I'm the running world's something or other

I ran my second "pace" run today and it went really well. I was nervous about it beforehand because this type of running is different from what I usually do: instead of really far at a snail's pace, it was kinda far, and kinda fast.

So I felt totally awesome when I made my time! Seven miles in one hour, two minutes, fifty-four seconds. I was happy to see that the Running Calculator provided by the Cleveland Clinic shares my enthusiasm. When I typed in my numbers to find out how many calories I burned on my run, the calculator had this comment:



Can you read that? It says "You're the running world's Lance Armstrong!"

Haha. Such an exaggeration but hey, I'll take what I can get. I guess they felt it was more inspirational than "You're the running world's average 30-year-old!", which would be more accurate. Or they could have gone with "You're the running world's you!", which has a comforting self-help ring to it, but which fails to really impress.

Just for fun, I started typing in a bunch of numbers. At 6 miles I get "Now that's what I'm talkin' about!" and for anything over 8 miles I get "Woah...The pavement's starting to melt!" Turns out I'm only Lance Armstrong between miles 7 and 8, which is a relief. Sure, it felt glamorous at first, but after a while the pressure of being a celebrity athlete wears you down.

Merry Merry

It's Holiday time again and I'm trying to get into the spirit, but this is probably the one time of year when everything in Japan seems the most foreign and different from what I expect. So I really feel this video by the Killers - there's something Christmas-like about it, but there's something that's a little off. And this time in a good way.

Pacing Ourselves

I've been sticking to the training schedule for 6 weeks now, and it's going pretty well. Today I decided to inflict it I mean share it with my husband! We rode the subway over to Tokyo Station, which is really amazing in itself. It's huge and completely overwhelming when you're inside trying to find a train, but on the outside there is one exit with a facade that dates back to 1914. Here it is, currently under renovation:



For a much prettier picture, click here.

From the train station, we walked over to the Imperial Palace, which is a really popular place for both strolling and jogging. The palace grounds are surrounded by a moat where ducks, koi, and even giant swans like to float around. On the outside of the moat is a wide sidewalk that goes in an uninterrupted loop for about 5K. I ran two laps and tacked on a little extra to make it 6.4 miles, total.

It was a perfect day for running and there were lots of people out there enjoying it with us: girls, guys, and couples all working out in various layers of highly technical running gear. And for me it was a nice change since I don't often see other runners on my routes. Tourists? Check. Car enthusiasts? Check. And old Japanese guys dressed as 50's gang members while throwing a makeshift dance party? Check! But runners? Not so much.

Afterwards we stopped at Dean & Deluca in Marunouchi for a delicious grilled chicken sandwich to go. Yum!

It's gotta be the shoes

Over my last 15 or so years of running, I've done most of it in Asics shoes. The 2130 shown above will probably be my next pair. I used to buy the 1100 series (1110, 1120). I tried the 2110s two years ago because I couldn't even find a pair of 1120s at that time in Pittsburgh. The selection over there is surprisingly sparse, even at running stores, where they fill up the shelves by displaying the same 3 shoes over and over again.

Eventually I just gave up and bought a pair of whatever they were pushing at the time - in this case some nondistinguished style of Nike Shox (maybe Saikano?). But it's time to replace them again, and that means shopping for sportswear in Tokyo.

To put this experience in perspective, keep in mind that in Tokyo we're crazy about hobbies and everything related to hobbies. Most of the time, participating in a sport is more than just training, teamwork, effort, or achievement - it's an opportunity to buy "gear". I've seen it on the ski/snowboard hills, where everybody out there is dressed like they've got an endorsement of some kind. But watch out, only a few have actually skied before. As a result of this mentality, there are plenty of specialty stores packed with flashy stuff for you to use - or just show off with - while you train.

One problem for me is finding out where these stores are, exactly. We started with this list from the Namban Rango running club. But because it was compiled in 2002, the "list" is really more of a cryptic, historical clue. We followed the directions to ART Sports Okachimachi, only to find that they now sell only camping equipment. Fortunately, in addition to being cleverly hidden, Tokyo shops are also clustered according to purpose. So by traversing from the camp store to a nearby climbing store, and eventually to an all-things-outdoor store, we eventually got directions to the displaced running store.


View Larger Map


Down an alley and around a corner, behind the JR Okachimachi train station, we found a tiny doorway leading to 4 floors' worth of every kind of running device, tool, supply, accessory, or clothing you could want. That is, assuming that you don't want shoes bigger than women's 7.5, which I'm told they don't carry in Japan. So at the end of this marathon of shopping, I will probably run the actual marathon in shoes that come from roadrunnersports.com.

Boston's all right

We went to Boston a couple of weeks ago, on our way back to Pittsburgh for some status meetings with my thesis committee. In Boston I got a chance to meet up with my little sister - yay! We took a walk around so she could show me some cool sites like these:

The bar where she drinks after work (dangerous places- it was in just such an establishment that we both decided to get tattoos, back in 2001):



The "Old North Church" of Paul Revere's Ride:



And a nice Boston-y mix of old and new buildings at dusk:


She also took me to the incredible flour bakery where we tried one of every kind of cookie. It was amazing!

I really liked Boston, even in the cold rain. So I was happy to be flipping through the channels back in Tokyo and see the final game of the
World Series being shown live! I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, given the absolutely crazy amount of media coverage they had here about Daisuke Matsuzaka joining the Boston Red Sox.

What did surprise me was the coverage strategy adopted by the Tokyo broadcasters. The game looked like a blowout until the eighth inning, when Colorado scored two runs and came within one of tying the game. At this point Boston replaced Japanese pitcher Hideki Okajima with an American guy. I'm no baseball fan, but I was into it enough to wonder whether Colorado would actually build some momentum and tie or even win a game. It was just at this moment when the station decided to stop broadcasting the World Series and return to the usual daytime soaps instead.

I'm not kidding! They broadcast eight innings - and baseball games only go to nine - but apparently once Okajima was taken out the whole thing became unwatchable to Tokyo audiences. Fortunately I already use www.sportsline.com for live scoreboards in all kinds of sports. So I got to kind-of watch the end of the game and send my sister an excited go-Boston! email afterwards.

And that's how I learned an interesting lesson about baseball:

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the Japanese pitchers.

Tokyo Marathon

Back in June I entered the registration lottery for the Tokyo Marathon.
There is a limit of 50,000 runners for this race, and the first 25,000 to register get a guaranteed spot. After these spots are filled, anyone registering on the website is entered into a lottery. At the end of the registration period, another 25,000 runners are chosen randomly from these registrants. The notifications were supposed to go out by email last week.

As a grad student, I've gone through this kind of thing a lot: these days, to submit a paper for publication in a conference or journal, you usually send the thing away electronically and then wait for weeks or months while someone decides whether or not the work is appropriate for their venue.

If you end up pulling one or more all-nighters trying to finish your draft, it's easy to put the waiting process out of your mind for a while: for the first 24 hours you're asleep. But after some time you start thinking about and looking for the verdict. The closer it gets to the time when you expect an answer, the more you think and the more you look.

Finally you get an email, either with good news ("We are pleased to inform you...") or with bad news ("We regret to inform you...").

With all of that in the back of my mind, this past Friday I saw this in my inbox:

Sender	Subject
tokyomarathon2008	TOKYO MARATHON 2008

After 6 years of graduate school I have a conditioned response to messages like these. My heart races as I try to simultaneously click and not-click on the email. Mentally, I enter a multiple-universes kind of state where I can peek into the future and see a "Congratulations!", while another future-me is reading the disheartening words "many fine applicants". It's a confusing time.

Anyway what I actually saw was this:

Dear Sir or Madam

Congratulations! You have been selected to run the 2008 Tokyo marathon.


So now, putting all of my imagined value-judgements aside (this was a lottery, after all, and not an application): is this good news or bad news?

In 2002, I ran the Pittsburgh Marathon, which unfortunately was suspended in 2004 and hasn't come back. Since then I've run here and there, but lately I've only been running 10 miles per week, at most.

I'm also very busy with work right now. Hal Higdon does not recommend that runners train for the marathon while "studying for a law exam or planning a wedding". Does "finishing a Ph.D." also count? Probably.

So maybe this is not the best time for the marathon. On one hand, this is an opportunity for me to do something uniquely Tokyo, while I'm here. On the other, there are many fun and beautiful marathons to be run around the world, maybe next year.

By the 26th of this month, I have to email the marathon organizers to tell them whether I'll be accepting my spot. I'm thinking of something like this:


Dear Sir or Madam,

Thank you for your offer, unfortunately my quota for exciting but stressful and ultimately unrealistic goals has been reached for this semester/year/life. There were many fine applicants and believe me I took on more of them than I could possibly accomplish with any grace...

Or who knows, maybe like this:


Dear Sir or Madam,

I am pleased to inform you that I will be running in the marathon this Spring. I look forward to the physical exhaustion as a way to balance and hopefully manage the intellectual stresses that come with finishing a doctoral thesis. It also seems like a golden opportunity for me to participate in Tokyo cultural life without having to use any of my unique and embarrassing pronunciations of Japanese words...

Bagslide

When we go shopping in Tokyo, we always come home with a fine paper bag. A cute, colorful bag that we shove into a small, dark cabinet as soon as we get it home and start putting its contents to good use. The bags are usually so attractive and neatly constructed that I can't bear to shred them down to a size that actually fits into our little trash can.

I was pretty happy with this buy-and-shove arrangement until yesterday, when I tried cramming the bag that broke the camel's back into the cabinet. The whole pile flooded out in a crazy, colorful paper-bag-slide.

The first thing I noticed: Boy, I must really love Starbucks. There were no fewer than 23 Starbucks bags in there, representing the full spectrum of seasonal Starbucks advertising campaigns here in Tokyo. The second: Those bags are so darn cute.

Here are some pictures of my favorite ones. Their companions have been collected and stowed into a new, more secure holding pen - a really big paper bag.

This one is uniqe. The Spring Starbucks bag features Azuki Frappuccino (Some people really like it, some people really don't). It seems to be exclusive to East Asia. Count: 1

This is the most common - standard Starbucks bag. Count: 14

The Fall Starbucks bag. Count: 4

Christmas Starbucks, Count: 4

Following the seasonal theme, here is a cute Christmas bag from Sony Plaza.

This one is for Valentine's Day. Level 4 Hot Pink!

This is my favorite. It's chock-full of Halloween details: a pumpkin on one side, a ghost on the other, and bats printed on the interior. Boo!