The Monthly Milestone (April 2026)
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Greetings to My Readers
I started my Substack in August 2023. Where possible I am still going to try to upload weekly in 2025 on Wednesdays at 17:00 JST. These milestone posts serve as update posts to keep myself accountable with my training and to also give an update to those who are following me.
Milestones will stay up but for the rest of my articles they will generally be archived after one month. After they are archived, they will be accessible to my paid subscribers. Free subscribers can read everything I post for free as it comes out.
This month…
In this Monthly Milestone I’m going to be covering the following:
Substack Stats
Monthly Training Stats
March Race/Event Results
Reading List (what I’m currently reading (including audiobooks))
Final Thoughts and Hopes for May
Substack Stats
I ended March with 736 subscribers and I am ending April with…743! It’s been the first time in quite a while that I’ve seen a positive shift in my subscribers. Welcome to those new people who decided to come along for the ride!
Monthly Training Stats
Here are my training stats for April alongside the March stats for comparison:
April run total: 272.4 km (March: 302.0 km)
April walk total: 23.6 km (March: 18.7 km)
April run/walk total: 296.0 km (March: 320.7 km)
April elevation total: 4,750 m (March: 3,173 m)
This month was very quality over quantity. I had quite a big race during the month (which I’ll mention in the next section), so I needed to do a taper beforehand. Thanks to that race I had quite impressive elevation for the month but overall my distance was a little less than ideal.
Race/Event results
I entered 3 parkruns (5 km races) during April:
April 4th: 19:11. 5th overall (3rd in age group) (Instagram pics here)
April 11th: 19:19. 5th overall (4th in age group) (Instagram pics here)
April 18th: 19:11. 7th overall (2nd in age group) (Instagram pics here)
My parkrun times have been pretty consistently under 20 minutes recently. The run on the 18th marked my 10th consecutive parkun (excluding when I was a tail walker) as a sub-20 minute runner. I am quite happy with this result and I will strive to keep running fast, but I’m guessing my results are going to start getting a bit slower as things start getting hotter and I run parkruns while recovering from races.
Speaking of which, I am in the process of writing up a full race report on this but from April 18th to April 19th I ran the Fuji 100 Kai 70K. The race started at 14:00 on the 18th and I managed to complete it by 02:30 on the 19th. It was a brutal run but a fantastic experience. I 100% need to get better shoes for my next trail race. More on that to come in the later report.
I only took one day off beach sprinting this month (that was to enter the Kai). Weather conditions continue to improve, meaning more and more people are coming to the beach. This definitely beats having freezing feet tho.
Iaidō and karate were business as usual but unfortunately my attendance was not great. This was largely due to schedule conflicts and the halls being unavailable for seasonal reasons. This may continue a in May and June but I’ll be trying to attend as much as possible.
Reading list
I finished one audiobook in April:
Gun Samurai by Matt Okuhara
I actually did a full review of this audiobook. That review can be found here:
I had one ongoing audiobook in April:
Warhawk by Chris Wraight
I have been slowly chipping away at this book (largely due to my tapering and recovery schedule). This was another Siege of Terra book. I am approaching the end now.
This book mostly focuses on the confrontation between the Jaghatai Khan and Mortarion. I am very much enjoying it but it is very clear that the end of a story I have been listening to for 7 years is approaching. I may need to take a short break to prepare myself emotionally for this.
Final Thoughts and Hopes for May
So the Kai was a success. It was one of the most brutal races I’ve entered so far and it is taking a bit of time to recover from it. This was supposed to be the end of my trail running for this season but I am finding myself looking at other trail races. I’m not sure if this is manifestation of some sort of delirium or not, but I think I would like to run more trail races once I get my shoe issue sorted out. During the Kai I fell many times and it turns out that my shoes may not have been appropriate. Maybe buying good trail shoes and giving another trail run a go would boost my confidence. But still, it needs to go on the back burner for now.
My next race is the Hida Takayama Ultramarathon (100 km) in June. The total elevation for this run is 1,530 meters, which is about half that of the Kai. It is also all on roads and has a time limit of 14 hours. All being well, this should be a much easier ultra to run, but I still need to make sure I arrive at the start line in good shape. This means my training needs to focus more on accumulation of volume on roads rather than worrying about running up and down trails. So my next training block will focus on that.
The month of May is going to be a bit of a weird one for me. The first week of the month is Golden Week. That means a lot of national holidays and schedule disruption as a result of those. Then it’s a week or so of normal schedule followed by the latter half of the month of me being on a business trip. I’ll be out of the country in a mystery location for the latter half of May. I’ll be doing my best to get some running in during that time (there is a parkrun where I’m going), so watch this space for more details.
Thank you to all my readers
I hope you had a fantastic April and are ready to get after it during May.
Osu!
