Runningmonkeys

Sunday, here in Ibaraki Prefecture, was the day of the Around Lake Kasumigaura Cycling event.  It was a 90 kilometre (which turned out to be 83klm) lap around the second biggest lake in Japan.  It was organised by the Japanese Cycling association and was half time trial, half social tour. 

There were about 500 registered entrants as well as a number of other non-official riders all riding the course.  This was a bit of a bummer when we came to the first checkpoint which was at a bird watching hide on the edge of the lake.  It just so happened that about 100 birdwatchers with their telescopes, and cameras came creaping in silently just at the same time that we arrived.  Needless to say the two different passions are fairly incompatible.  Just imagine the conflict when 500 Lycra clad racers meet head to head with a hundred safari suited photo hunters.  We got out of there as fast as possible to avoid the blood shed.

Apart from this everything went relatively smoothly despite the crippling headwinds and torrential rain.

Once again I had no idea what was going on most of the time.  I wasn’t even aware that we had actually started.  I assumed that we were still warming up but we never turned around and so I gathered after about 5 kilometres that this was probably the real thing.

I was linguistically carried by my cycling team as usual.  I rely on them for everything and they never let me down.  If it is important for me to know something, one of them will be there to translate for me.  Without them it would be very hard for me to even find out when a race was on.  This is the difficulty I am having with running events.  I am aware of very few of the 1000’s of races that are going on all of the time, so as a result I am not racing nearly as much as I would like.  I will have to make an effort to do more research for myself now.  It looks like I will be out of the country over the period that I hoped to run my next marathon (Tsukuba Marathon at the end of November).  So I have to get the calendar out and find another soon after.

This is what life is like for me in Japan.  I love it but sometimes I feel like I am missing out on so much because I am still not up to speed with my Japanese.  Every runner has obstacles to overcome.  This is one of mine.