Pre-race Carbo-loading Party

Barbarians,

There are some 50 Namban runners doing Tokyo Marathon. Most of us will go to Tokyo Dome to pick up our numbers the day before.** LaQua a lovely onsen spa open 24hrs just across the street. Our moons are aligned.

I suggest we make the most of this opportunity and gorge ourselves on a carbo loading lunch somewhere nearby after collecting our numbers in the morning, and then (for those who wish) go have a relaxing onsen in LaQua to loosen the mussels before this monumental race.

Provided that we get enough people together, I will look into a restaurant. The LaQua onsen itself does not require any advance booking.

Here is one possibility for restaurant:
http://www.americanhouse.co.jp/mangia/laqua.html
but they don't take bookings for weekends, so this would be tricky for Saturday. Any other suggestions?

Phil

** You can actually get your numbers on the Friday night before 8pm too - if more people want to do this after work on Friday night rather than Saturday, we can do that too. I suspect it may be less crowded then also, but it could be difficult for some nambanners.

Spectator positioning

I expect there will be a lot of family and friends out and about on the course cheering Nambanners on.  Just thought I would let you know that my wife and kids plan to watch from Hibiya Park.  There are a number of places like this where spectators should be able see the runners go past twice, such as anywhere along the leg from Hibiya to Shinagawa, or Ginza to Asakusa.  In fact you could quite easily watch your favourite runner go past the palace, then walk slowly over to Ginza and watch them twice again.  My wife has the kids though, so will probably just stay around Hibiya park where they can play.  If anyone else wants to join, just let me know. 

Phil

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A great inititiative

My good friend Gareth has really outdone himself here, setting up this piece of cyber real-estate for us to collectively stretch our legs in. Thanks Gareth.

I just want to make two quick points. To make the blog a nice interactive place rather than a one-way flow of information, we need to make extensive use of the comments. Thus if a particular post generates interest and discourse, that should take place in the comments to the post rather than as a series of separate individual posts. Try to keep each post to a specific topic, let the comments to the post roam where they may, to some extent.

Secondly, the blog is not like the mainling list. New content is not going to magically just appear in your Inbox. But instead of having to bookmark and check it manually each day, I recommend that you set up an account with a blog monitoring site called Bloglines. You use Bloglines to subscribe to the blog "feed". Then to watch all the blogs that you wish to subscribe to, like this one, you only need one bookmark (even better, make it one of your home tabs in Firefox), and you will automatically know if there is a new post. I think it is even possible to subscribe to individual comment feeds.

Let's make this thing work for all of us.

Steve Lacey

Welcome

This is it. The Namban Group Blog. The list is for short, sweet informative posts. This is a space where we can be more discursive, share more. I hope that all you need to know on how to post and comment is in the mail I sent to the list, if not let me know.

I hope this is useful for all of us. If not, we can lose it.

By the way. This is not mine. Anybody, everybody, is welcome to refine the design, add links and things--running-related links would be a good start.

Gareth