Take a deep breath...

...because here we go again!

It doesn't feel like I will be running a marathon in two days time. Where is that "can't get this song out of my head" feeling? I forgot to eat between breakfast and lunch today and was hungry by lunch time. Hardly a very diligent approach to carbo loading.

On Wednesday night I did a few bits and pieces of warming up and joined the Namban track workout. A mile time trial followed by five 800-m intervals. But all at well below maximal effort and I finished feeling quite energized. Rested yesterday. Got up for three laps of my 3.3-km loop from home this morning. I felt a bit slow and stodgy, but by the second lap had the pace up around 4:20/km and did the third lap a little faster again, feeling like I was finally getting into the run just as it was time to finish. But I definitely don't have that feeling of hubristic confidence I had going into Tokyo. Nope. I am determined to run this one at a modest pace of 4:20 to 4:30 for the first 30 km and then hope like buggery I can hold onto it. I am not at all confident that I can. In fact, if Satohi were to ask me to pace her rather than run my own race, I probably would. But for the time being, I will approach it with a view to chalking up a solid if unspectacular time in as even splits as possible. I am actually very curious to know if I can preserve myself enough to have a strong rather than "hanging on for grim death" final 12 km.

See you on the other side folks.

Oh...in case anybody might be interested, I started a new blog to balance this one.

A bit better

So I did the heart rate test again this morning: 4:11/km. That's a few seconds better than the rather unpleasant 4:15/km of last week. I was also having to work the legs a bit harder to get up to a HR of 149, and the average HR was the correct 149, not 150. So I guess I am some way back towards where I was four weeks ago. But at the same time, I am still certainly not there, at least as measured by this test.

I still have no idea what weight to put on this test, but suffice to say that my main challenge to myself for this marathon on Sunday is to NOT entertain thoughts of going sub 3:00, but rather to run a realistic pace in the first half that will feel fairly comfortable and allow me to enjoy the run, but still yield a respectable time if I can hold it throughout. At present, I think that is something around 4:25 to 4:30/km. If I can do that and get to 30k feeling good, there is always a remote chance that I may actually pick up a few minutes in the last 12 km. Probably not, but I really, really want to give myself a chance of negative splitting whilst still running a semi-decent time. Just not sub three!

Great Moments in Running

On Saturday I ran three laps of a 400-m track in about three minutes per lap, yet it gave me every bit as much satisfaction as finishing any marathon. The reason was that I was leading a blind runner in the EMB (Endurance Mind and Body) Race in support of fund-raising for eye operations in developing coutries. But it wasn't just me, nor was it in the slightest little bit about me or my running.

The format was that teams of six would take it in turns to guide a blind runner around the track for 45 minutes. The team that completed the most laps was the winner (though "winning" was the last thought on anybody's mind; I think we all felt like winners just by being there). The blind runner ran the entire 45 minutes and thus served as the team's baton. My team's runner carried the nickname "Big One" for reasons that are obvious from the photo of him and Anna.

The blind runners mostly came from the Achilles Running Club, which is often working out in Yoyogi Park when we do our Sunday runs. So often I have admired the courage of these people, who run despite living in a world of darkness, and the selflessness of their guides. Often I've wanted to help in some way, but never taken the step outside my own cosseted comfort zone to actually do anything, never faced my feeble insecurities like "what do you say to a blind person? Especially one who doesn't speak your language?". I think many of us carry these kinds of mixed desires to help combined with unbridled selfishness and "hangups" that stop us actually doing something. The presence of the Achilles Club in Yoyogi so often made me all too aware of my own.

So, when Fabrizio called for volunteers for Nambanners to form teams for this event, I jumped at the chance. It was really interesting learning how to run with a blind runner (make sure your inside foot is in time with his) and great to confront and overcome the "what-should-I-say-after-I-say-hello" discomfort of engaging in small talk with him and his regular guide, in this case his father, who was jogging along behind.

Our two Namban teams raised enough money to fund 19 eye operations. There are some more photos of the day here.

A highlight was the presence of the half marathon world record holder for blind runners (70 minutes), Henry Wanyoike and his guide, Joseph Kibunja.

They really cruised around the track and it was beautiful to see them in action. Aren't we lucky, that we can actually do that? See, that is. Here is a YouTube clip about Henry. It is amazing watching him drag his illness-weakened guide at the end of the 5000-m at the Sydney Paralympics.

Cat's Out of the Bag

First up, thank you to all who commented on my last post. There was some interesting discussion and I really appreciated the fact that a few genuine gurus dropped by to provide some sound advice, some of which I have even been taking ;-)

The thing I have hinted at but haven't been able to say up until now is that I am running another marathon next weekend. I don't really expect to do especially well, but after giving it some thought, am not going to jog along like some kind of training run either (but more on that later in the week). The marathon is called the Arakawa Marathon and prior to this year's Tokyo Marathon was the closest thing to a mass-participation marathon in our city. The course is an out and back on a narrow asphalt pedestrian/cycling road that runs for many miles inside the levees of the Arakawa (kawa = river in Japanese) just on the northern outskirts of Tokyo, only 15-20 minutes or so by express train from downtown.

The reason I was keeping it close to my chest was to surprise Satohi, who I have been coaching for the past year. She missed out on the lottery for Tokyo Marathon and so chose this one to avenge her disappointing DNF at Tokyo Women's International Marathon last November. Alas, she is now having a few injury threats and her last few weeks of training haven't gone as well as we would like. She hasn't quite reached the peak of preparedness we were aiming for, and she is still a bit concerned about a niggling ankle/ITB-like pain. Yesterday she attempted 20 km with the second 10 km working towards race pace, and finished OK, but with the ankle hurting some. So she was feeling a bit down in the dumps and her motivation was flagging. She is also planning to run Boston Marathon just a month after Arakawa, but only slowly for the experience. But still, she faces a difficult decision about what to do about Arakawa. Pull out? Back right away from her original target race pace and just try to finish? Go for it and see what happens risking another DNF? I am not really sure what to advise her as it is her decision and her ankle, and I am no doctor, but I do believe she retains a lot of her marathon fitness. All I can do is discuss the implications and possibilities of each possible decision with her. And I realized yesterday that under these circumstances it was rather selfish and unfair of me to keep sitting on my little secret. She needs to know all relevant data in making her own decision. After I told her yesterday her spirits seemed to take a bit of a lift and I think she is ready to give it a shot.

So, just six training days until Arakawa Marathon :-) !

Outlier? Outrageous!

Ingo just suggested that my 4:04/km might have been an outlier. Which is a fair question. But it looks more like a trend to me. As I said, the tests both before and after were also supported by the general trends on other runs. And I worked my arse off to make that trend happen, so it is all very real to me. What I will admit though, is that it is just a standard test for some kind of quantitative tracking of fitness over time. What I don't have is a reliable way of translating that test result into a target race pace for any particular distance. I am not for a moment suggesting that it meant I should have been able to run a marathon at 4:04/km. In fact I am now pretty certain that I over-reached when I went for sub 4:10/km pace. But I am OK with that because I decided to risk the sub-3 result by taking a shot at a PB, and to get a PB I had to run sub 4:10 pace. And for one reason and another it just wasn't to be.

All this does raise the question, of course, as to what is a good predictor of your current capability? Especially for the marathon where going out hard and hanging on simply doesn't work. Arobically, I was in as good a shape as I have been in, but it didn't translate into overall endurance because the build-up had been too short and there were not enough longer endurance/stamina runs, and perhaps not enough taper. So given that tests like this give a good indication of aerobic fitness, I wonder what you can do (apart from running the marathon) to adjust your upper aerobic pace to account for lack of endurance?

This is especially important for some of those fast-twitch people who blat around for 5k or 10k, but struggle to put together a marathon worthy of their potential, usually because they short-change themselves on the necessary endurance work. OK, so how do they adjust their 17:30 5k capability for the fact that they have only done two runs over 30 km? This is where McMillan calculators and the like break down and/or get abused leading to those horrible blow-ups in races that I have seen happen so many times.

What I am suggesting here is that a 3:10 marathon with even splits is probably a better marathon than a 3:10 with a 2:50-pace first-half and a 3:30-pace, horribly painful, part-walked second half (Dan, Martin, care to comment?). So how does Mr or Ms 17:30 5k runner convince himself to go out at 4:20/km instead of 4:02/km?? For me, the situation was not quite that dramatic, but the same principle definitely applied.

I suppose the answers are out there somewhere in coaching-boffin land!

Million dollar question

I did my heart rate test this morning. I won't repeat all the gory details of the protocol, but suffice to say it involves running a 2.15 km lap of a park at a standard heart rate after a standard amount of warm up and recording the time. Well, the last time I was able to do it, the penultimate week before Tokyo Marathon, I recorded 4:04/km for an average HR of 149 (80%). On that run, and around that time in general, I was finding my heart rate incredibly low, and I would have to work my legs hard to get up to target heart rates.

Today it was a different story: 4:15/km. Yikes. And it was definitely hard to stop my heart rate slipping up to a higher level; the average for the lap was in fact 150 instead of the target 149. I noticed the same tendency towards slightly higher than expected HR during Saturday's and Sunday's runs (I'm sorry now that I wasn't wearing the monitor when I felt so sprightly running the Palace in 19 minutes last Thursday!).

So the million dollar question is: Is this a reflection of fitness lost during the low mileage of the taper and recovery, or is it lost fitness through the battering of the marathon itself, or is it a reflection of not yet sufficient recovery?

My hunch is that it is a combination of all three and it would be impossible to disentangle them. If you simply didn't run, by the time you were "fully recovered", whatever that means, your fitness would surely have slipped. I mean, I couldn't sit on my arse for three weeks eating fruit and protein shakes and then come out and run the test at 4:04/km again could I? Yet if I run too hard, residual fatigue from the marathon will knock me around and again, the test results will suffer. So you are supposed to come back gradually, in a reverse taper, repeating the stimulus training runs, and eventually at some point you could re-hit the pre-marathon test results.

I suppose the moral of the story is that when you run a marathon, it takes a fair while before you come back to your pre-marathon condition. And you have to really train again to achieve it. You don't just "recover" to pre-marathon condition in the way you could with a 5k or 10k race. Well, that's as measured by this test anyway. I guess there are other energy and endurance systems that I am ignoring completely.

Today: 15.3 km, average pace: 4:35/km; average heart rate: 140 (75%)

I suppose that's what they call a long run

Today: 32.2 km in 2:42:45

Last 5k in 4:30-5:00/km (average 4:40/k). That hurt.

Average HR: 139 ... much, much higher near the end. This was a run I was glad to finish.

But why am I doing this to myself?

Recovered & re-building

It was lovely of Ingo and Pete to enquire about my well-being. Mental and otherwise. No, I haven't been chugging anti-depressants or eyeing off razor blades (if we had any to eye off, that is).

I've just been kicking back a little on the running front and also found myself up to my gills in work right from the day after Tokyo. I've also been enjoying a few beers and was happy to be able to start on a new keg of home brew, my Czech pilsener, right after Tokyo. Hmmm, beeer!

I found time to change my blog profile photo with something I pilfered from the official Tokyo photo site. I need to update "training for" etc gumph in the side bar but couldn't be arsed at the moment.

My running since Tokyo has been as follows:
Sun 18: Tokyo marathon
Mon 19: rest
Tue 20: rest
Wed 21: 5.5 km slow on the track.. a bit hurty.
Thur 22: rest
Fri 23: rest
Sat 24: 8.5 km, most of which was around 4:20-4:25/km...legs soon fatigued tho'
Sun 25: 12.2 km fairly easy (0:59:35) ... legs said that was far enough.
Mon 26: rest
Tue 27: 12.2 km fairly easy (0:57:55)
Wed 28: 15.5 km fairly easy -- legs got tired toward the end
Thu: 1 11.6 km did 5k m (Imperial Palace) of this in about 19:00 flat...just felt like going fast
Fri: 2 rest - back stiff
Sat: 3 12.2 km back still stiff, pushed it a little (0:55:13)...surprisingly high heart rate.

So the recovery is near complete. The hard 5k on Thursday was not without consequences. But it actually felt fairly smooth and easy for the most part.

I have other fish to fry. It is time to build back the km over the next couple of weeks. But I can't say too much about future plans just now. You will just have to keep an eye on the blog over the next couple of weeks.

Tokyo Splits

I said I'd post my splits. While I don't really have a lot of enthusiasm for the task, here they are:

0-5k	0:22:52	0:04:34
5k-10k	0:20:42	0:04:08
10k-15k	0:20:50	0:04:10
15k-20k	0:21:12	0:04:14
20k-25k	0:21:51	0:04:22
25k-30k	0:23:14	0:04:39
30k-35k	0:22:39	0:04:32
35k-40k	0:23:37	0:04:43
40k-42k	0:11:03	0:05:01

I guess they tell their own story pretty well. Lost about 2 minutes in the first 5k, and all of that in the first 2k. If I was going to have a good day though, that 15-20k split should have stayed down around 4:10 or 4:11 pace, and I should have stayed fairly comfortable up to at least 25k. The set-in of discomfort in my legs around 18k was the sign that the gamble wasn't going to pay off. The slower 25-30k split was due to a 1-minute toi-toi break. That is now my third marathon in a row where this has happened after getting through the first three unscathed. And then things get a bit ugly over the last 12 km. I think at least a small part of the drift over the final 12 km was due to some mental capitulation once I knew that even a really ball and leg busting exertion would only get me a couple more seconds per km...nowhere near enough to salvage the torpedoed goals.

What I wore...

Ewen just asked what I wore. That was adifficult decision that took some agonizing. In the lead up I'd been planning to try and stick with shorts and my Namban singlet and Cool Running cap. But the weather meant that the singlet alone would be pure folly. I probably needed something a bit more technical, but just used my old faithfull Climacool grey long sleeve top. Gloves of course (thanks Jim!) and...NOT the CR cap. That was another victim of the weather. The peak of the CR cap has become rather floppy and I didn't like it's chances of standing up to the rain. That grey one is an old favourite but the back adjuster strap had broken. My poor wife was pressed into helping me get it operational about ten minutes before I had to leave the house. All in all, I wasn't especially cold once I was moving and I find it hard to see any major changes I'd make to this. So I don't think we have our culprit there. I do wonder though how much toll it took being cold and wet for half an hour before the start.

697th

I came 697th out of 25,000 .... not bad I suppose. (Actually, 697th out of the men, so that's a bit less impressive).

Here is a link to nice little video montage of the 2007 Tokyo Marathon. Near the top of the page are three links to the video.  The wma one started but then produced an error for me. I got the Quicktime one to work. It definitely gives you a great sense of the scale of the event.

I'm going to post my splits and a few thoughts on my race in the next day or two. I have been very busy at work this week.

I really

What does 30,000 runners look like?

Something like this perhaps? And here is a link to the fairly ordinary article that it comes from.

And for a report on the racing that occurred up at the pointy end, here is a decent report from the Daily Yomiuri.

There were many reports on TV last night and this morning. I even caught a vox pop interview on NHK this morning with one of our Namban ladies, my good friend Carol. Carol will be heading off to live in Brisbane at the end of this month! [sniff]

A terrific day out...

Except for the rain. And the cold. And my performance.

I just got towards the end of a fantastic account of the day and my race, composing in Blogger, and somehow I bumped some key or other, maybe the backspace, and poof, it just disappeared.

To try to summarize: It was a fantastic event. Big crowds, wonderful crowds. Despite the rain. The constant, miserable, cold rain. Enthusiastic cheerleaders and taiko drummers. Good organization for such a huge number of runners under *very* trying conditions. A great course that looped back on itself so you could look for and cheer for you mates. And supporters in the crowd could move from vantage point to vantage point to cheer not once but two or three times. (Thank you Ms Minegishi, Satohi, Takako, Mami, Anna, Yukari, Shoji, Yoshiko, Taizo, Peter, Mrs AZ, Uchida-san -- among others)

I got off to a slowish start with the congestion, but soon settled into 4:07 pace. This was very comfortable down the hill, and then on the flat I came back to 4:10/4:11 pace. Exactly to plan. Unfortunately my legs were just not up to the plan. At around 18 km I felt the first signs that things were not quite right. By 25 km I was starting to hurt and fade. By 30 km I was well off pace, maybe 4:20s by that stage, which then ever gradually just kept fading to the point where I must have recorded a couple of 5:00 kilometers late in the race. My final gross time: 3:08. If I count the net time, the best I can say is that it probably wasn't a PW. I'm a bit disappointed, but not gutted. Shrug the shoulders. These things happen. Move on and try to get it right next time. Better training, better race conditions. I really appreciate all the support from all my blogger friends, plus various family and other friends who contaced me by email and phone. Thank you, and sorry I coudn't fulfill the anticipations that I created for you. I think I had better be a little more circumspect about my chances from now on.

Young Adam had an even worse fade than me, but managed to finish about a minute ahead of me. Somebody told me he was running sub 20-minute 5ks for the first ten or fifteen km. His splits will make for interesting reading. A 3:06 is still a very respectable debut (hey, that's what mine was!) and he will no doubt learn from the experience. I wonder if I will learn from mine?

I met Scott, and that was great. Gave him a punch in the guts for Tesso and Clairie. He came to the sento with us and dinner at our after-race party in Shibuya before scarpering back to Osaka. I'll let him give his own account of the race, but I'll just say that his, like mine, was a common story of the day: somewhat short of expectaions. It is just a bit hard to race to your potential when you are soaked to the skin and shivering.

On a final positive note, it was great to see some nice PBs and debut marathons recorded from our club; jewels among the chaff. Jay, Mary, Rie recorded big PBs, while Jayne, Adam, Yuka, Chris (sub 3!), Luke, Granne, Katakura-san--and possibly others I can't recall, please forgive me--had big first time outings.

In conclusion, the repeated reoprts on TV about the big day make it clear to me that the event itself outweighed any individual performances. Simply stunning, and I amjust glad to be able to say thatI was a part of it.

Sunday's weather forecast

This is the forecast for Sunday folks. Just ya regular Japanese weather forecast. Non polyglots, stay with it to the end for the English edition.

4 x 1 km

Got out of bed at 6 this morning and ran a total of 7.7 km, of which most was pretty easy, but also four lots of 1-km repeats at race pace on the same stretch of road where I did eight of them last Saturday. The pace was not actually very consistent, but that's OK, they were there or abouts. Near the end of the last one I encountered an old woman who'd just fallen off her bicycle. Silly old cow almost made me lose my stride. No, just kidding, I helped her up with the bike and made sure she was OK. A thousand sumimasens later I was able to finish the last 150 m of the rep.

So I think I might be about done and dusted. Thanks for all the good wishes folks. One of us will try to get on a computer or mobile phone with email in the afternoon to post the results. I will be sure to give Scott a punch in the guts for you, ladies. I'll probably wait until after the marathon if that's OK.

42.195 km in 5 minutes and 49 seconds

A friend brought this to my attention. I'm not sure if you really want to watch, but...

Race pace repeats

Last night we went through our normal Wednesdy night ritual of meeting at the sento and going out for a run. However it was all very abbreviated and we were back in the sento by 8:00.

There were three easy km of running up to the track and back to the sento, plus the jog recoveries between repeats. And then there were the six times one-km repeats. Matthias was back in town from Cologne for the marathon. He joined me in the repeats from the start, though they were a bit faster than his race pace. And then some others, Motozo, Jay, and Anthony tagged on part-way through.

It was pouring with rain. Very light and drizzly when we left the sento, but as we started the repeats, it really started coming down. Everybody else seemed to be just pacing off me and some of them were chatting. I was a bit distracted and getting twitchy, but then decided that, no, no it was all good. Good practice for concentrating on my own pace through the distractions of other runners and rain and cold. The others could do whatever they wanted; I was going to run my pace. My target pace was 4:10. The repeats were: 4:10.4, 4:14.3, 4:11.1, 4:09.2, 4:13.0, 4:09.3. The 4:14 and 4:13 are a little bit off, but otherwise pretty much on the button. I was chuffed with that frst one! As I got into the repeats I was checking the 200 m/400 m splits less and less frequently. For the last two I don't think I checked my watch once, or maybe just at the 400-m split.

I thought my heart rate was a little bit higher than it has been in recent runs, being at about 148 or 149 at the end of the first couple of repeats and 150 or 151 for the last couple. I think in some recent runs I have been going in the low 140s at that pace, but maybe my mind is playing tricks on me -- not properly comparing apples with apples. Anyway, I suppose there is a minor drop in fitness through the taper. Some reports say there isn't. But as Mr 2P says, fresh legs will carry
you a lot further than tired legs. And definitely my legs are freshening up a lot. Even some of the old niggles are fading to grey.

I feel ready for this.

Sunday!!

No, Sunday!! 9:10 am Sunday February 18.

Sorry, maybe that first counter was confusing you. I deleted it.

For the benefit of Clairie the Running Fairy

The start time is 9:10 am EJT

9:10 am EJT = 10:10 AEST (Qld?) = 11:10 AEST +1:00 (NSW, Vic daylight savings time).

Actually, it has been rumoured that during the race there will be a way on the Japanese web site to input a person's name or number and get updates on their progress every 5 km. If I get a more detailed "How to", I will try to post it.

To keep you amused in the meantime, here is the course.

See those little hills at the end in the profile? They are bridges associated with the dreary reclaimed harbour land. I hate them. I loathe them. I am going to kill those bastards. I am going to destroy them. They will crumble beneath my size 28.5 cm Asics Gelfeathers. Mere pimples on the backside of a stoat. That's all they are.

That's all for now. As you were.

Nothing to see here people

I didn't run today. Sadly, it came very easily to me.

I ran yesterday, but not very much. I also had a 500-yen massage. It was good.

I am eating a lot, growing sleek and fat like a laboratory rat.

I cut my toenails on Saturday, so at least that is done.

I think I will run a few laps around a track tomorrow night. Hmmm...that sounds nice...

I wonder what I can wear to keep warm after I hand in my bag?

I wonder if I can cope with the low mileage in my log for this week?

Tapering is kind of fun, but not.

Roll on Sunday, Sunday roll on.

Sunday Taper Run & Other Musings

So the object of the taper is to remove residual fatigue by race day without losing fitness. Removing fatigue is easy enough. Just stop running. But I don't think that is such a good idea because then your fitness slides. I also think that inducing very mild levels of fatigue promotes the body to undergo recovery processes...whatever that may mean. And practising race pace is Good. With these thoughts in mind, I decided that the last Sunday should be about 20 km with a mix of easy running and up to race pace, but nothing harder, and not too much of the race pace.

It turned out that my friend Colin had a plan for himself that closely matched what I wanted to do. So we ran two 2.5-km laps at pretty easy pace. I then changed to my brand new Asics Gelfeathers, purchased Saturday as a birthday present. I thought they and my feet probably should try to get to know each other a little before being forced to spend 42.195 km together next Sunday.

We switched from the off-road loop to the paved 1.94-km loop, then ran two loops at 4:40/km, two at 4:30/km, two at 4:15/km and one last one at 4:12/km. The pace was aerobically comfortable for me the whole way. My breathing was never very hard, though my heart rate was touching on 150 in the final two laps. Towards the end my legs were developing a few hot spots, but nothing too serious. Through the rest of the day I felt reasonably fresh as though I hadn't done anything much. Not like the fatigue you feel after a usual long run. So I do think that run trod a good line between a mild stimulus and not adding anything to the general fatigue level.

The new shoes were beautiful. Not even a hint of any rubbing or pressure that might lead to problems. I also wore a new pair of five-"fingered" socks, and they were great. This will be my marathon kit. When we were buying the shoes my wife said to the bloke in the running shop that I was there to buy some shoes for the marathon next week and did he have any recommendations. The patronizing bastard laughed and said you don't go buying new shoes now or you'll get blisters and other problems. Those shoes (pointing to the retired 2110s I was wearing) will do fine. I suppose I just didn't look much like a runner to him as I was wearing jeans and a down jacket over a flannel shirt. See, to be a serious athlete in Japan, you have to be wearing technical clothes festooned with logos. Gotta look the part. So anyway, I got a bit indignant and started to use the best Japanese I could muster to tell him that my present lightweight shoes, some Adidas Adizeros were just a little tight and also felt a bit hard on the footstrike, and that Asics shoes usually don't give me any problems, and that I had Gelfeathers in the past when I ran a 2:55 marathon, so I was thinking of using them again. Mr Smartypants stopped patronizing me after that and I only had to try the one pair of shoes to make the right decision.

Thanks for the encouraging words to my post of two posts back. Yes Ewen, controlled agression. I'm thinking an 87 minute half split, which will require some restraint because the first 5 km has a steady downhill gradient with a net fall of 40 m (so a tad under 1%). After that it is essentially flat. There are a few short sharp hills associated with bridges over the last few km, so their effect on pace will simply depend on how strong (or shattered) I am at that stage. But I'd like to think I'll be gritting my teeth and enduring some pain to maintain a pretty strong pace.

Scott, my self-esteem on the fathering front took a nudge upwards over the weekend when I fought off tiredness to eventually find a way to get videos from YouTube to Kohta's PSP. He'd been bugging me for a few days about it. Once it was cracked he was very happy, and I surprised him by loading this up as the first offering. Being 14 and a Harry Potter fanboy, he was pretty tickled. When I said I was a lousy dad, I suppose I was just trying to reflect the feeling we have that no matter how much we do with and for our kids, it never seems to be enough. And I know that with running and longish work hours, I spend much less time with them than I should or that I imagine I would if we lived in Australia...

A group running blog

For the information of my non-Namban readers, my friend Gareth started a group blog for the use of all the Namban Rengo runners (all 52 of them) to use as we approach Tokyo. He publicized the login and p/word to our mailing list. Though if that's how people post they have to be sure to sign their name to posts. Those with blogger accounts (like moi) could, however, set themselves up as contributers, so our posts (and of course comments) show up with our blogger identity. It hasn't quite taken off like wildfire, but is an interesting experiment and has certainly had a reasonable amount of activity. If you have time to kill or enjoy distractions, you may wish to have a browse of...Tokyo and Beyond.

Maybe some time you too will feel the need for a group blog.

Happy 44th to me!

I'm getting old! Running out of time to run any more sub-threes!

After the good run on Wednesday night I took a day off on Thursday. Then life got in the way of plans for a Friday run. First up I had to teach a workshop (English Business Letters) at 1:00 on Friday afternoon and was still preparing the bloody thing right up until 12:45, including a late night and an early start working on it. Once the thing was finished and the stress released I was dead keen for a run, but my littlest son Chiaki had received his results for a test to enter a selective public junior high school and...brrrt, had failed. So I was expected (not by him) to rush home and console him. I resisted at first, but felt like an absloute deadshit of a father (I mean I am anyway, but this just made me feel it for once). And the truth was, my legs felt weary from standing all afternoon teaching. So I traipsed home and gave Chiaki a hug and had my dinner and just shrugged off the run. It's the taper after all.

Mika talked recently about a good way to approach the taper. In fact I did something a bit like this before Ohtawara 2004 and 2005, but her approach is more structured. She suggested getting out and running 1-km repeats at your marathon pace with a 200 m jog recovery. You then progressively reduce the number of repeats each day closer to the big day. So today I got out and did a slowish warm up for a couple of km, then set off on a 1-km (turned out to be 1.1 km) stretch of back road that has very few intersections. I still had to dodge the odd daredevil taxi driver and a removalist truck that decided to overtake me and then immediately pull up, cutting off the left half of the road forcing me to run around him on the right within inches of cars coming the other way. The interesting thing about this stretch of road is that it has a gradual gentle grade, so for the first repeat I was all uphill and for the return, all downill. Repeat four times. So the pace was not especially consistent:
4:13, 4:12 || 4:05, 4:03 || 4:11, 4:04 || 4:11, 4:09.
up, down || etc

I did a walking/standing recovery rather than jog and just waited until my heart rate was about 85. A couple of minutes at most.

So I know Ewen is right, I do have to be careful of going too fast. But if my legs and back and energy levels all feel good, I think I'll go for a fairly aggressive pace anyway... and just see what happens. Nothing ventured, nothing gained! At the moment though, not all those things are in place.

Last Big Wednesday

Adam and I have been running these upper aerobic runs of 20 odd km with 14 or so at upper aerobic pace. Last night, with only 11 days to the marathon we could be excused for doing something different. But this is the run that I think has been absolutely pivotal in the training stimulus I've received over the past four weeks. So if it ain't broke...but we did chop off some distance. With warm up and cool down we ran 17.5 km in 1 hour 20. My average heart rate was 136 (73%) and maximum 158 (85%).

******** Lap (1.9 km) paces (min/km) ***********
This: 4:18, 4:09, 4:01, 4:02, 4:02
2WA: 4:14, 4:15, 4:16, 4:16, 4:17, 4:17, 4:16, 4:12, 3:57*
3WA: 4:29, 4:24, 4:21, 4:20, 4:19, 4:14, 4:09, 4:05
4WA: 4:23, 4:21, 4:20, 4:20, 4:16, 4:14, 4:12, 4:12
(WA = weeks ago)

The incredible thing was that we were still quite comfortable at those low 4:00/km paces. We were still chatting at the end of lap 2, though it was getting harder. We knuckled down a bit for the next few. But the very instructive thing is my heart rate. Note above that my maximum for the whole run was only 158. Not so long ago, this pace would have been a lactic threshold run for me, that is, a heart rate of 160 to 165. Last night, even running up a slight incline at close to 4:00/km, it never got above 158. And most of the time it was down in the low 150s. Hard but comfortable territory.

The problem for the marathon though is that although my cardiovascular system has responded so well, I am not convinced that I have the leg endurance to maintain a particularly aggressive pace. So I can't get over-excited about these numbers. All I know is that gives me the confidence to really go out after a sub three hour marathon -- 4:15 pace should feel like stroll in the park. But only time will tell. I wish the marathon was this weekend!

And again, a tip of the hat to Adam. He is looking so strong. He ran a 35-km long run last Saturday at not much slower than 3-hour pace, and says he pulled up without any real leg soreness to speak of. I think he might be one out of the box and I am probably more excited for his chances of going sub 3 on debut than I am for my own race.

Couldn't Keep it Up

My heart rate that is.

I have to dash for a Shinkansen now, but just very quickly wanted to blog that my heart rate test run just keeps getting more unbelievable each week. This morning I had to really reall work to get my heart rate up. The heart rate test lap was an incredible 8:44.. .Sorry will update later with the comparisons from previous weeks, but I thought last week was fast, this is getting towards 4:05/km pace.

14 km in 1:04:56

Finished hard at a heart rateof 153. It took exactly 54 seconds for my heart rate to fall to 90 when I stopped.

I'm feeling pretty upbeat just now.

35 km and a Japanese icon

Well, I did my planned 32 km run. The running pod reckons it was 34.8 km, but we all know that I would never break my word and run more than I planned, so it must have really been only 32 km ;-) . Running time: 2:51
Average pace: 4:54
Average heart rate 134

It was a pretty good run. I left home just before 8 am. It was a glorious sunny cool day of about 4 or 5 degrees. I made a beeline for Tama river (7.2 km @ 5:10/km). Then ran down river for 10.3 km @ 5:00/km. As I turned to head back up river there in front of me was Mt Fuji standing proud over the skyline. I'd never seen her quite so clearly and large from Tokyo. She was a feature of the view to my left or straight ahead for the 10.3 km back up river (@4:47/km avg). Notice I'd picked up the pace a bit there and the run was unfolding as I'd planned and I was feeling good. Then I turned for home for the final 7.2 km. I really worked hard at this and in long stretches had my pace down around the 4:15/km. There are a few uphills and other slow bits, so the final average pace for that section was only 4:36/km, but I was still happy with the strong finish.

I rewarded myself with a smoothy with a banana, two eggs, and small tub of ice cream. Yum.

So that's it. Final long run in the bag and nothing left now but to taper and start freshening up. Which means I'm off for a 7.5 km recovery this morning.

Footnote to Ewen: I actually like all my aunts as well, but was grasping at straws for a suitable metaphor.

Perserverance pays off

Waking up at 5:15 am, stumbling around sleepily, pulling on tights, strapping on the heart rate monitor, donning T-shirt and long sleeve layers, changing the battery in the footpod, doing battle with the shoes, lurching into the elevator, clicking the watch to start, off and running into the dark, cold morning.

Sometimes I embrace this routine like a reunion with an old friend--warmly, welcoming, breathing in each other's very being. Occasionally, when sleep is short and future goals hazy, I dread it like the approach of a cloyingly musty old aunt -- how do I get out of this? You can't! Just grit your teeth and give her a hug. Ugh!

This morning it was a feeling somewhere in between. I am driven by the thought of Tokyo Marathon just over two weeks away, but I am also getting tired and slightly leg-weary from some recent hard workouts and have a building trepidation of overdoing things too close to the marathon. Late yesterday I learn that we have a work function tonight. If I am to run today it is this morning or lunchtime. Lunchtime offers too little time, involves lugging gear to work, and runs the risk of being scuttled by the demands of work. So I choose morning, and thus, with the familiar "pip pip peep" of my Polar alarm at 5:15, the routine swings into action.

Today it was time for some speed. I was tossing up between four progressive paced post office loops (3.3 km per loop) or four 1600-m repeats at Komazawa Park. For reasons I can't well explain, I chose the 1600s. Last time I attempted this workout I pulled up very sore in my left knee. But I have had my Three Good Weeks since then. I still experience some pain in that old left leg, but it is higher in the thigh and and towards the groin...and quite bearable. The knee has actually been very settled.

I run the 4 km to the park and immediately have to have a toilet break. Good. Better than halfway through the repeats. I continue up to the start line in Komazawa Park and click the split button and I'm off. I'm running pretty hard and it feels fairly fast, but not flat out. It shouldn't need to be as it is only the first repeat. I do not look at my watch and try to run by feel. In the last 500 m I am working hard and breathing hard. This should be a reasonably fast effort I think. At least below 6:10.

I click my watch and am dismayed to see a time of 6:23. What!! I've been running so well lately. Fast, strong. Is it only my endurance system I've trained? Has my VO2 and leg speed gone completely? Do I pull out of this workout now and just go into the marathon on aerobic workouts alone? Finally I decide that, no, whatever happens I am not going to quit. I will finish this workout come hell or high water.

The next repeat I grit my teeth and try to push harder. Surely I have more to give than 6:23!! It gets tough over the last 400 m, which is slightly uphill, and finally I am encouraged to see a more respectable 6:07 on the watch. I have done my best here and don't expect to see any more improvement, so despite hoping that they'd all be under 6:05, at least this is getting closer to the territory I want to be in.

I jog back to the start and push hard in the third repeat. I am more warmed up now, my body more familiar with the hard effort. I focus more on my stride and foot strike, looking for ways to squeeze more out. It's been a long time since I've done intervals. Maybe I am just out of practice. And though I suffer again over those last 600 m, I'm even happier to see a flat 6:00 on the watch. Well, that's more like it. The cobwebs are clearing.

On the last repeat, with great prescience I say to myself, hey, this is the last repeat! and somehow, when I search inside, I find there is actually a little more to give. Oh, it hurts though. That rotten uphill over the last 600 m never gets any easier. But I push it right to the end, scaring the other denizens of the dawn, the old ladies and small dogs, with my hard breathing. Final rep: 5:56! Finally I can feel something approaching satisfaction!

This was not a perfect workout. In some respects it was even a bit ugly having such a wide spread of numbers, but at least there was a steady improvement with each rep. The temperature was only 3 degrees today, so I guess that simply getting warmed up was one of the problems. Ultimately though, I was most pleased with the fact that I simply stuck with it after the bad start and completed what I set out to do. I am sure it blew out some cobwebs. Running the 4 km home I was doing about 4:30 pace and it just felt like a stroll, my heart rate was barely getting over 135 (72%) and my cadence was easy.

When I got home, I quickly did some stretches and a few core exercises as it was after 7:00 and there was no time to linger. But as I picked up my heart rate monitor off the ground and walked slowly towards the front door, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief to have this run under my belt. Nothing could take it away from me now. Neither work, nor the mental contortions of mind versus will. And a feeling of satisfaction and warmth spread through my body. Except for my painfully frozen fingers.

Running out of time

The upper aerobic run in Yoyogi Park last night went pretty well. It was much more even paced than the previous two, just upping the pace a little on the penultimate lap and then throwing in a hard last lap. I ran with Adam again and we did one more lap than on the previous occasions. The hard aerobic segment was 17.1 km and with warm up and cool down the whole run was about 22.5 km in 1:45:11 with an average heart rate of 143 (77%). At times my legs (especially the left, and especially in the last 5 km) felt like they were being taxed, but generally it wasn't hard to hold the pace. I think these are the runs that have been giving me the strongest training stimulus over the past three or four weeks. These are the gift of the Running Fairy.

********* Lap (1.9 km) paces (min/km) ***********
This: 4:14, 4:15, 4:16, 4:16, 4:17, 4:17, 4:16, 4:12, 3:57*
2WA: 4:29, 4:24, 4:21, 4:20, 4:19, 4:14, 4:09, 4:05
3WA: 4:23, 4:21, 4:20, 4:20, 4:16, 4:14, 4:12, 4:12
(WA = weeks ago)
*At the start of this lap I told Adam, "Off you go, see how much you can beat me by!" He beat my about 20 seconds the ungrateful sod ;-) He is going to have great debut marathon.

There were some conflicting comments to the recent pondering on my part about how to do my last long run. I think I will do it on Saturday. About 30 to 32 km at progressive pace. That is, slow for the first 10k, moderate for the second 10k, then lift towards marathon pace over the last 10k.

Training in my sleep

Just for something completely different, here is a post about not running. Not a non-running post, a not-running post.

Tonight is the monthly 5k time trial, so what I'd hoped to do is get up this morning and take my 20-km mid-week IV drip of aerobic goodness and then back up at the track tonight for the time trial. That's how good I'm feeling at the moment.

But sadly, last night I couldn't get out of the office until 10:30. I was home by 11:15 and fed by 11:40 or so, but feeling pretty tired.

Climbing into the farter at midnight, looking down the barrel of waking up five hours later to run 20 odd km...I thought, nup, I think it would be far better for my body to take an extra two hours sleep, move the 20k run to this evening, and toss the time trial out the window. So that's what I plan to do.

Now wasn't that a fascinating training session!

More good omens

Not so much omens and woo woo as hard, clear data. For the fourth consecutive week I did the 80% of HRmax pace test.

Last week I was over the moon that the third lap, the test lap, was in 9:03. This morning I actually had to work like crazy on the pace-up lap just to get my heart rate anywhere near 149. Finally by the start of the measurement lap, which is on a slight uphill, I was able to get up to the target of 149. On this uphill section in previous my heart rate would easily creep up to 151 before I would have to adjust; today it only made it to 150 and then the slightest of easing would halt the increase and soon get it back to 149, or 148, or 147...I had to be really careful or it would just start dropping. And this was going uphill.

The time for the lap: 8:51 ... that's bloody 4:07/km!! There is no conclusion to be drawn from this other than that long, hard aerobic runs are just a veritable pot of training gold. My Tuesday and Wednesday runs over the past three or four weeks have really paid off in aerobic endurance. The comfort at a stiff pace in the race on Sunday was very real. And speaking of that, I felt absolutely no fatigue or soreness from the race until about 12 km into today's run. At this point I had to decide whether to do another lap of the park (that would result in over 18 km for the run) or head home. I was a bit torn, but was feeling that my legs were definitely not real happy about the pace we'd been running. I took that as a sign not to overdo it and pointed the pony for home. I still managed a reasonably fast park to home leg, but had to crack the whip to keep the legs turning over as they were definitely interested in a more relaxed pace.

This certainly bodes well for Tokyo, but still leaves me with a bit of head scratching to do. In particular, the sense of being underdone for genuine long runs. I could squeeze in a run of about 30-33 km this coming weekend, leaving 14 days for recovery, or just keep churning out as many of these 16 to 22 km aerobic runs as possible. It is also going to make a pacing strategy interesting. I am definitely fit enough now to be able to confidently go out at 4:10 to 4:15/km pace and hold it long into the race...but for just how long? And how bad will be the fade? I really want to avoid another fade of Ohtawara-esque proportions, so am inclined to try and be more conservative and feel relatively fresh coming into 30 km. Well, I suppsoe these are good problems to have. Better than worrying about how to optimize a running/cross training regimen that could get me to the start line of the marathon, which is where I was at only a little over a month ago.

Shinjuku Half

I felt very relaxed about the Shinjuku half today. I decided I'd run it hard, but not aggressively. I think of aggresive as when you go at a pace that you really honestly don't think you can hold, but if all goes well, somehow you do, or close enough to end up with a great time. A couple of people asked me what my goal time was and I truthfully said I really didn't know but would be happy with anything under 85 minutes.

The race started and finished on the running track of the national stadium. Oh my, it was so crowded. And that was the theme of the day. I got with an audacious group of Nambanners right up near the front in the 1:15 to 1:25 group.  Even so, it was a very slow start, and those that started further back later said that, for them, during the first kilometer "running was optional". I was able to get up to a steady pace after four or five minutes and eventually went through the first 5 km in 20:43. Not bad considering the slow start. And I figured I wasn't too much slower than 4:00 pace, but feeling fairly comfortable. The course consisted of four loops around the local area, and during the first loop we got, as a special treat, to run through a road tunnel. Yippeee!

The second 5 km split was 20:09, so tracking nicely. Still felt hard but comfortable. I had picked up a passenger too, a young chap named Christian who spoke to me at the starting line and had decided that I seemed "experienced" and he would try to stay with me for as long as possible -- his goal was to finish under 90 minutes. He was still there at 12 km but somewhere after that dropped off.

The 10 to 15k split came up in exactly 20:00.2 minutes. Somewhere around here things got ugly as the multiple loops meant we were running through the back markers, and in places we had a total of one traffic lane of space. Mostly there was a way through, but there would always be the odd dimwit who would stray over to the right and block the path prompting me to have to yell for them to make an opening. One guy did it wearing earphones and couldn't hear the call, so when I went through I tapped him on the shoulder to make a point. Probably not really the right thing to do, but the point is it was pretty frustrating because actually I was building up pace and feeling strong and wanting to really bring it home.

Anyway, I hit the 20 km mark with a 19:32 split. So, yes, I really had been building up. Then I had another curse-fest as there was a point after the 20 k mark where you had to leave the main course and head back to the stadium. Only it was just after a drink station so all the slower runners on their third lap were obscuring the exit point and the marshals were doing an awful job -- the exit lane wasn't even marked with cones or anything...blah! I wasn't the only one who missed the turnoff. I realized something was wrong pretty quickly and cut back across to the right course, but I reckon it cost me at least 20 seconds, and it also broke my rhythm and concentration so that I probably just coasted home instead of building to the big finish, so maybe it cost a few more seconds. So the final 1.1 km was 4:29 for a final gun time of: 84:56!!  Exactly 4 seconds off my estimate. Not bad eh!  And I was pleased that each successive 5k split was faster than the previous.

A very nice postscript was that young Christian came in under his goal of 90 minutes. I think we have added a new Nambanner to the ranks!

Busy couple of days

My last training entry was for Thursday morning. Here we are Saturday and I have had three runs since that post. I ran about 11.5 km around the Imperial Palace on Thursday evening at a fairly easy to moderate pace.

Had a sleep-in until 6:45 on Friday morning and then joined a few Namban friends last night at the Palace again. I ran three and a bit laps for a total of 18.5 km. The first 5k was just a nice steady pace around 4:50/km. The second lap I kicked it down a gear and averaged about 4:20/km for an average heart rate of 148(80%). At the start of the third lap I was joined by TRD and shortly after Motozo and they pushed me along for a slightly faster lap and an average heart rate of 151(81%). So this was a good upper aerobic run. It felt a bit harder than that pace has been at other times this week. So I think some accumulated fatigue is there even though I am recovering quickly and feeling pretty good during the day. So this morning I just got out for an easy 7 km. My average heart rate was only 128(69%) for that run, but on three occasions I accelerated up to top pace over a distance of 100-m or so.

I have a half marathon tomorrow. Shinjuku City. I haven't even mentioned it to now because it is not really a target race. I entered it because I thought it was a good proximity to Tokyo for a nice fast tune-up. I am partly regretting it because the leg troubles and then Shibuya ekiden last week meant that I haven't done as many long runs as I would have liked. And tomorrow is about the last chance. Still, I am in for a penny in for a pound. Let's see what happens. If I feel up to it I might do a further slow 10 km after the race. Could be tough.

I haven't filled my log in for days but I must be already up to about 90 km for the week.

Sayonara baby!

Thanks for all the kind comments on Tatsuya. We saw him off last night. It might have been more emotional for us if his 24 current and former schoolmates hadn't shown up at the airport! We could have got a good game of touchy footy or cricket going. Half the kids, even the boys were bawling (actually I don't think the girls were!) He lost it a bit giving everyone a hug goodbye, and I suppose it must have hit home to him as hard as it possibly could that he is very popular and greatly loved here. Let's hope the quiet and lonely first few weeks in Australia aren't too hard. I had a long hug with him and let him have a good cry. I told him to be strong. He said he was. Told him to sieze this opportunity with two hands and use it to forge his identity as being firmly of two countries and two cultures. Not half Japanese and half Australian, but fully Australian and fully Japanese. He said he would. I was so impressed by the words from the Prophet I posted yesterday. So I told him that Mum and I are just a bow, and you are the arrow, and now we are releasing you to fly straight and true and make your mark in the world. He nodded, and I think he understood.

For a laugh, you might want to try looking at the boys' blog when run through Google translator. Don't ask me to explain!

Three in a row

Today was the third day in a row that I was up for a run with less than seven hours sleep under my belt. After getting back from the airport at getting on for 10:00pm it was time for a snack (fish & a rice ball) and a beer and check emails before getting to bed around 11:30. Set the alarm for 5:30 and managed to prise myself out. I want to run twice today so decided not to head off on the 4-km jaunt to Komazawa park. Instead I set out to run three or four "post-office loops", a 3.3-km circuit course from my home that takes me past Meguro Post Office. At first I was thinking of doing one lap easy, one hard, one easy, one hard. But that just didn't seem very attractive, so I decided to try and run a progressive pace. It went pretty well actually, especially the relatively low heart rate for the pace of the last two laps. All up, 13.3 km in 0:58:45 for an average heart rate of 142 (76%). Here are the lap data:
Lap time Ave pace Ave HR(%max)
0:17:01 0:05:09 123 (66)
0:14:35 0:04:25 140 (75)
0:13:43 0:04:09 151 (81)
0:13:17 0:04:02 158 (85)
It was hard work keeping that kind of pace on the last lap, particularly because a little brown skin diver was knocking on the escape hatch.

Tonight's run will just be an easy 10k. The leg is feeling pretty good, as in not hurting much.

A rare Wednesday morning run

With the airport trip tonight I won't be doing my usual Wednesday run in the park with Namban mates. So I got up early and headed out for a mid-week kinda long run (as Hal Higdon calls them). It wasn't quite as intense as the ones with Adam last week and the week before, but I still ran much of the second half at a heart rate up near 150 and pace between 4:10/km and 4:20/km. The averages are dragged down by the easy cool down.
Total distance: 22.3 km (week to date: 41 km)
Time: 1:40:10
Average HR: 140
Average pace: 4:30/km

Your children are not your children

Tatsuya will be leaving tonight to start year 11 in Australia and we head out to the airport with him later this afternoon. I mentioned to a friend yesterday that this would be just a little gut-wrenching (if gut-wrenching comes in degrees). It prompted him to send me an excerpt from The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. It echoed what I already hold to be true, but I just thought it was worth posting as I prepare to see off my eldest. It seems it was only a few days ago that I pulled into a shop in Military Road on my way home from Royal North Shore and bought a teddy bear for my newly born son (the very same bear my wife discovered a few moments ago in his hand luggage!). Anyway, here is the passage from the Prophet

Chapter 3 Children
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, "Speak to us of Children." And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Strong

TRD put up a lovely little post that I think you all should see for the quote about the greatest compliment that can be paid to a distance runner. It is so true and gives us all something to aim for apart from raw speed and clock times.

Which kind of makes me want to buy this book...

Food

I'm feeling a bit down on myself about food. I have been eating far too many empty calories. Breakfast is alright...usually meusli, sometimes of late porridge. Lunch is alright...usually a tomato, cheese & lettuce sandwich and soup. Dinner itself is usually quite good, but often due to my our hectic lifestyles, especially on weekends, can be just rice and a piece of fish/meat, not much in the way of vegetables. But my dinner serving isn't much bigger than what the kids eat. And if it is bigger it is mainly by having more rice. So, for those that are doing some quick calorific accounting, you will realise this isn't really enough calories to sustain someone training for a marathon. The problem is, I top up with shit. Chocolates and cookies (bikkies) at work, maybe some chips on the way home. I keep telling myself to quit and buy something healthy instead. What I mean by healthy is simply something with some vitamins and minerals, maybe even some protein, for much the same kind of calorific value as the other rubbish. I'm sure it would help my energy levels and overall well-being if I could cram in a few more vitamins etc. The main impediments are laziness (to get up and pop out to the convenience store or getting organized), stinginess (I would have to pay out of my own limited pocket-money), and self-gratification (I actually do like the naughty foods, especially chippies and chockies, so it is kind of a comfort food I guess...but totally unecessary!)

I wonder if anyone else can identify? Anyway, I hope this post gives me the impetus to start doing something about this. In any case, I must try to eat more natto, even if it doesn't help you lose weight after all.

Proof!

This morning's run bears testament to the oft-quoted line that it takes two weeks for a training stimulus to show up in your physiology. Yep, the old heart rate test again.

The protocol in brief for those who come in late: third lap of Komazawa Park, first lap at around 138 to 143 HR, then second lap getting the HR up to 149, then the third lap is the comparison lap.

Two weeks ago the time of the third lap was 9:15 (4:18/km) and that marked the first measure after I had really started to pick the training load back up following the knee soreness. Then last week the lap time was 9:23 (4:22/km), which might have been discouraging if I were not a man of great patience and forbearing. And today, ta-daaaahhh ... 9:03 for 4:13/km! Yeeeahhyy!! It might have been exaggerated slightly by the fact that partway through the second lap I had to stop and tie my shoelace, thus giving the cardio system some recovery time. But still, I had a sense right from the get go this morning that my aerobic system was in pretty good shape as I felt I was putting in quite some effort with the legs, and the pace was reflecting that on my watch, and yet I was breathing easily.

So things are coming together on the general aerobic fitness front. Endurance is going to be another thing as I feel a bit underdone for long runs. Never mind, at least I'm getting to a point of developing enough confidence to have a go.

New Shibuya Ekiden, 2007

The shibuya Ekiden changed its location this year from Oda athletic track and surrounds to inside Yoyogi Park. Each leg is 2.8 km. The Ekiden is for the community of Shibuya Ward, and since Namban Rengo's registered address is in Shibuya, we attend each year. Our numbers have really taken a bit of a jump lately, I suppose with a peak of interest in running due to the Tokyo Marathon and a bit of a raised profile for us.

So today we had more teams than ever before: 8 open mens, 3 masters mens, and 6 womens. Our top teams won the open mens (Gordon finally making it to the starting line and having a good run and Brett running with a broken toe) and womens divisions. Seeing Mika sprinting her guts out to catch a junior high school boy right at the end of the women's victory was a marvellous sight.

I was in the so-called masters A team. Our masters B team kicked our butts for three legs, and then poor Gareth, who had been unfairly drafted into the anchor position of Team B by the dastardly GPAA, was never going to hold off the flying Juergen. But alas, there was one team ahead of both of us, our arch enemies, the Shibuya Police. So we got 2nd and our Masters B came third, so not a bad effort overall. I was pretty happy with my run of 9:46 (3:29/km) on that fairly tight little course. A number of people said they thought the course was a bit short, and now that I think about it, I don't think I could have averaged 3:29 with all those twists and turns. Still, I know I worked very hard and was breathing like a steam train, so who knows...all I know is I ran hard and was happy enough with the result.

Due to family and some work commitments I wasn't able to get a long run in yesterday and had to settle for a squeezed-in 10k. So after the ekiden a group of us did not hang around but stowed bags in lockers at the nearest subway station (Harajuku) and ran to the Imperial Palace for a couple of laps and back to Harajuku for a 20 km run. With 5 km warmup before the race and the race itself and a few other odds and bobs I recorded about 31 km for the day, but not exactly comparable to a continuous 31 km. I was tired afterwards though!

Six-minutes times five

I took advantage of the fact that I am alone in the office today to slip out for a midday run. I ran to the Imperial Palace, hitting the course at Hanzomon, and then continued down to Sakuradamon at easy pace. I then hit the split button and took off running at long interval/hard tempo pace, aka cruise intervals. Rather than run mile repeats and record the time, I decided to make use of the footpod and ran for precisely six minutes with three minutes recovery. McMillan says my mile cruise intervals should be in 5:56 to 6:04 minutes. While it is a bit meaningless because of differences in terrain, the distances recorded for the six-minute efforts were: 1.56km (flat), 1.51km (uphill), 1.6 km (downhill), 1.44 km (flat + uphill), 1.49 km (flat & downhill). The pace readout showed zero a few times during the last two reps, so if the pod and watch were having trouble talking the distance might be underestimated slightly. But maybe not...

This was an interesting workout because it required a different mental approach. It seemed somehow harder thinking about how long I had to go rather than how far I had to go.
Total distance for the run: 14.6 km
Average heart rate: 141 (76%)
Maximum heart rate: 166 (89%)

It is the Shibuya Ekiden on Sunday. Many of us are anxious about when to do our long runs. The ekiden legs are only about 3 km, so it is a little bit of a hassle to be honest. Some people will do long runs after the ekiden. If I can find the time, I think I'll do mine tomorrow and then just take things pretty easy on Sunday (apart from the 3 km blast).

What doesn't kill me...

Got out for a "recovery" run today lunchtime. I headed from my office over to Gosho (the Imperial Guesthouse). I just ran at a relaxed pace, which began at around 5:00/km and peaked at around 4:40/km. Oh, there was that one little downhill where I let fly for 100 m or so and smiled as I saw the pace readout on my watch say 3:09/km. Ha ha ... it was fun. It would have truly been a nice recovery run if I'd stopped at two laps (around 8 km total). But no, I had to go and run another lap didn't I. No damage or anything, but with 11.4 km all up I am feeling a little more fatigued now than I should be (but think of the adddition to the weekly mileage!)

I also spent a bit of time wrassling with Bloglines and learned how to add a Blogroll, which you should now see over at the right. It lists all the Namban Rengo bloggers. Please let me know if you notice any omissions.

More hard aerobic

Last night, Wednesday, I had very similar workout to last week: 5 km of warm up followed by eight hard-aerobic laps of the 1.9-km loop in Yoyogi Park. The average pace per km of each lap after the warm up, comparing last week and this week, were as follows:
This week: 4:29, 4:24, 4:21, 4:20, 4:19, 4:14, 4:09, 4:05
Last week: 4:23, 4:21, 4:20, 4:20, 4:16, 4:14, 4:12, 4:12

Slower at the start than last week, consolidated to about the same in the middle, but then finished quite a bit harder last night. It felt it too. Actually, I didn't feel that great and was a bit dissapointed with how it was unfolding around lap four or five. That sort of spurred me to try and lift the effort a bit and resulted in the last two faster laps.

I did the workout with young Adam. He is a relatively new runner, joining us perhaps seven or eight months ago, and is now powering towards a great debut at Tokyo. Both last night and last week he gradually pulled away from me after the first few laps. He is actually a chance to break three hours on debut, but I fear he will not have the necessary long runs in his legs to hold pace through the final 7 km. It will be very interesting to see how he goes. Mika and Paddy also joined us for about four laps before dropping off to run at a more sensible pace. Paddy was far and away our club's most improved runner of 2006, and considering where he has come from, the fact he was running fairly easily with us at that pace last night was awesome. If his creaky knee holds out he is primed for another great PB at Tokyo (and if the crowds don't get us).

No need to panic

Bit of a steady-as-she-goes day today. I basically did exactly the same run as last Tuesday except that I added a fourth lap of the park to make it 16 km instead of 14 km. I ran the first three laps according to the heart rate protocol as per last week. Last week the third lap averaged 4:18/km and this week...4.22/km! Gack! Backwards. The average heart rates were identical. I suppose it could be random variation caused by being slightly under or over pace on different parts of the course than last week, or it might be a function of the relatively hard week last week. I'm inclined to think the latter. But the legs were quite good so you are not hearing any complaints. But if next week is also slow you might! I also did the hard finish again and the return leg from the park to home was slower than last week by ten seconds or so.

Penn and Teller on Physical Fitness

Kevin Beck has embedded a video clip of a pretty funny take on something that I would hope you already know. For your discretion, the clip is about 27 minutes long and contains some strong language.  As Kevin mentions in comments, the genetic predisposition line is over-simplified by Penn & Teller, but it is still an amusing look at the diet and fitness industries.

One down, two to go

I asked for three good weeks and the running fairy says she granted them to me. She has been good to her word for the first one. After the 16km on Friday I had a nice 12-k run yesterday morning at mainly steady pace, but I also wended my way to my favourite 350-m hill and did six repeats. Instead of running up really hard and jogging slowly back down, I ran up at about tempo pace and then turned and ran back down fast and recovered at the bottom. Tokyo has 5 km of downhill at the start, you see, so I figure that some fast downhill running in the legs won't go astray.

Today I went to Yoyogi Park and ran 36 km in 3:03:15. There were some slow stretches in there disguising the substantial portion late in the run at under 4:40/km pace, and even a good bit at sub 4:30/km pace. Of course this is all pretty pedestrian compared to what some people do on their days off.

Still, that gave me 108 km for the week. Nothing to complain about for a broken down old man who only has one leg.

After the run we had a very enjoyable (read boozy) lunch at La Verdy in Shinjuku to celebrate the 53rd birthdays of my two goodest friends, Colin and Gareth. Happy birthday fellas!

What are the good places in Brisbane to live for runners?

I know at least two of my beloved readers live in Brisbane. Maybe there are some other Brisbane-based lurkers. Anyway, a great friend from the running club needs some advice. She is moving to Australia at the end of February (a week after she runs Tokyo Marathon in fact). She is from the UK and has scored a permanent residence visa to Oz and basically it is a blank slate for her. If she followed the easy road, she has some friends in Sydney and could start off there. But my counsel has been, no, Sydney is a den of iniquity and as expensive as all get out. You want to follow the sun. Southeast Qld is a growth center, land of opportunity, and a pretty darn nice part of the world (you are hearing a born and bred cockroach swallowing his pride here). Carol's qualifications are in accounting, so she probably needs to head to a large center to pursue career opportunities; to me, the logical recommendation is Brisbane.

So the question I throw open to you good people is, what are the best suburbs in Brisbane for a runner who wants to be less than 30 minutes by bus from the CBD? Or at least a runnable/cyclable distance. I am asking here because Carol reads the blog and can easily pick up your answers in comments. And while her main need is advice on places to set up home, a longer bow is that if you know anybody nice that may be in a position to take on a short-term boarder until she finds a job and can get her own place, I'm sure she would be open to offers.

Brisbane readers who have other Brisbane readers, if you could post a short entry with a link to this post, it would be very much appreciated.

Over to you guys!

Hard Gay Meets Natto Meets Kids

I'm not going to even try to explain this, but you guys in Australia are going to love, perhaps hate, perhaps be just a little bit freaked out by this. Anyway, don't watch in an environment where laughter or non-PC might be frowned upon. But do enjoy (thanks Ingo for the prompt to have a peek at what is already on YouTube):

16 km of cool

Today: 16.7 km
Week: 60 km

I got to bed at a reasonable time last night but it seemed to take forever to go to sleep. This has become a recurring theme lately whenever I have an early training session scheduled.

Although I'd penciled Friday's in as 1600-m intervals, the failure last week has shaken my confidence in my ability to produce appropriate times on these chilly, chilly mornings -- about 2 degrees today. And there is always that knee to consider. So I just ran aerobically. Not quite as hard as Wednesday night, but something like first 4km at 68%, 2 km at 75%, 6 km at 77%, and the last 4km home at progressive build up averaging 80% (but finishing with a hard near-sprint reaching 88%). (Percentages are heart rate as % of HRmax.)

The whole run felt pretty comfortable, but a definite feeling of moving along at a good clip. Kilometers six through 12 averaged slightly faster than 4:30/km pace. The harder run home averaged 4:23/km. With three more weeks of training the way this week is unfolding I would expect to see these paces dropping by 5 to 10 seconds.

And related to Scott's post, I had some natto with dinner last night. I felt compelled to stir it briskly for 60 seconds and got a good slimey, icky texture going. It was almost enough to motivate me to learn how to post clips to YouTube. If anybody would like to see a gross-out video of me slurping up some natto or raw egg, mention it in comments and I'll see what I can do. Or Scott and I should perhaps compete to see who can come up with a clip of their most, er, adventurous Japanese dining experience. I still relish the day that a visiting former work colleague from Australia took me out to dinner and told me to order anything. He could handle anything, no problem. But it was sure fun watching him try to eat that chicken liver sashimi without gagging!

Medium long upper aerobic

Tonight 21.7 km
Week: 43.7 km
Average HR: 77% of HRmax

Since I can't do speedwork, long, hard aerobic stuff is the next best thing. So tonight it was into Yoyogi park and after 5 km of warming up at around 5:00/km pace, I got stuck into an upper aerobic workout: 15 km at heart rate close to 80 of HRmax. It went well. It involved seven laps of 1.9 km each plus 1.3 km to make up the 15 km. The average per km pace of the laps was: 4:23, 4:21, 4:20, 4:20, 4:16, 4:14, 4:12, 4:12 . The average heart rate of the last few laps was about 84%. My leg hurt a bit, but nothing unbearable or lasting. Thanks Adam and Stuart for the company, not that there was a whole lot of talking by about the third lap.

My running club makes the news!

One of our members, Yukari Pratt, is a chef, sommelier, raconteur, writer and all-round nice person. She sometimes contributes articles to the Japan Times. Last year she forced at gunpoint a JTs photographer onto her motor-scooter and made him take photos of us as she buzzed us on the scooter during last October's Yamanote Mawari. Now she has used them to write this article about how she took up running and joined Namban Rengo. It was in yesterday's paper. Have fun picking me out in the photos. I must have been a bit camera-shy that day.

Interesting heart rate test

Today: 14 km (yesterday 8 km)
Week: 22 km

First, let's get the tedious news of the leg out of the way. It's holding up. There are two distinct problem areas, one behind the knee and one higher up the rear thigh extending almost into the groin. When the knee is bad, which seems to be brought on by things like intervals, I feel alarmed and want to stop running and rest for a day or two. When the thigh is bad, it is uncomfortable, but doesn't feel like it is going to get any worse and I can carry on. Topical anti-inflammatory lotion seems to be bringing the knee under control.

I felt alright yesterday despite the 34 km the day before and ran a nice easy 8 km at lunch time. Nice and easy for the most part, but I did some accelerations up little hills and steps and things. It was quite a nice refreshing run.

Although my new regime with the cross-training emphasis had today down as a cross-training day, I decided the leg was good enough to do a heart rate test like the one I was doing last year in the lead up to Ohtawara. So, I ran to Komazawa Park, got the heart rate to the low 140s, then on the second lap accelerated to get it up to 149 and held it there for that and the next lap. That third lap is the test lap. Interesting result. The average pace was 4:18/km. This puts me almost exactly where I was at almost exactly the same time out from Ohtawara. That is, on the 10th October when I did this test the average pace was 4:19/km. Effectively identical. Ohtawara was on the 23rd of the following month. Tokyo will be on the 18th of the following month. So I have four days less from now until Tokyo than I did from that previous test to Ohtawara. This is actually pretty encouraging.

I think a couple of things let me down at Ohtawara. My long runs were done a bit too slowly, I didn't do enough miles at upper aerobic pace, and there were possibly some nutritional/energy supply problems on the day. If I correct the last one with better management, I can get back some time with just the same level fo fitness. And if I can get some pivotal training runs in over the next three weeks, hey, then who knows, maybe I can even get my fitness back to and beyond where I was at Ohtawara (if nothing else I now have one more full marathon in my legs than I did then ;-)

After the heart rate test lap I ran home firstly at regular heart rate of 143-146, but then as I was getting closer to Toritsu-daigaku, about 2.5km from home, decided that I should put in a bit more effort. It really hit me then that this is what I have been lacking in some of my training over the past year -- the hard finish to recruit higher level muscle fibers. When I was at a much earlier stage of running, I used to run with these hard finishes, though with no particular purpose, it was just something that approximated racing, and to get faster I just figured you had to run faster. And it worked, though I never strongly attributed it to that type of training  because I had a lot of potential improvement left in me and just about anything should have worked. Then I switched to heart rate based training and got a lot of benefit from it by getting much better conditioning of my aerobic system. And sometimes I would run intervals and sometimes a tempo run. But the progressive, hard finish type runs basically went out the window. Well, now that tempo and intervals are currently suspended from duties, it is time to bring back the hard finish. I ended up running the last couple of kilometers home at under 4:10/km pace, dipping down to 4:00 and below in places. I actually had to back off from the really hard sprint finish because of some twinges from the knee at about 500 m from home. But I still held the close-to-tempo type pace and ran it home strongly. I was pretty happy to have such a good quality aerobic workout while realising there are still things I can do to improve my condition without necessarily endangering the knee.

Three good weeks. That's all I'm asking for. Three good weeks.

Long Run Achieved

Today: 34 km
Week/month/year: 81 km

Some friends, including Tokyo Running Days, were planning a very interesting long run this morning through the highways and byways of western Tokyo. The pace was planned to be a little on the stiff side, which would have been perfect from a training perspective, and I really wanted to join, but I was just a bit concerned about it (the pace) being too stressful on the leg at this stage. So I headed off to old faithful Yoyogi Park to see what I could accomplish. Again the leg had improved since the Friday morning run, so I was hopeful it would hold up for something upward of 25, hopefully 30 km. I was very pleased to notch up 34 and squeak over the 80 km mark for the week from four runs. Probably not an ideal regime, but it is what is helping me lurch ever onward towards Tokyo.

So Scott's son recognized my boys! That was pretty cool. I thought they would remain pretty much incognito on this blog, what with it being in English and the fan base being pretty much Japanese. But they've been outed now. So, yes Tesso, the two younger lads are cast members on a Japanese TV show on NHK (the national broadcaster) for kids called Tensai Terebi Kun MAX. It has music, talk spots, comedy, special guests, location shoots of things like "how to make xxx", etc. Until a couple of months back there were a bunch of clips on YouTube including some with the boys. But the Japanese broadcasters got wind of it and stacks of clips on YouTube that had been grabbed from various  Japanese TV programs were unceremoniously removed. There seem to be a few from the show back on at the moment, but not featuring the boys. Here are a couple of links just to give you an idea of the show:
From last year's live stage event  (Kohta is at far right, Chiaki 2nd from far left, both in the back row)
A version of Happy Birthday from the ending of the show during the 2005 season.
Riho learns to make tofu

The eldest boy, Tatsuya, also gets a little bit of modelling work and, Scott, if you keep your eye out you might see him in a PSP ad on TV at the moment where they have all this blue, white, pink, grey paint flying in slow motion (indicating all the colours that PSPs now come in). Then his ugly dial pops up in black and white for a second. He is looking up and then a blob of blue paint drops on his cheek. He is going to be moving to Australia at the end of this month to live with my brother in Newcastle and attend year 11 and 12. We will miss him.

As for me featuring in Flash magazine, I will first have to work hard on doing something worthy of a scandal. I suppose it could happen when I have the halo in at the dry cleaners.

Oh yes, I almost forgot: the boys also have their own blog operated through their agency. Good luck reading it. If you go back a few posts you will see a very dodgy looking Santa.

The old two-step

Target workout: four by 1600-m cruise intervals amongst a 16-km run.
Actual result: Aborted intervals after two poor efforts. Clocked up the 16-km, aggravated the knee/leg.
Distance this week/month/year: 46 km.

The old two-step: As in, two steps forward and one back. You hear this all the time from runners with one eye on a goal race while trying to deal with annoying injuries. So why should I be any different? After my 19 km on Wednesday I was very encouraged that the knee/leg was feeling quite under control (not cured, but not painful either). I was also proud of myself for sticking to the regime and not hopping out for a run yesterday in celebration of this relatively happy state of affairs.

Today was the first day back at work after the new year break. I had four times 1600-m repeats on the program. I got to bed a lot later than I planned, but somehow willed myself out of bed at 6:00 am. I ran up to the park at easy-moderate effort; everything, leg included, felt fine apart from the fact that the perceived effort seemed a little harder than my pace or heart rate were saying. I started the first mile repeat and decided not to push too hard. But I still thought I was going at about normal mile-repeat pace, maybe slightly slower. It turned out to be a full 15 seconds slower than the first repeat one week ago. Blech. And I felt a twinge in the leg. Still, I gritted my teeth and started the next one. It was still 7 seconds slow AND I was putting in pretty hard AND my leg now felt decidedly sore AND I need to take a crap. So that was that. I decided that this session should be hereby terminated without prejudice and a resumption to normal aerobic running. And so that is what I did (after attending to business of course), at around HR143.

The leg is now sore/tender again, but not as bad as it was two weeks ago. I suppose this at least justifies the truncated training approach. The next task is to give it some TLC tonight and tomorrow with a view to completing an LSD on Sunday. <sigh>

The lads...

We bought a new digital camera just before Christmas. I just downloaded the first batch of photos and there was a nice one of the boys; for no particular reason, here it is for your viewing pleasure. L-R are Tatsuya (16), Chiaki (12) and Kohta (14).

Gosho

Today's target workout: medium long upper aerobic (HR145-150)
Actual: 19.8 km with 13.2 at average heart rate of 149 and average pace 4:29/km

I met up with some Namban friends at Sendagaya. We left our gear at the Tokyo gym and ran one easy lap of Gosho, a 3.3 km loop with a couple of stiff little hills. The others then split off to do some intervals on a flat neighbouring course. I picked up the pace and continued another four laps of Gosho. Late in the third lap I met up with the others again and Jay fell in with me for the rest of that and the final lap. Both being on the wrong side of 40 we spent the time (when talking was possible) comparing notes on our respective battles of the niggle.

The pace for heart rate show I am certainly off my aerobic peak, as would be expected after the past month of disrupted training, but it was an encouraging run all the same as the leg was as good as it has been for a while and I generally felt strong throughout. I ran the downhills pretty hard and eased up on the uphills to avoid major fluctuations in heart rate. I am feeling a few twinges in the upper hamstring (probably not the right anatomical term) tonight, but nothing too serious. I'm feeling fairly upbeat about this new regime, though it is still very early to tell if it will actually deliver a decent training stimulus.

Do you like the photo I added t the previous post? I suppose you could call it "New Year Day Still Life". The picture of the runner is actually a digital television stream called "Wanseg" (one segment) that can be picked up by certain mobile phone handsets. It only started last year and is very cool--that phone is shared by two of my kids who need it (not teh TV so much) due to the fact that are often travelling to and from NHK by themsleves for work. I took the photo during the New Years Day Corporate Ekiden. The green sash the guy is wearing is called a taski and is the functional equivalent of a relay baton. The small ceramic cup shows my sake with the flakes of gold -- the bottle it came from is at upper right. The little green packet is some seaweed -- the snack of choice for discerning sake drinkers. The peanut and Lindnor chocolates are exactly what they appear to be.

Off the Mark for '07

Running on Gantan (New Years day) is pretty much out of the question in Japan. Instead you just lounge around, eat lots of traditional food and assorted treats and drink as much as you like. I had a bottle (750 mL) of sake with breakfast and then abstained for the rest for the day, I do mean day, and then knocked over another one over the course of the evening. The first one had gold flakes in it for visual effect and tasted quite good to boot.

The pattern for today was not much different. I watched the first couple of legs of the Hakone ekiden (two-day event for university teams that absolutely drips with tradition, having been held continuously for some 85 years apart from a brief break during WWII) and then got out for a steady 11 km in 51 minutes before we had our main meal of the day. The left leg is still far from cured, but was vastly improved over where it was a week and a half ago. My aerobic condition, as evidenced by heart rates, is definitely down a little, but having done a few speed sessions and the trail run, I think I am in a good place to stick to mostly aerobic running. As much as I'd love to launch into a lot of mileage, I think I will stick with the plan I have established of three key runs per week plus cross training and see what happens. If the leg continues to improve I might add in a few more aerobic runs later in January.