The Monthly Milestone (June 2025)

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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 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

• Race/Event Results

• Reading List (what I’m currently reading (including audiobooks))

• Final Thoughts and Hopes for July

Substack Stats

I ended May with 743 subscribers and I am ending June with 740. It’s unfortunate that I’ve lost a few, but I’m grateful to everyone who is sticking around and reading my work. Keep on being awesome.

Monthly Training Stats

Here are my training stats for June alongside the May stats for comparison:

June run total: 301.4 km (May : 311.9 km)
June walk total: 5.6 km (May : 54.1 km)
June run/walk total: 307.0 km (May : 366.0 km)
June elevation total: 1,232 m (May : 4,670 m )

June was a bit of a weird month. I managed to get my running distance complete but I did very little in the way of walking and climbing. I didn’t make the climbing goal and only walking 5.6 km was pathetic. I focused on getting 300 km of running done as a priority and I made it by the end of the month.

I should note that by the end of June my running total for the year is 1,974.4 km. With half of the year gone the expectation would be that my total would be around 1,825 km, so I am ahead of where I need to be for a 3,650 km year by quite a long way. I want to try to keep up the 300 km months this year and try to break my personal record. Let’s see how it goes.

Race/Event results

I entered 4 parkruns (5 km races) during May:

• June 7th: 20:23. 4th overall (3rd in age group) (Instagram pics here)

• June 14th: 21:06. 23rd overall (7th in age group) (Instagram pics here)

• June 21st: 22:24. 9th overall (3rd in age group)

• June 28th: 20:10. 8th overall (3rd in age group) (Instagram pics here)

June 28th.

I was at parkrun every week this month. As the temperature has been getting hotter I seem to have been slowing down, with the exception of the 28th where I was kind of dragged along by the crowd and ended up way faster than I expected (despite starting a bit further back than expected). As we enter summer I expect my time to start going down. I’ll do my best to keep pushing but I make no promises.

Beach runs are still going great. In fact it is much nicer to run on the beach in this weather due to the sea. The breeze is pleasant and you can enjoy the water too. At the end of June one of the runners brought a watermelon to share. That was a great way to really kick the summer off.

Watermelon dash!

In June I was pretty busy with martial arts events. On one of the weekends I went to cheer on a Tae Kwon Do tournament in Kamakura. It’s nice to see some other martial arts sometimes.

Jump kick demo

I also went to support a grading at the Ashihara Karate Tokyo Honbu dōjō. I needed to act as one of the sabaki opponents for the junior grades to fight. It was a great opportunity to show my face and do my part. Who knew I could do a good deed by dumping people on the floor?

There were no special iaidō events this month. Just regular training.

Reading list

I finished 2 audiobooks in June:

• Tallarn by John French

This book was a bit of a slow burn. I eventually sort of enjoyed it but it was an anthology book that didn’t really need to be an anthology. About 2/3 of the book was one story that kept switching between perspectives. I was expecting a bit more of a payoff in the end but it turned out that the main message of the book was about something not happening more than it was about something significant happening. I introduced this book last month too but just as a reminder, this was a 40K book about the Iron Warriors.

• Ruinstorm by David Annandale

This was another 40K book that focused on three Primarchs (The Lion, Guilliman, and Sanguinius) attempting to escape the ruinstorm and find their way back to Terra. The Damnation of Pythos, (which it seems many people didn’t enjoy) was the set up for this book. I quite enjoyed this story, because it focused heavily on people who already know the future interpreting how it “ends” differently. The Horus Heresy series has always been based around “knowing” how it ends, so this was quite an interesting meta narrative.

I had one audiobook ongoing in June:

• Old Earth by Nick Kyme

I literally only just started this book. Another 40K book. So far…”VULKAN LIVES!”

Final Thoughts and Hopes for July

June was a tough month. It was difficult to go beyond my regular runs and it is now getting hotter and hotter. Because so many of my weekends were taken up with martial arts stuff, I ended up getting up VERY early one Friday to squeeze a half marathon in before the day started. It was cooler at that time but it was not fun getting up that early.

July is getting to that time of year when the number of events start to dwindle due to it being too hot to sustain human life. There is however one event at the end of July, which is supposed to be done on a stupidly hot day. I’ll be running the 人間塩出し昆布マラソン (Human Salted Seaweed Marathon), which is a contest to try to lose as much weight as possible during a 10 km race. It sounds a little dangerous so I will just be aiming to take part and have fun. I have no intention to try to win a prize.

Just as a reminder, there are 3 races I’d like to enter in 2026. I’ll be putting my name down for them as soon as I’m able to so I’ll leave a reminder for myself (and anyone reading this blog in case they would also like to enter these events):

• Tokyo Marathon (Full Marathon): March 2026 (Entry in August)

• Mt Fuji 100 (Kai) (70 km trail): April 2026 (Entry in November)

• Hida Takayama Ultramarathon (100 km): June 2026 (Entry in November)

Aside from the sweating contest the rest of July is going to be largely devoid of events. It’s going to keep getting hotter and keeping the motivation going is going to be one of the most important things.

All I can really say to this is that I’ll do my best. I’ll hopefully have a fun report next month for the Human Salted Seaweed Marathon and also have another 300 km in the bank.

頑張りましょう! (Ganbarimashō!)

Thank you to all my readers

I hope you had a fantastic June and are ready to get after it during July.

Osu!

Anthony