Why I'm feeling upbeat about Tokyo Marathon

I do this heart rate test procedure to track my fitness. I run from my home in Meguro to Komazawa Park, coming into the park at the bottom of the course, and run one lap -- all this at moderate warm up pace. Then on the second lap I accelerate up the hill and get my heart rate up to 149 bpm, that's 80% of my maximum heart rate. By the start of the third lap I should be close to 149 and then I do my best to hold it at 149 for the whole lap. It can drift up and down slightly with the hills, but I always manage to average 149 for the lap. As a measure of fitness, I look at what pace I ran the lap in. This chart shows my records for each time I ran the test since last summer. There are a few gaps there where I didn't do the test, during the summer idle and after Ohtawara. The most interesting thing is that just before Ohtawara, the test gave me a pace of a bit less than 4:15/km. I subsequently ran 3:04 at Ohtawara.

Over the past four weeks I have finally been able to get some niggling injuries under control and ran some very good quality workouts, especially the long hard aerobic workouts in Yoyogi Park on Wednesdays, mostly with Adam. I clocked up 450 km in January; not huge mileage, but solid, and a high proportion of it of good quality. You can see the effect of this period of training on my aerobic system as my pace for the test lap has fallen from 4:20/km at the start of January to just over 4:00/km this week.

What will all this mean for Tokyo? Well, I do feel that I am missing a few long runs due to the injuries hampering me through December, and the interference of the Shibuya Ekiden and Shinjuku Half, so perhaps my endurance won't be as good as it should be. But on the other hand, running at 4:15/km (3-hour marathon pace) should not present any problems for at least 20 to 25 km. After that it is anybody's guess. But I do appear to be in better shape than I was at Ohtawara soI will be a little disappointed if I don't break three hours on February 18.

But regardless of anything, it is really going to be such a buzz just being part of the excitement on the day. Running a good time will be a bonus, but it does now at least seem possible.

Tokyo Times

Here’s a topic that’s perfect for this forum, not least of all because a lot of the people who could be, should be (why aren’t you?) reading this are thinking about it: What will I run at Tokyo? Hoping to unleash a flood of discussion, here’s my take.

My training for Tokyo opened with a determination to run below my 3:11 PB. Until the beginning of this year, I would have said I was edging towards that. A great end of year 30k in Osaka, a better 35k on the first Sunday of January; Wednesday night speed plus distance workouts that exceeded expectations; comfortable tempo runs; consistently rising mileage. Everything was pointing in the right direction and looking good.

But on January 14, I got the unwanted birthday present of the Sunday run from hell. I plodded a lonely course through Yoyogi, watching the pack run away from me, dwindle and disappear, leaving me to run at a pace below that of my Saturday slow (recovery pace) runs. Nothing else I could do! Wednesdays were the same, as both speed and distance slipped away. There was no apparent rhyme or reason for this abrupt and then persistent decline. No pain, no fatigue, no trouble sleeping; and I was sleeping long enough, seven hours a night. I eased off mileage to see if that helped, but it made no apparent difference. Racing a slow leg at Shibuya ekiden only confirmed what I already knew: Bye bye 3:11.

So, here we are. Seventeen days out. I did 98 plus change at Shinjuku half. Way too slow for a 3:11 full marathon. For the moment I’m hoping I’ve settled at this level, that the deterioration will not go on, and that I will manage to finish Tokyo under 3:30. Let us see what we shall see.

Gareth