The Monthly Milestone (June 2024)
The Monthly Milestone (June 2024)
Thank you for subscribing!
Greetings to My Readers
Things are still going strong since I started my Substack in August 2023.
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 July
Substack Stats
I ended April with 647 subscribers and I am ending April with 695. I’m almost at the 700 subscriber milestone. I’m glad to see that there is steady progress with this. Maybe I’ll get to 1000 within this year.
Monthly Training Stats
Here are my training stats for June alongside the May stats for comparison:
June run total: 187.9 km (May: 243.3 km)
June walk total: 117.7 km (May: 90.7 km)
June run/walk total: 305.6 km (May: 334.0 km)
June elevation total: 2360 m (May: 2072 m)
My running distance total for June is lower than it has been for other months. There are a few reasons for this.
Sprint training.
Since we are heading into summer and there are no races I’m running other than parkruns I’ve been doing some intense hill sprint training sessions. These involve me going to the bottom of a hill in my local area, sprinting up it and then jogging back down. These sessions are quite physically demanding and as a result my overall running volume needed to reduce a bit to stop me from overexerting myself. (Though my walking volume increased to compensate for this a bit).
Martial arts taking up more time than usual
I generally try to add long runs on weekends but in June I ended up having most of the weekends taken up by martial arts events. It’s nice to change things up sometimes but I lost a few of my long run slots due to these events.
Prioritizing recovery (linked to the above 2)
I sometimes end up burning the candle at both ends sometimes with regards to both running and martial arts. I’ve been doing a lot of intense sessions recently and I‘ve been quite sore after. They say that if you don’t pick a day off your body will pick it for you. On days where I’ve been pretty wiped out I’ve chosen to do active recovery walks instead of runs.
These are my excuses and I’m sticking to them. I aim to beat my run total from June in July.
With regards to karate and iaidō, I had a camp at the beginning of the month for karate, and a tournament for iaidō. I’ll cover that in the next session.
Race/Event results
I entered 4 parkruns (5 km races) during June.
June 8th : 20:06. 7th overall (1st in age group) (Instagram pics here)
June 15th : 20:09. 2nd overall (1st in age group) (Instagram pics here)
June 22nd: 20:16. 3rd overall (1st in age group) (Instagram pics here)
June 29th: 22:59. 17th overall (3rd in age group) (Instagram pics here)
I had three pretty quick parkruns this month. My watch time has had me under 20 minutes for a few of these but not all of them. I think my sprinting has contributed to this a bit but I still haven’t had an official sub-20 for a long time. My final parkrun was slower due to having an iaidō event the following day that I wanted to be alive for.
令和６年芦原会館神奈川県合同合宿
(2024 Ashihara Kaikan Kanagawa Training Camp) - June 1st & 2nd
In June 1st and 2nd I went to a training camp in the mountains of Tanzawa with Ashihara Karate groups around Kanto. People from the Kawasaki, Yokosuke, Miura, Shonan Fujisawa, and Chiba branches came to train together. There was some pretty hard sparring, a BBQ, and a few hungover people on day two. A good time was had by all.
鎌倉市テコンドー選手権大会
(Kamakura City Tae Kwon Do Championship) - June 23rd
I don’t practice TKD these days but I have some TKD connections in the area. I went to watch the Kamakura City tournament on the 23rd to show some support. It’s nice to just watch other styles sometimes.
第４４回神奈川県居合道大会
(Kanagawa Prefecture Iaidō Tournament) - June 30th
It was my first time to enter the Kanagawa Prefecture Iaidō Tournament since I became a 4th dan. It takes a minimum of 4 years before you are able to test for 5th dan so there are some 4th dans with several years more experience than me in this bracket. I mainly wanted to enter this tournament to show my face, check out the newly refurbished budokan and get some experience. I lost my first match but I achieved all my goals so I’m happy at that.
June was a very productive month. My race results were better than last month (for the most part) and I managed to attend a lot of martial arts events. I don’t have any big martial arts events in July so I should have a more focused running month in July.
Reading list
I finished 2 audiobooks in June:
The Last Ditch by Sandy Mitchell
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
The Last Ditch is another Ciaphas Cain book. I’ve been listening to a lot of these recently and I’m almost at the end of the series. This one had Commissar Cain crash land on an ice world to fight off some orks, only to accidentally thaw out some tyranids that have been dormant on the planet for a long time. The story was a bit formulaic and in line with the other books, but that would only be a complaint if I wasn’t fond of the formula and the other books.
I saw the movie No Country for Old Men a long time ago and I heard good things about the book. The book is incredibly well written and the audiobook is very well narrated by Tom Stechschulte. A man finds a briefcase of money in the desert after a drug deal gone wrong and is pursued by an unstoppable evil antagonist (a common theme in McCarthy’s work) to get the money back. That in itself is a great plot but it’s told from the perspective of a sheriff that reflects on the situation and how the world has changed for the aging lawman. Highly recommended.
Final Thoughts and Hopes for July
I mentioned last month that June would be a month that’s going to be a bit more focused on martial arts than usual. It’s been a busy month and I hope to get more running done in July. I am however very aware that it’s going to start getting very hot soon. It gets crazy hot in Japan summer so let’s see how that impacts my parkrun times.
I mentioned last month that I was considering putting an entry in for the The Izu Trail Journey (70K trail race). Registration opens for that one on July 19th and I’m still undecided about that one. The Shonan International Marathon is still an option and entry closes for that at the end at the end of September.
The Tokyo Marathon will be held on March 2nd 2025 and it looks like entry opens in early August 2024. I’m leaving this has a note for myself so I will put in an entry in August.
I mentioned a couple of ultras I was looking at. Next year if I’m going to do another big 100k race I’m looking at the Nobeyama Ultramarathon (a 100k held in May). I’m expecting entry to open in late November for that one.
I’ll mostly be running with the intention of running further than last month and trying not to die in the summer heat. I’ll get some sprint sessions and long runs in whenever I can.
I don’t have any races within the next few months (other than parkrun events) but I just put in an entry for the 湘南藤沢市民マラソン (Shonan Fujisawa City Marathon), which takes place on January 26th, 2025. I entered this event in both 2023 (report here) and 2024 (report here) so this will be my third year consecutive year to run this. On previous years this has been a 10 mile race, which is a bit of an awkward distance for me. The next one is the 15th event so to celebrate the organizers are increasing the distance and making it a half marathon event. This will be my first time running a half marathon race so I look forward to giving this new distance a try. Every distance is a new game.
I’m expecting July to be a relatively uneventful month after a June full of events. That makes it one of those, “In times of peace, prepare for war,” months.
Thank you to all my readers
I hope you had a fantastic June and are ready to get after it during July.
Osu!
Anthony