Kanagawa

You may not think a running event that starts from a cooking oil factory, runs for 5 kilometers under a concrete expressway, past a sewage treatment plant, around a large electric power station and then back under the expressway sounds so terribly appealing.  And if that doesn't sound bad enough, you have to repeat the whole thing twice.  But the Kanagawa Half-Marathon is one of the highlights of the winter running schedule here, and so on Sunday I traveled to the Kanagawa Half an hour south of Tokyo with 17 of my teammates.

Prior to the run, I had a very clear vision of race strategy - teammates Martin Verdier and Juergen and I would run together at a pace of around 3:50 per kilometer (which would feel magically comfortable), then we would try to pick it up a bit toward the end.  This idyllic fantasy seemed to be materializing for the first 5 kilometers.  Martin and I caught up with a Juergen after a quick start and we all ran as a team.  I tried to encourage our squad to stay together loudly singing the Sister Sledge song:
"We are fa-ma-ly-
Mar-tin and Juer-gen and me"
and referring to us as the three musketeers (trois musketeers corrected our French teammate Martin). Teruyuki ran with us for a while so we were the four musketeers (or quatre musketeers).  Around 5k Juergen begun warning us that the our pace was too fast, but tragically I failed to heed his warning and soon it was down to just deux musketeers - Martin and I. 

My strength quickly began to drain away, and I grew increasingly uncomfortable, but still hung on to this 3:45 pace up to the 16 kilometer mark at which point the wheels came off completely and everything went terribly, terribly wrong.  Martin looked back at me and I waved him off with a "gambatte".  As I struggled slowly through the final 5-kilometers, I repeatedly smiled and shouted when I saw a Nambanner running past in the opposite direction, sortof a sad, pathetic effort to put on a front, as if to say "noo proooblem - I may be bent over and shuffling and drooling, but actually this is only my training pace and I am feeling just chipper".

Of course one thing kept me going - knowing a bottle of cooking oil straight off the assembly line is waiting at the finish line.   In the end it was all worth it -- I got my cooking oil, and over french toast and coffee at Denny's we all regaled each other with our tales of our exploits earlier in the day amidst the freeways, sewage plants and factories.