Run 20: This is why runners are the way they are
Normally, you'd go home.
Rain.
Muddy ground.
Soaked shoes.
Yet, runners still line up.
The Kawasaki Monthly Race is held at the Furuichiba Athletics Stadium along the Tama River, near Shin-Kawasaki.
The course is mostly flat, with a mix of paved and unpaved sections.
The path is wide and easy to run on, even as a cycling road.
🔳Perfect for brick workouts
There are baseball fields, soccer fields, and riverside golf courses nearby, and the parking is excellent.
There is a parking lot near Gas Bridge, making it a convenient location to combine with bike training compared to other monthly race venues in Kanagawa Prefecture.
🔳Even though I was all set and ready to go
Actually, I was planning to do a brick workout on a day like this.
I even loaded my bike, hoping it would clear up after the typhoon passed.
But the reality was rain.
It's not impossible to ride a road bike.
However, road bike tires don't have drainage grooves like car tires.
Cleaning and lubricating wet components is quite a hassle.
Runners will run in the rain, but if you get a road bike wet, the cleanup is a nightmare.
This time, reason won.
🔳But runners are a different breed
Normally, you wouldn't run.
Going out of your way to the riverbed on a rainy day,
pinning on a bib,
and lining up at the start line.
It's not normal.
I wrote the other day about how I went to pick up my car after its inspection while wearing a trash bag.
I think you can understand from today's scene that this is by no means an unusual behavior.
Basically, races aren't canceled unless there's heavy snow, a direct typhoon hit, or a pandemic.
In this world, running in the rain is the norm.
🔳Still, it's tough
Mesh shoes soak up water without hesitation.
Even my socks are soaked.
Just having heavy feet makes a huge difference in how tired you feel.
The weather forecast said it would get worse in the second half, so I decided to participate in the:
1km
3km
5km
races.
Starting from the very back
5km from the back challenge.
The result was
24 minutes 06 seconds
44th place / 114 people
With poor conditions and fatigue, I couldn't push it to the end.
Well, it is raining, after all.
At this point, my monthly mileage was 196km.
4km to go until 200km.
In the end, I decided to do some extra practice.
The last 800m was two laps of the track, timed with the 10km mass start.
With this, I reached 200km for the month.
A weekend where the rain threw off my plans.
I couldn't ride my bike.
My shoes got soaked.
Even so, I went out of my way to run in the rain,
and finished everything I had to do.
Seriously.
This is why runners are the way they are.
#Running
#Marathon
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#KawasakiMonthly
#KawasakiMonthly
#RainRun
#NIKE
#NRC
#200kmPerMonth