Training

Yes,

We've begun training.

The kendojo (kendo training room) of the local municipal health and sports center is now serving the purposes of our training room.

The ladies next door were very nice, as they didn't let our mad stomping disturb their very nice and civilised ping-pong game. They were even kind enough to pop in their heads into the room and show a very excited and curios face as they witnessed a pair a human beings walking in very strange ways to the sound of music that even to Japanese ears sounds a bit odd.

Their gracious comment was something along the lines of: "That looks like it hurts", or more accurately something like "That makes my knees hurt just by looking at it".

We thanked them for being our spontaneous audience and carried on with our very painful looking training.

The next day we did experience some pain, the kind that you get the day after you climbed a tall building after having run half the city to get there.

And tomorrow we'll do it all over again.

10 K

On Sunday May 10th (Happy Mother's day!!!) both of us ran the 10K Hamanako marathon.

Needless to say, being so busy with our part-time jobs we have only been able to train sporadically, but Sunday marked the beginning of a more concentrated stage of training. With two months to go before the Toga summer arts program, we used the marathon as an opportunity to challenge ourselves and complete a clear goal.

We couldn't really run the days previous to the race because we had somewhat of a typhoon during the "golden week" (May 2-6) so without all the preparation we would've liked, the race was a little rough. We came in a bit over our goal time of 60 minutes, (our time was 1 hour and 6 minutes). But fortunately we didn't experience any terrible pains the day after or even today.

Also, that evening we ate some very delicious sushi. (sorry, forgot to take a picture!).