Race Report : Running the 6th World Major, Tokyo Marathon, Feb 22, 2015 - Part 1

It's 2:48AM, Saturday Feb 28th, six days after completing the Tokyo Marathon, and I'm wide awake sitting on my couch in sunny northern California wondering why did take a nap after landing at noon in the States!  Yes, major jet lag.

Since, I have nothing better to do on an early Saturday morning let's talk about participating in the 6th World Major Marathon as well as logistics of getting to the marathon and faux pah for the foreign traveler to be aware of.  Let's break this up into three parts:

1. (This Post): This part about how to get to the race and reflections on the race itself
2. Part2 : The two weeks we spent in Taiwan prior to the race
3. Part3 : The three days we spent after the race in Tokyo/Hakone (Hot Springs Area)

If you have never heard of the World Marathon Major Races then you should read about each of them here as each has a rich history of their own.  Tokyo was the last marathon to be added and is the largest marathon in Asia.  Each year more than 300,000 people apply to get in and only about 35,000 are accepted.  It's even harder for local Japanese to get in.

Race Report : Kaiser Permanente (KP) SF HM 02/01/2015 (3rd year running)

This is the third year I've run the KP San Francisco Golden Gate Half Marathon and probably the most fun for three reasons:

• The weather was stunning perfect
• PR'ed by nearly six minutes over last year
• Was able to encourage more fellow KP-IT employees to run this year

Last year (2014) was a HM PR for me but under challenging conditions.  If you want to read about the storm conditions we ran in and my slip on a manhole cover read the gory details here.

Strava has a nice feature that once you name a run a 'route' then it will automatically compare them.  Here Strava compares my last three races.  You can clearly see a nice ~7 min improvement from 2013->2014, then a nice ~6 min improvement from 2014->2015.  I'd sure like to think if I continued to train and improve that I could knock off another ~5 off for a 1:42 next year!  Clearly not linear and it is going to be fun to see over time how fast I can become on the same course. If I had not been suffering from that dang cough that has been going around for the last four weeks I think I could have nailed my ~7:45min/mile average I was actually shooting for (not the 8:03 I measured with my Garmin 310xt).  However, I'm not unhappy.  In fact, I was downright giddy passing the finish with the clock showing a 1:47!