To Yoyogi and back

So my Thursday run got nixed by work. I was actually in Osaka from Thursday night to Friday on business, so I brought my running stuff with big plans to sneak in a morning or afternoon run as a nice little hors d'oeuvre of the Osaka marathon, but it was not meant to be.

I decided to flip weekend cross training and the long weekend run so I did my cross training on Saturday. I stationary biked through two episodes of Mad Men. An hour and a half of that bike and it still doesn't feel like I did all that much.

Today I ran the 8 miles on Hal's Novice 2 training guide, "a slight step upwards in difficulty from Novice 1". I thought Novice 1's never-ending 3-mile runs at the outset were a bit to short for me, but Novice 2 seems to be a bit better fit. That said, I got injured on Novice 1 so perhaps that was even too hard. I'll just sweep that argument under the rug for now.

I decided to run today's 8-miler in normal running shoes. Since I haven't ran in Vibrams since last Tuesday, and took a break from them after that because my feet were kind of sore, I didn't think it'd be a stellar plan to jump back into them with an 8-miler. I'll be back to Virbam's for Tuesday's 3-miler.

I clocked in today's 8-miler at 9:18 per mile. As usual, that was not counting water breaks and stopping at lights and other times when I lazied out, as I pause Nike+ whenever I'm stopped or walking. I ran up to and around Yoyogi Park (which is about 3 miles from my apartment). There were two water fountains in Yoyogi Park that I hit coming in and going back, and another near Arisagawa Park, closing to my apartment, all of which were long break point to drench myself and drink.

I can't say today's run was too challenging, but I was definitely hoping to hit red lights towards the end to get those sweet forced breaks. Because I thought I had copped too many breaks during the run, I decided to tough it out on this hill towards the ends that I often take a walking break on. From that point on, it was basically sweet cruising home.

As an aside, one of the major downers of running in Tokyo at night is the smokers. Running next to cars, I can rarely smell their exhaust, but a single smoker will give me 10-20 meters of oxygen-depriving tobacco smoke. The worst today was at the water fountain near Arisagawa Park; a smoker was sitting right next to it puffing away and the wind was pushing it right to the fountain. At that point I was dying for a drink (it'd been more than 2 miles in Yoyogi Park since my last drink), so I just had to bear it. I wonder if I can come up with a route that lets me avoid smokers...