messes with the space-time continuum...

Wednesday 8th, Yoyogi Park. The Ohyama Tozan group, who had been doing hill repeats the last few weeks (core of Gareth, Keren and moi ) decided that we would enforce a taper upon ourselves and just run an easy aerobic hour or so. We were also joined by Carol, Masako, and Akira.

Started off normally, running the conventional direction of our conventional 1.95-km loop. All very safe and familiar and comfortable. But somewhere soon after the start, Gareth, yes he of Beer Mile fame, decided we would take a turn down a side path. That was a bit game, but OK, let's go with it. Soon after he took a turn down another path. Very soon he was leading us through a series of random and spontaneous twists and turns, one of which took us out of the park altogether, up and over the footbridge over Inokashira Dori down by the Koban (police box), back up the hill past the track, then a doubling back and around past NHK and down Koen Dori and into the top of Shibuya, then back to the park via the unnamed road beside the Yamanote line. Back into the park and a further series of twists and turns and running over paths which we had never before trod.

For a bunch of anal retentives used to running very set routes over accurately measured pathways, constantly checking pace and distance, this was really rather a radical exercise. I feared all sorts of dire consequences, possibly involving a shift in planetary alignment, but fortunately we were able to complete a little over an hour of running. We conferred for a while over how far we went and decided that 12 km sounded like a good number to put in our log books. It was actually a fun way of spicing up what would have otherwise been a fairly dull old run (apart from the excellent company, of course).

Injury note: it was all pretty good last night. Very strange condition. It is surely some form of inflammation that flares up and calms down at its own whim. Easy runs certainly seem to see it settle down the next day.

I took delivery of the RS200sd and got to use it, but only in basic heart rate mode. I plan to calibrate the footpod tonight and will post more on it after that.