The 2024 Tokyo Marathon and my second Six-Star Medal in one year
I have mentioned my theory that sometimes I crash during marathons because, unbidden, my brain reins in my body when it thinks I am on the verge of doing damage. Thus, the price of being able to run consecutive races with only a few weeks, or less, of recovery time between them is that nearly all of them are rather slow.
To be clear, I think my brain holds some capability in reserve. Maybe it thinks I’ve got another big run coming up or something.
Turns out, I am not the first to propose that theory and, in fact, it has been extensively studied. It is called the “central governor” and I have been reading about it in Alex Hutchinson’s intriguing book Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. Just as I thought — the autonomic nervous system, which pertains to involuntary physiologic functions, works in the background to limit threats to the body both environmental and self-imposed.
I think that my central governor is overzealous. I’m willing to risk some bodily damage for the sake of a faster marathon. Endure devotes many pages to strategies that have been explored for hacking the central governor with the intent of extending an athlete’s performance.
That is my opportunity — to outwit my autonomic nervous system. I mean, hell, it’s already compromised by Parkinson’s disease. Literally, it is not playing with a full deck. I can take this guy.
Unfortunately, this revelation comes too late to influence my performance in the 2024 Tokyo Marathon.
Travel to and around Tokyo has changed since coming here for the 2023 marathon. A year ago, Japan was just beginning to let foreigners in after their pandemic blockade. Cumbersome health and safety checks were in place causing confusion and bottlenecks at every step — customs, the Marathon Expo, the start area, and on the course.
All that has been lifted now and moving about Tokyo and the marathon venues was a breeze.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the ubiquity of great food in unlikely (from an American perspective) places. I ate very well from the fare — sushi, ramen, japanese-style fried chicken, etc. — at convenience stores like 7–11 and in the basements of large department stores.
I arrived in Tokyo Wednesday evening. The plan for Thursday was to get my race packet at the Expo and then meet up with Mai Takeuchi. Mai is a program manager for a start-up accelerator based in Japan that has offices and nascent startups in the US. I’ve been helping on an informal basis one of the startups involved with Parkinson’s-related wearable health management devices.
Last year the Expo had strict social distancing rules in place. For example, all visitor traffic was forced to follow the direction indicated by arrows painted on the floor. I tried to hop over some barricades and got busted.
This year it was just like any other Expo. No security and a lot of polite, friendly, helpful volunteers.
Mai also entered the marathon. As it was her first, she was expecting to be running slowly. She was concerned that she might not make it to some of the early checkpoints in time and get swept off the course. She also had an ankle injury and asked several of the people managing the booths for advice on how to deal with the injury. They sold her some high-protein food products.
At lunch, Mai told me a little of her story. She grew up in Japan and went to university there. But there aren’t many opportunities for women with ambition in Japan so in the midst of the pandemic she went to Babson College to get her MBA. She didn’t know any English at the time. Somehow she pulled it off, got her degree, and found a job in Silicon Valley (in Palo Alto, not far from where my wife and I raised our family). Now she is running her first maration in Tokyo. I told her by text that she is a badass but I don’t think that word translated well.
I had the whole day Friday available for rest and sight-seeing. Mai gave me some suggestions. Hence, I filled that time with a visit to the teamLab Planets exhibit and wandering about the Shinjuku area.
teamLab Planets is an immersive, interactive experience wherein visitors are treated to a series of rooms that feature knee-deep water with images of goldfish swimming about one’s feet, adult-sized inflated spheres rolling about, a forest of colorfully lighted glass rods suspended from the ceiling, and a dizzying array of flying objects projected onto the domed walls and ceiling.
After teamLabs and while waiting for a bus to Shinjuku, I chatted with Daniel and Lauren Fernandez. They were both running on Sunday and planned to leave their son, Dash, with a local nanny during the race. Daniel and Lauren have a social media presence as Wander Local. They travel about in an Airstream trailer and post about their adventures. They are both speedy runners but with Lauren three months pregnant they planned to take the race slowly. Daniel was expecting to record the whole event on his phone.
We got to talking about the Boston Marathon and the long cutoff time (5 min 39 sec) for the 2024 race. I mentioned that I blogged an analysis that predicts a much longer cutoff time in 2025. To my surprise and delight, Daniel said that he read that post and it influenced him to intensify his training. That’s the first time I came across a rando who read something of mine. To be sure, that post has had far more views than anything else I have written. At a gathering of marathon runners, odds are that I would meet someone who has see it. Still, chancing into someone who had gave me chills.
Afterwards, I strolled about in the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden hoping for an early glimpse of cherry blossoms. But I was a week or two early for them. At the height of blossom season it gets very crowded and it is best to book a reservation for entry. Without any blossoms to show, there were just a few visitors, many of them marathoners enjoying the exquisitely tended landscape as I was.
I did a short shakeout run earlier in the week and on Saturday decided to join one of several local parkruns. Parkruns are free 5K (3.1 miles) community events for walkers and runners that take place every Saturday morning at more than 2,000 locations in 22 countries across five continents. Some are in the US but they are not as popular as elsewhere in the world. Often, participants go for volume and are celebrated when their total number of parkruns cross into the hundreds and thousands. The one in Tokyo would be my second.
I first heard about parkrun in the UK when a friend, Louise Dunn-Massey, suggested I join her at one in Worcester near her home. We were visiting with her and her husband, Steve, after last year’s London Marathon. It was fun — informal, cheerful, supportive, and a nice way to meet other runners.
I chose the Urayasushi sogo koen parkrun, a 50 minute subway and bus ride from my hotel. The course was along the harbor waterfront — cold and very windy. After the run, many of us, still shivering, went to a nearby coffee shop to warm up and chat.
Many of the runners were eager for intel on the other Majors as they were still short of achieving Six-Star status. I spoke with Ian Ruddick from Newcastle, who, after Tokyo, still needs to get Boston to complete his WMM journey. Boston is hard to get into and with the new trend towards higher cutoff times it is getting harder. But Ian is a fleet runner and missed a BQ in Tokyo by only 72 seconds; with some more work and a carefully chosen qualifier race he should be able to manage it.
I spent the remainder of the day resting up and preparing for Sunday’s race. Though it was cold Saturday, the forecast for the race was promising — low 40’s. That would suit me just as long as it didn’t warm up too much during the race.
Meaning, the temperature was good for running. It was not so good for waiting to run. I spent a lot of time shivering while I waited for the start.
Last year the starting area was congested. Moving around was difficult and the wait for the toilets was more than 30 minutes. Not ideal because most runners take at least two pre-race trips to the toilet. Tokyo adapted for this year’s race by increasing the number of porta potties, improving the queue strategy, and relying on a sizable number of male-specific urinals. These adjustments worked extremely well; I had time for three trips to the loo.
Last year, I noticed that the spectators lining the course were subdued compared to the throngs at the other Majors I have raced in. This year was different, though. The crowds seemed just as excited as at any other major.
At one point, I think about halfway, one runner was getting a lot of attention from fans. He waved, high-fived, and chatted with some spectators while a videographer tracked his every move. I bombed his video and then asked who he was. He just said, “soccer player”. Apparently a very popular one. But I didn’t get his name at the time and my google sleuthing has come up empty. I was hoping to see his video somewhere on line with me in it but no such luck.
My race was a virtual copy of last year’s Tokyo Marathon. I finished in 4:15:24, a mere 74 seconds faster than last year. Like last year, the morning started cool, low 40’s, then warmed up to 54 by the end of the race. That should have been fine for me but for some reason my central governor decided that 54 was too warm and in both races it executed crash protocol at about 17 miles in.
In an earlier post, I posited that my marathon crashes could be caused by inadequate sodium replenishment. I lose a lot of sodium in my sweat. However, during the race I took one SaltStick capsule (215 mg Na) each mile as per my plan and in accordance with my hydration meter sweat data. Hence, this time at least, it wasn’t about the sodium. I had no trouble with cramps during the race and afterwards so, in that respect, the SaltStick capsules worked well.
I wore my new HOKA Cielo X1 carbon-plated shoes, which showed some moments of effortless speed in some training runs. In fact, though my overall mile pace was 9:45, I pushed it on miles 12, 13, 15, and 16 to average 8:33 on those four miles.
Those miles were immediately before the crash — maybe that spurt of intensity wiped me out. I don’t know. The point is, I can get good speed out of these shoes under the right circumstances.
Nonetheless, I did earn my second WMM Six-Star Medal. The date of the race was March 3, 2024. I earned my first Six-Star Medal in Tokyo on March 5, 2023. Hence, both of them were awarded over a span of 364 days. Two Six-Star Medals in less than a year’s time. Cool!
There may have been others repeating as well. Due to the pandemic, the 2020 race was restricted to only elite runners, it was canceled in 2021, and in 2022 it was restricted to only Japanese residents. The backlog for runners seeking their sixth star in Tokyo was huge in 2023. The 3000+ who earned the Six Star Medal in 2023 set a Guinness World Record for six star finishers in a single race. But I heard that Tokyo 2024 was not far behind with 2600+ six star finishers.
I am based in Seattle and my local running store is West Seattle Runner. Through social media some of us who frequent the store realized that five locals were running that day. We attempted to get all of us together for a photo but with the chaos at the finish and with varying finish times only three of us found each other: myself, Sarang Shamshery, and Desmond Lee (photo below). We hope to get the whole crew together for a complete photo once we are all back in Seattle.
Next up is the Boston Marathon on April 15. That gives me five more weeks to spar with my central governor, probe its weaknesses, and plan a strategy to overcome it. Should be fun.
