Trying to warm up after the race with a cup of Joe. It's only hot chocolate.

Feeling the pain on the train ride home.

A little post-race celebration with the baby. We don't have Friday's down here in Iwakuni, or anything remotely similar. 2 appetizers and 2 entrees barely filled us up.

A nice pic Becky took of the skyline that shows how nice the weather got after the race was over.

Becky showing off with her medal.

A pic I got from the newspaper showing a small portion of the 30,000+ participants.

42,195 meters / 26.2 miles

Tokyo Marathon 2007

We survived the Tokyo marathon. The event started on Saturday when we dropped off the boys with a very kind neighbor who was willing to watch them, and we dropped off the girls with Yumi-San from church. Before we left we brought over the neighbor boy that would be taking care of Duchess to make sure she was familiar with him and wouldn't kill him when he came over to feed her.

After we got everyone taken care of we left at about 9:30. The trip to Tokyo is about 600 miles and it took a long time because the whether was bad and that slowed down the traffic. We had to check in for the marathon at the Tokyo dome and check in closed at 8:00. We got in line for check in at 7:59. (at least there was no line) I think we were officially the last ones, and we hoped it wasn't an indication of how we would perform in the race. The Tokyo dome was set up for a huge expo which looked pretty cool. They had all kinds of sporting goods vendors, but unfortunately they were packing up by the time we got there. This was the first annual Tokyo marathon. Tokyo is bidding for the 2016 summer olympics, and this was an attempt to show the world that the city could host a world-class competitive event. In my opinion they did a very impressive job, with over 30,000 people running in the marathon, and over 10,000 staff personnel. (they just needed a few more assigned to porta-john cleaning duty)

After we checked in at the Tokyo dome we drove down to Naval base Yokosuka where we would be staying. Yokosuka is normally about an hour from Tokyo, but we got lost and it actually took a couple of hours. We got there around 11:15. We went to sleep and got the wake up call at around 5. Some people we met at church last summer when Luke was born were nice enough to watch him for the day for us. This was a huge favor considering he is a nursing baby and this was the longest he had ever gone without Becky. We were on the train for Tokyo at about 6:15 and were headed for the Tokyo Metropolitan government building where the race started.

The weather was horrible. It was raining badly and was quite cold. The rain did not let up until we were about 30 minutes from the end of the race. Once we started running we stayed warm enough, but we were soaked to the bone. Nobody really seemed to notice how bad the weather really was, at least I didn't hear anyone complaining in English, not even me or Becky. Running through the streets of Tokyo with all of those people and no traffic was an awesome experience. The race route went by the imperial palace, the Ginza district, the Tokyo tower, and many other famous temples and buildings in downtown Tokyo.

We took a pretty comfortable pace and were feeling really good until about the halfway point, which is about as far as we got in our training. After about mile 15 we started looking forward to the race ending. At about mile 18 Becky got some crazy second wind of energy and took off on an extremely fast pace. I was amazed and could hardly keep up with her, of course I didn't say anything at the time. At about mile 21 my legs started cramping up really bad and I simply had to slow down. I tried to walk for a minute, but walking hurt almost worse because my muscles tightened up even worse. At about mile 23 I had to resort to what I would describe as an old man shuffle. I didn't say anything to Becky because she was still going strong, so I just kind of let her drift off ahead of me. Much to both of our surprise she beat me by about 10 minutes. She thought I had blazed ahead at some point though, and long story short, we spent the next hour and a half looking for each other.

Towards the end of the race we both cursed ourselves for being so stupid to volunteer and shell out a lot of money for something so painful. Within 24 hours we were already making plans for the Marine Corps marathon in October, and the London marathon in the spring of '08.