The 6th Enoshima Tyrannosaurus Race
第６回江ノ島ティラノサウルスレース: 2024/11/24
Background
A few years ago I was running the Shonan International Marathon for the first time and I thought to myself, ”There are a lot of dinosaurs around here.” This wasn’t some stress based hallucination. There were actually people dressed in dinosaur costumes cheering on the runners.
In January the following year I was running the Shonan Fujisawa City Marathon and noticed the same thing. Only this time I came across a dinosaur running the race with a sign attached to its back about a dinosaur sports day on the local beach. I knew I had to check this out.
On the day of the event I planned a run by the place and check it out. A hundred or so people were sprinting up and down the beach dressed up as dinosaurs (with hilarious results). It was a great day and I knew these events happened around here periodically, so I wanted to check more of them out in the future.
In summer this year I started doing beach sprinting sessions with some pretty serious runners. Little did I know that the organizer of this beach sprinting session (Sakamoto San) is also the organizer of this dinosaur event. After sprinting through the summer and entering a relay marathon with this group, I was invited to help out with one of the dinosaur races. Who could pass up such an opportunity?
The 6th Enoshima Tyrannosaurus Race : 24 November 2024
第６回江ノ島ティラノサウルスレース
The event schedule was as follows:
8:30: Reception
8:50: Open ceremony (Radio exercise/Zumba)
9:10: Test run
9:30: 20 M dash
10:40: Tug-of-war
11:10: True/False quiz
11:20: 50 M dash
12:20: Mayim Mayim (dance)
12:45: Closing Ceremony
Staff arrived at 7am to set up the event. (I actually arrived at around 6:30 to do some beach running). We managed to get everything set up in good time, and take some staff pictures before the event started.
Check in opened at 8:30 as planned and dinosaurs gradually filled the beach. By 8:50 we were ready to do the opening ceremony, radio exercise and Jurassic Zumba.
During the event it was my job to be in charge of lane for of the runners. I gave a lot of pep-talks on that day and advised the dinosaurs to keep their knees up while running on sand.
Sometimes those pep-talks worked, sometimes they didn’t. But everyone seemed to have fun.
One of the highlights of the day was the tug-of-war event. The staff needed to cheer on the teams and encourage them to keep pulling the rope. We ended up deciding on chanting ガオー (GAO) over and over again (gao being a roar sound that a T-rex would make if it were Japanese). This ended up sounding like go-go-go, so it worked out quite well.
After we had a break and did the true/false quiz it was back to racing. Some of the races ended up getting really intense despite the short distance.
After all the races (including a staff race) were done we ended the day with a folk dance called マイムマイム (Mayim Mayim). I had never heard of this before but many people tell me it is “Japanese culture” to do this dance where you stand in a circle and do this dance. Apparently around a campfire in a lot of cases. In the absense of a campfire we danced in a double circle with the staff in the middle. A 360 degree camera was used to capture the shot below.
After that we did a closing ceremony, packed up, and let everyone get on with their human lives again.
I had training in the evening so I was unfortunately not able to attend the after party but it sounds like everyone had a good time.
Thanks for reading
There were 120 dinosaurs that took part on the day, supported by 30 staff members. I had a great time and I’m sure all of our dinosaurs and staff did too.
If you want to get updates about the Enoshima Tyranno group you can find them on Instagram at enoshima_tyranno. This was the 6th event of this kind and there will likely be more of them happening in the future.
I’d also like to shout out matsunosuke.k for his amazing camera work, and of course tomonorisakamoto721 for creating this event.
Thank you very much for reading. If you enjoy my work please share it with someone you think would also enjoy it.
If you aren’t subscribed, please sign up to keep up to date.
If social media is more your thing I’m active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Osu!
Anthony