Shonan Fujisawa City Marathon (2024)
Race report 7
Background
Keeping up with race reports in hard work. I’ve written a report for every race that I’ve run but they are not all up on Substack yet. Not only that but I keep running more races and generating more work for myself.
Anyway, in 2023 I ran the 13th 湘南藤沢市民マラソン (Shonan Fujisawa Shimin Marason : Shonan Fujisawa City Marathon), and I wrote a report on that one. That can be found here if you want the full details.
Briefly, this is a 10 mile “marathon” in the Fujisawa area starting at Enoshima, running down the coast towards Chigasaki (A), running back to Enoshima (B), running back again towards Chikasaki, turning around part way (C), then heading back to Enoshima after running around a cone at point D.
In 2023 I ran the event in 1:10:53 seconds (1:10:22 net time). My plan for 2024 was to simply beat my time in 2023…but there were a few issues.
Race preparation
I started 2024 in Thailand in an area where it wasn’t east to run. I still got in about 100 km in the first half of the month, and kept the momentum going when I got back to Japan. The adjustment from running in the heat to running in the cold was quite rough, but was doable.
A few days before the event I was doing my usual training runs when suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my left knee. I wasn’t doing anything unnatural at the time. My leg just decided to shut down. I decided to spend a few days without doing any sort of intense running before the event with the hope that it would go away. But even the day before the race I was in pretty bad shape.
My goal for this race changed from beating last years time to simply completing the run. I was ready to limp the whole 10 miles if I needed to.
Race Day!
On the morning of the race my leg didn’t feel too bad. I went over to Enoshima by train (there were a lot of people) and I managed to arrive about 40 minutes before I needed to line up.
It was about 5°C so I wasn’t too thrilled about taking off my jacket. I still had about 40 minutes to use the restroom (like any good runner does) before the race but the line was massive. When I lined up there was this obnoxious guy behind me that kept bumping into me and loudly talking to his friend about how badly organized the line was. Although I was cold, choosing not to feed this guy his shoes was keeping my mind off the weather. I had just enough time to use the facilities, drop my stuff off, and get to the starting line with about 5 minutes to spare.
Because I was in the B block this year I was starting with less of a crowd. The A block was a small block of elite runners, followed by the B block. Then there was a big gap to stop the huge C block from mixing with the B block, then the remaining blocks.
This ended up much better than last year because I didn’t have to weave through as many people once everything started up.
At 8:30 we all set off (I set off my watch just before crossing the first sensor). The cold weather stopped bothering me about a minute after I started running. My knee was also relatively ok so I was in the zone.
I was maintaining a pace of about 4:10/km for most of the way towards the A turnaround point. It started snowing/hailing a little as we were going along but it didn’t affect anything really. (There was also an earthquake at some point during the race but I was too focused in on the race to notice).
After turning around and heading back to the B point I noticed an uncomfortable sensation in my leg which later developed to feeling like I had an ice pick in the side of my knee at the 10 km point. It was painful and I was slowing down a bit but my overall pace was not too bad. My gait was also fine, it was just painful.
As I was running up the hill towards the B point I saw the lead runners circling back around. They were making it look pretty effortless as they were charging along. Seeing runners like this is one of the reasons I like this race.
I was determined to keep going. The pain wasn’t getting any better but it wasn’t getting any worse either. I kept the pace going after the C turnaround point and by then I figured I was going to finish at just under last year’s time if I kept going.
At the final turnaround point I started running on the bridge towards Enoshima. I had been running behind a few guys for most of the race. Based on the distance to the finish line I thought my leg could take it so I sprinted as fast as I could, charged past about 5 people and crossed the finish line. This was especially cool because on of my running friends was cheering on at the finish line. That really helped with the strong finish.
As I blew past the finish line I realized that my watch still hadn’t ticked over to 16 km yet (it was at 15.8 something) so I kept running after I went past the finish line. It ticked over to 16.1 km, which is when I decided to shut off my watch and close out the race with 10 miles clocked in on the GPS.
After the race
After the race I noticed that my watch wasn’t quite at the 16 km mark so I kept going to make sure my watch ticked over to 16.1 km just in case. It wasn’t until I checked Strava later that I saw that 16 km exactly was recorded which is 0.0934 km shorter than 10 miles so a 10 mile run wasn’t recognized.
When I came to a stop I ran into a few friends of mine from my local parkrun. I had seen the occasional runner I knew as I was doing the race but it is always nice to run into people you know at the finish line so you can really finish the race with a smile. (笑顔で完走 : Egao de kansou - Finish with a smile, is always going to be the number 1 priority).
Just like last year, when you finish the race you are able to vote on the t-shirt design for next year by throwing your tracking chip into a bin under your favorite design. Looks like next year we are going to see a lot of people with red t-shirts running around Fujisawa.
So I returned my chip, picked up my bag, threw my jacket on and decided to head home, but not before checking my results.
Race results
One cool thing about this event is that the results are uploaded to Runnet pretty much immediately after the race. In 2023 I completed the race with a net time of 1:10:22. This year my net time was 1:07:28, meaning despite my leg injury I was able to beat last year’s time by 2:54. That’s not a massive difference, but I’ll take it.
I also found that I was in the top 100 runners of my division (Men living in Fujisawa). I was only in the top 100 by a small margin, but that really made me feel happy that I put in 100% of what I had at the final stretch. Checking the online results I was 99/1560 for my division and 384/5300 overall. I’ll definitely take that result.
And just as a side note, although Strava betrayed me on the 10 mile result, it was gracious enough to recognize my new 10k (42:18) and 15k (1:03:41) personal bests. So that’s something.
Final thoughts
I really want to do this again. I improved on last year’s results even with a leg injury so I’m sure I’ll be able to do even better next year. However, next year is the 15th Shonan International Marathon so they are going to change the course a bit. They are going to have half marathon and quarter marathon divisions but no 10 mile divisions. It might just be for 2025, so if that’s the case I won’t be able to take another crack at this 10 mile marathon until 2026. But I’ve never entered a half marathon before so I look forward to giving this a go in 2025 (if I’m around at the time).
Thank you very much for reading. I hope you enjoyed this “marathon” report. If you did enjoy please consider sharing it with someone you think would also enjoy it.
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Osu!
Anthony
Way to go on finishing, and beating your previous time with a bung leg to boot! I admire the attitude you had in just wanting to complete the race, come what may, regardless of result. Something I certainly need to work on in applying it to more aspects of my life!