Boston 2011: The Fastest Marathon Time Ever!!!

Wow folks, Geoffrey Mutai wins the Boston Marathon 2011 with a 2:03:02 record breaking time. To put that in perspective, you'd be watching the end credits roll on Empire Strikes Back and still have 58 seconds to go until the final crescendo of John William's Rebel Fleet/End Title Medley score flittered past your eardrums, all the while Mutai would have finished running a full marathon and already be toweling the sweat dry from his forehead while soaking in his victory.

Further perspective, for the slightly less geeky, the Tokyo Marathon 2011 first place runner, Hailu Mekonnen, clocked in at 2:07:35. Not a record breaker, but still incredibly fast. Both Vin & I crossed the half marathon point at 2:13:09 (split), meaning Hailu was done running for the day, while we still had the second part of the race to finish; which was a long hard road indeed.

Mutai: "You don't look at world records. You just go" 2:03:02

A champion for sure, but an official world record holder, maybe not... When breaking a world record is not a world record

Very big congratulations to Japan's own Masazumi Soejima and Wakako Tsuchida for winning the men's & women's wheelchair division of the Boston Marathon. がんばろう日本

Cross Training on the Shoulders of Giants

I spent the weekend in Yokohama, and while I didn't have much time for running, I did do a substantial amount of walking. Which, if you do it for long enough, starts to seem semi-respectable; as I'm sure a number of olympic racewalkers would undoubtedly assure you that it most certainly is. For whatever reason, most of the top record holders for race walking are either from Russia (née Soviet Union) or China (feel free speculate on why that is in our handy comments section below). A lot of the walking I did initially took place Saturday morning on the rainy streets of Chinatown in Yokohama. The skies eventually cleared up to reveal a stellar latter half of the day, but not before thoroughly soaking my feet, and undoubtedly drenching me in radioactive particles: しょうがないね (it can't be helped).

A Rainy Day in Yokohama:

The Chinatown Chronicles

The continued walking adventures await...

Vegan Banana Bread with Extra Awesome Bananas

My last attempt at introducing vegan baked goods to my ever gracious host family here in Japan was a bit of a miss. Not so much a fail, as the cookies were still tasty enough, but from a personal standpoint I felt the finished product just didn't knock it out of the park with that Sadaharu Oh pizzaz.

This time around I set out for some banana bread action with a little bit of prep work before commencing; I did all the metric cooking conversions before hand, so I wouldn't find myself standing over my mac eying the keyboard with battered hands wondering if I could use my nose to peck out my conversion question close enough for Google to figure out what I really wanted to know. Avoiding that awkwardness was a G.I. Joe "now you know, and knowing is half the battle" win!

Vegan Banana Bread 

(freshly sung to for added awesomeness)

Recipe + Banana shenanigans await...

Less is More: Recovery Running...Now with More Cycling!

I set out this week to basically make or break my road to recovery by implementing a handcrafted training schedule built around all the previous weeks' semi-successes and full on failures. As noted repeatedly throughout a plethora of posts chronicling the on-again off-again relationship I have with ITBS, coupled with my reliance on the preset Higdon schedules (for which there seems to be one for every level), things just weren't going smoothly post-marathon. I'm Beyond Thunderdome now: Tina Turner is singing sweet-sweet songs, with her heavenly Nichiren Buddhist pipes, promising victory ahead: なんみょほれんげきょ* and so forth...


Go Beyond Thunderdome...

Rhythm Method: Afrirampo "あふりらんぽ"

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen...or more precisely, midnight JST. Though they weren't so much striking as silently slipping past the moonlit hour like a distant whisper of waves wafting through the riverside* air with an odd accompanying smell of tires & rosemary. I was listening to Afrirampo on my ipod nano as I suddenly came upon an unexpected darkness. It was more than a little creepy to bike down a familiar path enveloped in a fresh lacquer of black vinyl nighttime sheen as Oni & Pikachu yelped back and forth to one another from opposing sides of my grey matter. There was nothing to be seen except for the tiny light on my Harlem Globetrotter** that shone(n knife'd) a small circle only a few feet ahead. I almost hit three people, but swerved to avoid plowing through them just in the nick of time. Though, I suppose, the more accurate way to look at that situation is probably to say they almost hit me, since, I was the one blazing down memory lane with the bat-signal on full beam, warning all of my forthcoming, while they, draped in blacker than black attire, stalked about in their ninja ways on a narrow path in the naked night. This darkness is all part of a plan for Tokyo to conserve energy during the continuing crisis, and while I support that decision, I just wasn't expecting to be unexpectedly confronted with the unusual eeriness of it while heading down my usual cycling/running path.

Afrirampo broke up less than a year ago. What makes it especially sad is that it was two days after my birthday, and 7 months before I myself would be anywhere near Osaka, where they hail from. There's something about missed opportunities that stings like fresh squeezed turnip juice in your eyes while you want nothing more than turnip-ade to quench your ever maddening thirst for sweet-sweet turnips...though, it is promising that Oni & Pikachu have openly stated that they would consider playing together again, if & when, they basically feel like it. Hopefully that urge overtakes them sometime soon. This video, for their titular track, only hints at what, I can only imagine, their raucously renowned live shows delivered on. Shhh...you can almost taste the turnips.



Footnotes...

Lost in Translation

I know I have to tread lightly here, because I'm aware I'll be on thin ice, and I'm clutching a heavy heart...but many (both) of you are probably aware of how my post(oh hell, and pre)-marathon running has been plagued by constant ITBS knee problems. It's been a steep slope to try and work my way up to recovery, and I hear on a day like today back in P.A., it's a slope that's even lightly coated with snow flurries. That's some wackiness in our weather systems, for sure!

Recently, I've been trying to redefine my training schedule to accomodate this reoccurring injury, in the hopes to transcend its limitations, only to be met with continuous failure time and again. There's one aspect of my life with the potential for change that I've been kicking around, even with a bum leg, which is something I didn't want to really have to redefine, because I felt it might betray something deep within me by even considering it, but today is the day that I finally made the decision that it is, in fact, my diet that is essentially lacking, and I need to experiment with new healthy options. Now I'm not saying I'm going to go out and start guzzling down gallons of milk, cracking open raw eggs, or go gnawing through greasy chicken bones at the corner KFC (because I haven't seen any here in Japan yet), but at least while I'm in Japan, I am going to keep my protein levels up for long distance runs by ingesting fish: I will become a pesco-vegan. Fish is far too abundant a source of nutrition in Japan to outright ignore.

I'm already sure some will question the very nature of keeping this blog title Vegan Marathon Runner, and while I do feel like I've failed in some way here, I remain confident that I can keep the title mainly because: 1) I was VEGAN at the time of my marathon (and through the entire course of training for it) 2) my co-author, Vincent, still remains purely vegan. I've been wary to discuss this with too many people, but I hold to the decision, and look forward to providing you all with a fresh perspective on running, one that will now, slightly diverge from the original intentions of this blog. When I return to the States, at some point in my foreseeable future, I do see myself returning to a full vegan diet. But for now, the timing and placement of everything in my life is pointing in a different direction. Especially considering that it's April Fools' Day...