Shonan Fujisawa City Marathon (2023)
Race report 6
Background
“How far is your marathon?” People with no clue about races ask this question a lot. It’s become a bit of a running joke at this point…Ok, I’ll stop with the attempts at comedy (for now).
The word マラソン (marason) is a Japanese loan word that seems to mean running events of any distance. I’ve written reports on the 2022 and 2023 Shonan International Marathon, which is the largest running event in the Shonan area of Kanagawa prefecture (and is in fact a full marathon). There is however another, shorter, more local event called the Shonan Fujisawa City Marathon, which is a 10 mile run, both starting and ending at Enoshima.
The map below shows the course. You begin at Enoshima, run down the coast to point A, turn around and run back down to point B, turn around again and run to point C, run back down towards point D, and then back to the island to cross the finish line.
Race preparation
From January 1st 2023 I ran 10km every day. I did exactly zero tapering before the race and ended up getting second place in a parkrun the day before the event (while promising myself I would take it easy). I clearly hadn’t done any sort of special preparation beyond not having an evening run the day before the race. (That put my January distance total to about 205 km on January 21st).
Since the event is local to me I didn’t need to get up crazy early. I woke up about 20 minutes earlier than I usually do, had two cups of coffee and about 400 calories of Calorie Mate blocks, then I ran to the train station (just over a 1km effort).
The morning of the race was pretty chilly (3°C). I knew once I got going I would be fine but I did make sure to pack gloves that day.
I arrived in good time at the train station and walked over to the island. You could see a lot of people taking the obligatory photo of the start line as they walked towards the health check point, then we were funneled into the changing zone and back drop off. There were thousands of people and probably not enough toilets for everyone, but I did manage to take a quick restroom break before standing in the C block area where I was going to run.
The race was divided into blocks where the A block had elite runners (aiming to run each kilometer within 3:30), the B block with the sub-elites (4:00/km), my block (C) with the ‘pretty quick but nothing to write home about’ people (5:00/km), and then several other blocks with progressively slower target times. The C block was HUGE. If I were to change one thing about this race I would set the C block to be within 4:30/km and the D block within 5:00/km because once the race got going it was obvious that there was a lot of variation in the C block.
I bumped into a parkrun friend at the beginning of the race and once 8:30 rolled around and the race officially started I decided to run with him for a while and have a chat. The chat mainly centered around the fact that neither of us were going to take this race too seriously and that we were seeing it as a fun run. Another friend of mine passed me, and after that I decided I was going to step up the speed a bit and just go for it. (Because even though I wasn’t taking it too seriously I also didn’t want to come in last out of my parkrun group).
I was running at quite a comfortable pace but passing many people as I went. There wasn’t a point of the race where I wasn’t weaving around and passing people. This problem was impacted further by the fact that I ended up wasting a few minutes taking a quick bathroom break after the first turnaround point. (That ended up costing me about 2-3 minutes and I ended up having to take over the same few hundred people again).
Just to the east of point C on the map a friend of mine was cheering and taking pictures. I ended up passing him several times on this run and it was great to have people I knew in the crowd cheering. (I included a picture my friend took below).
In general there were many people cheering at the sidelines. It was like the whole town came out for the event. There were a lot of people wearing those inflatable dinosaur costumes too (I laugh every time I see those).
When running towards the B turnaround point I could see some of what I thought were the elite runners coming up the other side to the C turning point. Then I looked at their numbers and realized that these were the quicker guys in the B group and that the A group was probably almost finished. Clearly there was a big difference in the levels.
I turned around at the B point then had a clear shot until I got to the C turnaround point but after that my pace ended up slowing down. I still had plenty of energy but after the C turnaround point I ended up meeting up with a block of people heading towards the B turnaround point who were moving at a slower pace (because the race loops over around several times you end up having to run in the same areas more than once). I had passed so many people earlier that the road was quite open but from C onwards it felt like it was the beginning of the race again.
By the time I ended up getting clear of the crowd the road was completely open with almost a single line of runners heading towards the finish line. I passed as many people as I could coming towards the finish line and after crossing I stopped my watch with a final distance of 16.1 km completed in 1:10:57. I still had plenty of energy in the tank and could have quite happily gone on for much longer but that was the race so I headed to get my gear.
When it came time to hand the race chip in there was a line of boxes with T-shirt designs above them. Whichever T-shirt design you liked the best was where you dropped your race chip and the design with the most chips would win the popularity contest. What a good idea.
After picking up my drop bag and high fiving a bunch of volunteers I took a few more pictures and headed home. There were still a lot of people left to cross the finish line, (many of whom were in costumes) so I managed to enjoy a bit of spectating on my way back to the train station. The guy in the bunny suit is my absolute hero (2023 was a rabbit year).
I downloaded my race certificate to get my official chip time of 1 hour 10 minutes and 53 seconds. I was in 547th place in total (out of over 5053) and 126th in my division (out of 1394 men who live in Fujisawa). I am very happy with that result. I also got PBs for my 10k, 15k and 10 mile times on Strava so it was a very successful day all around.
Final thoughts
The Shonan Fujisawa City Marathon was a fun event and definitely one I want to take more seriously next time I try it in 2024. I’m hoping to enter the B block next time so I won’t need to weave around as many people. I should also probably avoid the coffees so I don’t end up needing to run off the course and take a restroom break next time.
Thank you very much for reading. I hope you enjoyed this “marathon” report.
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Osu!
Anthony
Well done chap 🙂👍