The Northern Horse Park Marathon Event

The title says it all really. Another month another marathon event that doesn't actually involve running a marathon. In my case it was half a marathon while for Sanae and Cian it was, ahem, 2.5 kilometres. But they were a long 2.5 kilometres.
The marathon-that-wasn't was held in a large stud farm just a short gallop down the road from Chitose airport. Unlike the Date half marathon the numbers participating tend to be considerable smaller (in the hundreds rather than the thousands) and the food you are supplied with after the race is exceedingly tasty (even if Sanae did end up in hospital on the Monday, but more of that later).
Tired of Daddy stealing all the athletic glory, Mammy and the young fella decided to "go for gold!" and enter the two and a half thousand metre sprint, sorry, marathon race. This in turn gave rise to bouts (three) of intense training over the past month when some of the runs stretched to almost 20 minutes.
Yes, 20 minutes. The Clare hurlers wouldn't push themselves as hard.
So Sunday rolled around and we rolled out of bed at the ungodly hour of 6:00am to get to the race. Then again this is Japan and they do ungodly quite well.
Cian and Sanae were off at 9:00am while Daddy didn't unleash his hairy legged magnificence until eleven o'clock.
Cian and Sanae were finished by 9:17am. Which meant (a) they had obviously imbibed some of the same stuff that the trainer Al Zarooni was wetting the horses oats with back home; and (b) Daddy had to sit and twiddle his thumbs for an hour a half. Which I duly did albeit in my car as it was fecking freezing out. There was an unholy wind blowing, listen to me, a full gale howling across the Park, picking up some of the recently foaled foals (?) and hurling them into the tree tops. Where the crows pecked them to death while the thunder rumbled.
Gothic were the conditions.
Eleven finally rolls around and we are off. Or everyone else is. Daddy has taken shelter from the wind in a stable and whilst burnishing my horse whispering technique ("Listen Neddy, stay away from Tesco, you hear me. Stay away from Tesco, particularly the meat section"), miss the sound of the starters pistol. So I am the last across the starting line.
That wind, though. Blowing mean and hard. For the first 5km though it's at our backs so some of the smaller, lighter Japanese runners find themselves being whooshed down the road. However, we then u-turn around and run smack into it for the next 11 kilometres. Around the 8km mark I begin to think I am hallucinating. Up ahead of me there is a runner wearing a green and gold top which looks remarkably like the Kerry jersey.
I get a bit closer.
It is a Kerry jersey!
WTgoodF?!
I hammer away for a couple of minutes and finally catch up with this far flung exile from the Kingdom. Turns out to be Mick from Ballybunnion who I played football with last summer and works on the Irish owned stud farm down Hidaka way. I had met him earlier this year at the Ambassador's reception but I don't think either of us expected to cross paths close on 9km into a half marathon on a windy as feck Sunday in Chitose. We chat for a few minutes, or rather splutter out a few gasped words in between our panting before I put the afterburners on I disappear off into the distance. Damned if I am going to shame my Causeway ancestors by finishing behind a Ballybunnion man.
The wind continues to blow.
After an hour and fifty four minutes I finally cross the finish line, exactly 27 seconds slower than my time in the Date half marathon. This is uncanny. Spooky even. Last year my time difference between the two events was 23 seconds. Henceforth I will now be known as the Metronome Man.
The post race feed is as good as I remembered with steak fillets, curry rice, ham steaks, steaming bowls of ramen and a very nice man with a barrel on his back dispensing free beer to all and sundry. Cian and me want to take the nice man home but Mammy says no.
Unfortunately, for Sanae the post race meal proved too rich for her gall bladder free body and she spent Sunday night in a prolonged intimate embrace with the toilet before spending a rather anxious Monday down at the local hospital wondering if her pancreatitis had flared up again. (She reckons the steak fillets were sourced from Tesco).
Cian on the other hand was splendidly impressed with his own athletic prowess. Immediately after the race he reckoned had passed "at least 10" other runners. By Sunday evening that had increased to 20 and by Monday morning he estimated he had easily sped by 50 people. Next up for Cian Gebrselassie Takahashi Gaynor is the Forest Kozan Green Race in September though he plans to get in some high altitude training around Athgoe hill this summer.

Binman Brian

Yesterday was an absolute cracker; sunshine, blue skies, 23 degrees and a gentle onshore breeze to take the edge off the unseasonal heat. Unfortunately I couldn't enjoy the day as I was too busy with the Chonaikai.
Ahh the Chonaika. Sounds a bit like the name of a particularly fierce band of Aleutian inuits who used to pillage and plunder their way across northern Japan, but the truth is a bit more prosaic. The Chonaikai is in fact the local resident's association and they are a kind of civic version of the Corleone family. They represent power and you do, not, ever, refuse the Chonaikai. So when they came a calling last week with an offer I couldn't refuse, I didn't. Which meant Sunday morning found me scouring the backstreets of Tenjin-cho for paper and cardboard rubbish of all sorts.
The Chonaikai organize such collections every two months and they collect a fair amount of paper - 4 truck loads in fact, which they take to the recycle center and get paid for. And after that the financial trail runs cold. I'm not sure how much money they get and what they do with it, but it is surely more than the few hundred yen it cost for the bottles of Pocari Sweat we got at the end of the morning.
There were though a number of positives to participating:
(a) Me and my family didn't get "whacked" for not helping;
(b) I got to visit parts of Tenjin-cho I didn't even know existed. Who knew there is a small dam only half a kilometre from our front door with apparently, very good trout fishing?
(c) Despite my 44+ years I got called the Japanese equivalent of "young fella" all morning

Golden Week

Has come around again but this year we don't have such an extended period of holidays. Japan is fairly rigid when it comes to public holidays. If the holiday falls on a Sunday then it is carried over to the Monday, but if should occur on a Saturday, well, enjoy 'your day off' on what is otherwise considered a work day. The other vexing issue with public holidays is that they tend to be clumped together. Although Japan has more public holidays in the calendar year than Ireland (15 as opposed to 9), they are not spread throughout the year. We have two each in January, September, and November, with Golden week accounting for four in the space of seven days. Spreading these out a bit more, say one every month with the remainder bundled together either at New Year's or August, would be a bit more relaxing, ne?
Well, alright 15 days off are better than 9 so less of the whining. 
Anyway, we have had a couple of days off so on Saturday we went to Lake Utonai where a bitter wind was blowing across the water and Spring was refusing to arrive until the place warmed up a little more. So for lack of green things to snap I present to you my photo essay "Tree Bark - the untold story".

 

After meditating on nature and the soul stirring appeal of all things arboreal, we went shopping because Mammy isn't quite taken with all this tree-hugging shite. It was raining at the shopping mall so Cian and myself took shelter in the Lego store while Sanae ran amok with her credit card. And gosh and darn it if we didn't find a must have helicopter. And we had it. Plus we didn't get home until late which meant Cian could subsequently boast to his friends how he didn't go to bed until after 10:00pm!

Sunday we went rock fishing! Yes!! Where we caught: a starfish, a shrimp, some aggressive hermit crabs, a more chilled out crab, a sea snail, a mussel, some baby fish, and a dollop of seaweed. Much to Mammy's disappointment Cian operates a 'catch and release' policy so she couldn't snack on them in the car on the way home.

 On Monday the wind blew hard and we didn't feel like going anywhere in particular. Some days are just like that.
Tuesday found us up in Forest Kozan, our first trip this year for a very relaxed afternoon of ambling around catching tadpoles, admiring cherry blossoms and enjoying the sort of transcendental peace only nature can bestow.
And then it was back to school and work today and the peace transcended and reality reasserted its vulgar self. And no more holidays until August.

Spring?

Spring or what in Japanese they call 'Spring'

The seasons seemed to have accelerated this year, skipping a couple of gears from a wintery first to a full on summery fifth. Last night was the first time we have had rain since April 9th having enjoyed day after day of sunshine. Last weekend saw temperatures hit 23 with beautiful blue skies and warm, dry winds. Today saw normal service resumed with stiff onshore breeze keeping things a tad more chilly and necessitating a quick blast of the central heating this evening (us middle-agers like our creature comforts). Anyway the flip side to all this good weather is that I have purposefully neglected this blog. After five months of winter sunshine and 23 degrees is going to have me back in the water reacquainting myself with the waves and my surf 'brahs'. And then there is the garden, that foot wide strip of foliage that runs along only two sides of the house but takes a surprising amount of time to weed and tidy up.
Oh, and there was the 21km jog around Date which I, ahem, completed in a time of 1:54, some, ahem, 13 minutes slower than last year. But those extra 780 seconds can be chalked up to hard earned wisdom. Last year after Date I ran another half marathon in May in almost the exact same time (22 seconds separated them), which was an incredibly stupid thing to have done so early in the season. By the middle of June I had torn the achilles tendon in my right foot, by August the left foot, all of  which left me hobbling through the Gaelforce West race and having to forego all the events I had planned for the autumn.
Not this year. Slow and steady is the approach peaking on top of Croagh Patrick on the third weekend of August.

The post-Date victory parade

"The Memuro Mucker" as she's called round these parts

Twice on Saturday, yes twice! That's how good the weather was.

Got himself a new set of wheels.