Steve - 6.5

Its a funny coincidence that the track club (called Namban Rengo, means Barbarian Horde in Japanese) I was attending in Shibuya tonight is also on Wednesday night and that one of the guys from my club in Pasadena was also here tonight! He lived in a Japan for a long time 10 years ago or so, and was also visiting Japan.

I had talked with one of the leaders of the club, Juergen, online a few times and he was really cool. He is a German guy that has lived in Japan for 21 years. He pretty much can speak to anyone in the world because he knows so many languages. Every last Wednesday of the month the club does a 5k time trial. I decided I wanted to run a tempo 5k around 20 minutes. A bit ambitious to run that pace in a tempo effort, but I thought it was not unreasonable. Typically during these workouts, the track is absolutely jammed with people from all kinds of clubs and school teams. Wednesday is the only day the track is open to the public. Fortunately it wasnt too crowded because it was a school break or something. Generally there are race walkers and stuff in lane 1 and its a mess.

About 40 of us lined up for the trial. The pace was blazing for the first 200 and I settled in in the middle of the pack. I wanted to keep a hard pace without pushing too hard. I had to move into lane 2 several times to pass slower runners from other groups, but it didnt cost me too much time. I ran roughly even 400 splits and I was lapped by some of the faster runners with about 500 meters to go. I think some of the really fast guys lapped me with about 700 to go. When I hit the final turn, I felt someone pushing to catch me so I just made sure this clown didnt beat me to the finish. It was a nice controlled surge, not a sprint. Final time was 20:28. It was a good solid effort and I felt good when I finished. I think I could have run maybe 45-60 seconds faster if I had pushed it, but who knows.

2.3 mi wu in 21:00
5000m time trial in 20:28 (6:34, 6:36, 6:34, :44)
1.1 mi in 11:45 cd