Tokyo Marathon 2008
On a warm and sunny Sunday morning I lined up with 30,000 other crazy guys and girls waiting for the starting pistol to set us off running at the second official Tokyo marathon. The event was to say the least, excruciating and I still have not, four days later, fully recovered. However, I did manage to complete the race, with an exceptionally bad time of 5:51:00 which was totally down to my knee injuring we forced my to speed-walk the last 17 Km with an embarrassing ‘limping-shuffle’ motion. Anyways, beside my terrible performance I got another couple of surprises during the day-long run.
Firstly, was the amount of participants in the race who were taking photographs, filming video and chatting on their cellphones, whilst running. Now I know this is Japan but it was ridiculous, here we are in a semi-serious long distance race and everyone is busy texting their friends and taking snaps. I was half expecting a pile-up as one guy dressed up as a novelty salary-man, wearing a full suit, shirt and tie and unbearably - shiny work shoes, ran past, holding his briefcase ( a very realistic prop ) in one hand and his phone in the other.
This sort of behavior continued right up towards the end of the race where I over heard one young lady on the phone, probably to her significant other, saying that she was just coming up to the finishing line and that she was sorry but she was probably going to be late for dinner. Like yeh, ‘duh’, your only running a freaking marathon.
Maybe they just don’t take it as seriously here. Wait, who am I kidding, according to the Nikkei newspaper over 97% of the entrants completed the race. That, for those of you who don’t know, is pretty damn high.
After I stumbled across the finishing line and smiled for the cameras, who were kind enough to stay on and film the rest of us long after the pros had packed up and gone home. And after I had got changed and slowly made my way out to the friends and family meeting area, I found out why everyone was so busy with their phones during the race. It turned out that the Yomiuri Shinbun, a national paper, was running ( no pun intended ) a campaign encouraging participants in the race to submit photographs and their current GPS location information. These were then relayed onto the web to give a live view of the race with people’s positions and snaps.
Along with this there was other keitai-related goodness set up to enhance the race.
For instance, how was my wife managing to keep up with me and get to a good spot just in time to cheer a big “Ganbatte!” as I ran past? Well, at regular intervals around the course I ran over big red mats which picked up the signal from the IC chip strapped to the laces of my shoes this told the organizers where I was at any one moment in time. And, as it turned out, they were then relaying this information live to their official website. The also had a mobile version http://r.tokyo42195.org where you can input the entrant’s bib-number and then get a view of how far into the race they have completed. You can check out how badly I did here on the web version of the site http://tokyo42195.org by entering my number – 36513. If your Japanese is up to it you will notice the link to the next keitai service I found.
After the race was finished I checked the keitai site and found a streaming video ( QCIF format – which on my handset opens in the same player as regular 1Seg broadcasts ) which showed me limping across the finishing line in my bright yellow jersey. I have to say the web version of the video was a lot clearer, as it is streaming flash video, but it was nice to be able to access this content on-the-go as well and share it with friends and relatives across Japan.
Well it is now almost a week later and I am still sore, however, it was a fantastic event and I have a permanent record of every painful step of the way which will hopefully be enough to bore my grandkids in the future.