The Monthly Milestone (August 2024)
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Greetings to My Readers
Things are still going strong since I started my Substack in August 2023. That means this Substack has now been going for an entire year! Thank you to everyone who has come along for the ride!
Articles are uploaded on Wednesdays at 17:00 JST including monthly milestone posts to give a few updates at the beginning of each month. Monthly milestones will be updated on the first Wednesday of the following month, meaning there will be one milestone and three regular articles per month. (That’s the plan anyway).
Articles will generally be archived two weeks after posting.
This month…
In this Monthly Milestone I’m going to be covering the following:
Substack Stats
Monthly Training Stats
Race/Event Results
Reading List (what I’m currently reading (including audiobooks))
Final Thoughts and Hopes for September
Substack Stats
I ended July with 706 subscribers and I am ending August with 702. This is the first month my subscribers have gone down overall. Usually in a month my subscribers go up and down a little bit. Hopefully this isn’t a trend that continues.
Monthly Training Stats
Here are my training stats for August alongside the July stats for comparison:
August run total: 146.2 km (July : 205.9 km)
August walk total: 103.9 km (July : 95.7 km)
August run/walk total: 250.1 km (July : 301.6 km)
August elevation total: 2,788 m (July : 2,120 m)
My running volume was lower in August compared to July. I took a holiday where I ended wasn’t able to run at the time, and also I have been trying to do training that focuses on more specific types of running, such as trail running and barefoot sprinting on the beach. As much as I’d like to say that I’ve been focusing on quality over quantity, I think the holiday part is what put the biggest dent in this.
I managed to get quite a bit more elevation in August than usual. One of the reasons for this was that I did a bit of mountain climbing during the month. That was a nice change of pace.
Race/Event results
I entered 4 parkruns (5 km races) during August.
August 3rd : 20:50. 4th overall (1st in age group) (Instagram pics here)
August 10th : 22:04. 9th overall (3rd in age group) (Instagram pics here)
August 17th : 22:14. 5th overall (1st in age group) (Instagram pics here)
August 24th: 21:27. 7th overall (2nd in age group) (Instagram pics here)
The summer heat continues to be a challenge. On top of that a typhoon ended up canceling one of the parkrun events on the 31st of August so I ended up missing a race.
I took part in three Enoshima Dash events during August. These events are now my go-to sprinting sessions of the week. 20 x 200 m followed by a 1km run. Barefoot running on the beach is extremely good training.
I took part in karate and iaido as much as I could over the month but there were no specific events.
Reading list
I only finished 1 audiobook in August:
The Greater Good by Sandy Mitchell
As mentioned last month, this is another of the Ciaphas Cain stories based in the Warhammer 40K universe. This one was about the imperium teaming up with the Tau to fight off a tyranid hive fleet about to descend upon a forge world. It was a good story but I was expecting the Tau to play a bigger part. They are kind of forgotten about half way through the book and it just ends up as another imperium vs tyranids book. Not that I’m complaining. I wouldn’t read these if I didn’t enjoy that formula.
Ongoing audiobooks
Choose your Enemies by Sandy Mitchell
I believe this the last main story in the Cain series (so far). There’s one omnibus of short stories I’d like to pick up but after this one I’m done with the main stories. I’m really enjoying these books, and though I’m sad to come to the end of them it gives me a chance to check something else out.
Choose your enemies (so far) is about the imperium fighting the Eldar on an ice world. More info to come later.
Final Thoughts and Hopes for September
August is generally not a great month for running. It’s hot, humid, and not a lot of events go on. I’m hoping things will start picking up in September as the weather cools down an events start up again.
I mentioned in my last update that I was putting in an entry for the The Izu Trail Journey (70K trail race). The chances of getting into that race were probably under 50%, but thankfully I managed to get a place. So it looks like I’m running Izu in December! I’m going to try incorporating more climbing and more trail running into my training over the next few months to prepare for Izu in December. (I also need to buy some more gear for this. The rules are quite strict due to the lack of aid stations).
I also put in an entry for the Tokyo Marathon, which will be held on March 2nd 2025. I won’t get the result of the lottery until late September, so I’ll make an update on this at the beginning of October.
On another surprising note, the organizer of the beach sprinting event I take part in invited me to take part in a relay marathon as part of the Running Park Shonan event in Hiratsuka on September 15th. I’m in the 3 hour division which means I’ll be involved with a team that will take turns running a 1.7 km course for 3 hours. The teams haven’t been decided yet but we’ll give it our best shot. This is the first time I’ve been on a team running event so I’m looking forward to trying something new and feeling a new kind of pressure.
Moving forward things are going to start cooling down. I’m hoping this will improve running conditions because running in the summer has been somewhat miserable most of the time. It’s too hot to run without wanting to jump into the river. Also, when attempting to trail run in these conditions it’s very easy to get caught in some of the extremely large webs made by extremely large spiders in the area. These spiders aren’t dangerous to humans (to my knowledge) but you tend to know about it if you run through one of their webs. Cooler temperatures may mean better conditions all around (including fewer spiders).
In September I plan to try to do more trail running, give that relay marathon my best shot, and also do my best to improve my running just in general. I’m also starting to incorporate a bit more strength training and a bit more flexibility to improve my martial arts as well. For a while I’ve been thinking I’d like to get faster, AND stronger, AND more flexible, but it’s quite difficult to do all these things at the same time. But thinking that it is difficult was leading me to not doing enough. It’s impossible to reach any of these goals if you don’t focus on those areas, so more strength training and more stretching should help.
Thank you to all my readers
I hope you had a fantastic August and are ready to get after it during September.
Osu!
Anthony