Nakasendo GPX data

As I've mentioned before, a lot of the enquiries I get from readers of this blog are about maps. Usually they're from people who want to walk the Nakasendo but can't find a map of the route in English. The bad news is, as far as I know, there are still no commercially available maps of this kind. But for those of you looking for GPX data, I have some good news.

A couple of years ago, Léonie van den Haak, a Dutch ultrarunner living in Tokyo, ran the length of the Nakasendo. Yes, she ran it. In a time of 5 days 7 hours and 32 minutes. (For comparison, it took me 22 days to walk the same route.) She took along a GPS device, and posted the data she collected here:

https://fastestknowntime.com/route/nakasendo-way-japan

I've had a look at the map displayed at the above site, and apart from a minor deviation in Kumagaya, which meant she didn't run through the Yagibashi Department Store, it looks pretty accurate. So if GPX data for the Nakasendo is what you're after, look no more!

Note: As mentioned in this post, if you have an iPhone, there are also apps for the Tokaido, Nakasendo, Koshu Kaido, Nikko Kaido and Oshu Kaido. All the information about the posttowns and so on is in Japanese, but you should still be able to follow the routes even if you can't read the language. 

Goals

A couple of months ago, feeling especially motivated after reading a book on Neuro-Linguistic Programming, I made a list of my dreams/aims for the next few years. Included in this list under such headings as "Health & Fitness," "Work" and "Writing" are such goals as running the City-to-Surf (an annual 14 km run held here in Christchurch), reducing my cholesterole (I guess those two are kind of related), working more while making sure I keep regular hours and take days off, getting my first novel published, and attending the Melbourne Jazz Festival.

Naturally, one of the headings is "Walking." Under it I wrote three goals: walk the Oshu Kaido, walk Route 16 (the 241 km beltway around Tokyo), and walk the length of Japan (aka The Big One). According to the book, it's important that you not only write down your goals and refer to them regularly, but also that you set dates by which you intend to achieve them. And so next to "Walk the Oshu Kaido" I wrote "May 2017." A few days later I booked my flights to Japan.

All of this is by way of an announcement that in May next year I will be walking the Oshu Kaido, the fifth of the go-kaido, or five old highways of Japan (labelled A on the by-now-familiar map below). Walking all five of these highways has been a kind of unconscious goal of mine for a while now. I don't remember when I came up with the idea exactly, but it was probably after I walked the Nakasendo and was thinking of what to do next.

At just 90 km, the Oshu Kaido is the shortest of the go-kaido. I plan to walk it over three days. As usually, I'll be posting updates on my training up until I leave and reporting on the walk after I get back. Otanoshimi ni!

The all time best running coach

"Give me a hundred kids and I can give you an Olympic champion."

So said New Zealander Arthur Lydiard, once hailed by Runner's World as the "all time best running coach". At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, three Lydiard-coached runners (all of them "ordinary runners", according to Lydiard) won medals. One of these runners, Murray Halberg, hadn't been able to use his left arm since suffering a serious rugby injury as a youth. Halberg won gold in the 5000m. Peter Snell won gold in the 800m at Rome (and golds in the 800m and 1500m at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964). Barry Magee won bronze in the Marathon at Rome.

Lydiard's training philosophy, radical at the time but later emulated by coaches around the world, involved building stamina and endurance in his athletes by having them run 160km a week regardless of their specialist distance. On top of this base training he added phases of specialized training to ensure his athletes were at the peak of readiness for major events like the Olympics.

In the late-1960s Lydiard moved to Finland where he sparked a renaissance in Finnish distance running. But his influence continued to be felt in New Zealand, where the great middle-distance runners of the 1970s, Rod Dixon, John Walker and Dick Quax, benefited from his training legacy.

Lydiard is also credited with sparking the jogging boom of the 1960s and 70s by encouraging people to run to stay fit. Prior to this, "fun runs" and mass-start marathons were non-existent. Marathons were the preserve of a special breed of athlete, "nut-cases," Lydiard called them.

A feature of the mass-start marathons of today is the presence of large numbers of older runners. Says Garth Gilmour in the foreword to Lydiard's Distance Training for Masters:

[T]he bulk of those huge fields have always been masters runners. Many began as keep-fit joggers who became so fit that the dormant instinct to compete and to reach for personal goals roared back into action. For people learning and succeeding to run well, it became a logical challenge to complete a 10-kilometres fun run or race, then a half-marathon and then that ultimate, a full marathon, to see how far and how fast they could go. The original intention, merely to run regularly for their health's sake, escalated into today's mass-start marathons all around the globe.

A plodder

According to New Zealand film director Michael Bennett, who last year completed the New York Marathon, there are so many similarities between film-making and running it's ridiculous.

"You have to be so utterly committed to both. I've got no talent as a runner. I'm only a plodder. The only thing I bring to running is commitment, focus and bloody-minded determination, and whatever talent I have as a film-maker is based around those same three things."

Yeah, that's me. A plodder.

Medium-term goal: Christchurch City 2 Surf, 27 March 2011.

Due back

Christchurch City Libraries
Library name: Central Library
User ID: ***101100

Title: Distance training for masters
Author: Lydiard, Arthur, 1917-2004
Date charged: 19/11/2010
Date due: 17/12/2010

Title: Marathon runner's handbook
Author: Fordyce, Bruce, 1955-
Date charged: 19/11/2010
Date due: 17/12/2010

Rod Dixon

A youthful-looking Rod Dixon popped up on the television the other day. Of the three great New Zealand middle-distance runners of the 1970s (John Walker and Dick Quax were the other two), Dixon was my favourite. Walker may have outshone him with his world record in the mile and Olympic gold in the 1500 metres, but Dixon was an extremely versatile athlete, posting world class times in everything from the 1500 metres through to the marathon.

Perhaps Dixon's greatest single achievement was winning the New York City Marathon in 1983. I remember watching this race live on television. It had what has been described as one of the most dramatic finishes the event has ever seen, with Dixon overtaking Geoff Smith of England in the final kilometre through Central Park to win by eight seconds in what was then the tenth fastest time for the marathon.

Here's a nice article about Dixon. And below is a recent video of Dixon talking about his New York City Marathon win with clips of the race. The scene at the end with Dixon raising his hands in the air while Smith collapses over the finishing line says it all.

The Sakura-michi International Nature Run

If you're a long-time reader, you may recall that I gave up running around eighteen months ago (just as I was starting to really enjoy it) after my knees started playing up. Every so often I get the urge to start running again. I got the urge again a couple of nights ago while watching a program on Japanese TV about the Sakura-michi International Nature Run.


The Sakura-michi International Nature Run is a 250km ultramarathon that follows a course from Nagoya on the Pacific Ocean side of the main Japanese island of Honshu to Kanazawa on the Japan Sea side. It was established to honor the memory of Sato Ryoji, a bus conductor who worked on this route and dreamed of planting cherry trees along its entire length. He managed to plant some 2000 trees in his spare time before dying at the age of 47.

The program focused on two runners, a man and a woman, both of whom only started running in their thirties. The woman, Kuwahara Akie, was also very sick in her teens, a good deal of which she spent in hospital. Both runners finished well within the cut off time of 36 hours. To put their achievements in perspective, they ran in under 36 hours further than the distance I intend to cover in ten days when I walk the Koshu Kaido.

Watching the program, one thing that struck me was that the event seemed less like a race and more like a social occasion for many of the runners, members of an elite club who get pleasure from putting their bodies through absolute hell, battling themselves to finish and improve on their previous times rather than their opponents.

Only 100 runners - 80 from Japan and 20 from overseas - are chosen to compete each year. The entry fee is 45,000 yen.

Distance walked since last post: 3km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 83.9km
Days left until departure: 74

The running fool is dead

So, what have I been doing post Nakasendo? Not running a marathon, that's for sure. For a while I did run pretty seriously. This included taking part in a series of organized 5-km "fun runs" at Hagley Park in early 2008, over the course of which I steadily improved my time, finishing up with a not discreditable (for a newbie veteran, that is) 27 minutes 33 seconds. Here's me surging towards the finishing line just ahead of a woman and her dog.


I downloaded a training schedule for people preparing to run their first marathon and was running nearly every day. But as I increased my workload to the point where I was doing 10-km runs once or twice a week, my knees started getting sore, so sore that they kept me awake at night, and I reluctantly concluded that I wouldn't be able to run a marathon. I packed away my singlets and running shorts and bought some new walking shoes (waterproof Keens, similar to the ones Erik wore when we walked the Nakasendo together).

And so in the middle of last year I switched to Plan B and bought a walking map of the Tokaido. I plan to walk it in May-June this year, but as usual there are several obstacles in my way. Principal among these is yet another health issue. I recently found out that the "unsightly bright red scab-like thing on the side of my nose" I referred to in October 2007 is in fact a basal cell carcinoma. A dermatologist has reassured me that it's no threat to my health, but I need to have it excised. I don’t know when this will be. I'm not even sure how long the waiting list for this kind of surgery is at the moment. Hopefully I can get it done and recuperate before 18 May, which is my preferred departure date.

For my next trick...

I'd quite like to run a marathon. I started running again soon after I got back from Japan in November last year, and have got back to the point where I was a couple of years ago (before injury persuaded me to give up running and take up walking) where I can run 5-6km without any difficulty. Barring further injury, I reckon I should be able to run a marathon in a year or so.

My goal is the Tokyo Marathon in February 2009. Unfortunately this is quite a popular marathon, so popular that they hold a lottery to determine which of the applicants get to run. They had just over 130,00 applicants for this year's marathon, with just 25,000 of these getting to start. So if I don't get selected I'll try the Gold Coast Airport Marathon instead. That would be in July 2009. If injury forces me to give up the idea of a marathon altogether, I'll bail out and do something easier, like walking the Tokaido.