The Monthly Milestone (May 2024)
The Monthly Milestone (May 2024)
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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 June
Substack Stats
I ended April with 583 subscribers and I am ending April with 647. Whenever I get a new subscriber I receive an email letting me know how they discovered me. I note that many of my subscribers are coming over from
. To any of my subscribers who are not subscribed to Martial X, I highly recommend this publication.Monthly Training Stats
Here are my training stats for May alongside the April stats for comparison:
May run total: 243.3 km (Apr: 266.7 km)
May walk total: 90.7 km (Apr: 92.3 km)
May run/walk total: 334.0 km (Apr: 359.0 km)
May elevation total: 2072 m (Apr: 2665 m)
Towards the end of April I completed the Challenge Fuji 5 Lakes Ultramarathon. It took me weeks to recover from this, which led to a slow start to May. When I say it took weeks to recover I’m referring to both physical and mental recovery. Being in too much pain to comfortably run dragged down my motivation for a while. I was still running 50-60k weeks for most of May but it took more effort than usual to do this. Hopefully I’ll get back to it in June.
My karate and iaidō training was pretty much back to normal in May. June is going to have more martial arts focused activity which I will describe later.
Race/Event results
I entered 4 parkruns (5 km races) during May.
May 4th : 20:37. 6th overall (2nd in age group) (Instagram pics here)
May 11th : 20:20. 12th overall (1st in age group) (Instagram pics here)
May 18th: 20:42. 6th overall (1st in age group) (Instagram pics here)
May 25th: 22:29. 9th overall (2nd in age group) (Instagram pics here)
My parkruns were the only events I took part in during May. I ran pretty hard on most of them (I got a new personal best for my heart rate during one of the races) but the last one was a little slower. I wasn’t feeling 100% on that day and decided to hang back a little. Because I was hanging back I was able to run with some people I don’t normally run with and do a bit of coaching. The lady I ran with on that event ended up crushing her personal best time, which also inspired me to write the article Training is not a competition. We don’t always need to be at our best to get a lot out of our training.
Reading list
I finished 2 audiobooks in May:
Cain’s Last Stand by Sandy Mitchell
The Emperor's Finest by Sandy Mitchell
It has been a common theme over the past few months that I’ve been chipping away at the Ciaphas Cain series. There are only a few books left now so I may take some time to listen to something completely different in the coming months.
Cain’s Last Stand had Commissar Cain defending the world he was supposed to be enjoying his retirement on from a Chaos invasion. Some things in this book were a bit different from the other 40K books I’ve read (including a Chaos psyker that can do mind control on a mass scale and corrupted sisters of battle) but I enjoyed it mixing things up a bit.
The Emperor’s Finest saw Cain getting attached to a group of space marines and investigating a Space Hulk that was threatening the system. A lot of the story was focused on a confusing romance Cain developed with one of the local aristocrats and choosing to face orks and tyranids to get away from her.
Ongoing Audiobooks:
The Last Ditch by Sandy Mitchell
I’m not far into this one yet but it looks like this is a story of Cain being attached to his old Imperial Guard regiment and being sent to an ice world to fight off some orks.
Final Thoughts and Hopes for June
June is a month that’s going to be a bit more focused on martial arts than usual. In particular:
June 1st-2nd : 令和６年芦原会館神奈川県合同合宿 (2024 Ashihara Kaikan Kanagawa Training Camp)
June 30th : 第４４回神奈川県居合道大会 (The 44th Kanagawa Prefecture Iaidō Tournament)
Moving forward I’m uploading articles on Wednesdays including these milestone articles, so as you might notice, I survived the training camp. I’ll cover this in more detail in next month’s update. I’ll be focusing my mental energy on iaidō for the remainder of the month but I do have a few things I want to do with my running as well.
Last month I mentioned that I’m thinking about what races to enter next. I still haven’t decided which to do this year. The Izu Trail Journey (70K trail race) is one I am considering but that is at roughly the same time as my local race (The Shonan International Marathon) in December. The ITJ releases race information at the end of June and the Shonan International Marathon closes entry at the end of September, so I have some options open.
I am interested in entering the Tokyo Marathon as well, but that would be in 2025. The Tokyo Marathon will be held on March 2nd 2025 and it looks like entry opens in early August 2024. I ended up missing the entry window last year so hopefully I’ll be able to put an entry in this year.
After finishing the Challenge Fuji 5 Lakes Ultramarathon I decided that I really want to do more ultramarathons on this scale. However, these ultramarathons take quite a toll on a lot of levels in terms of impacting my schedule, my training, and my bank account. Because of that I’m not going to rush into my next one that will be at the same scale as the Fuji 5 Lakes. There are two ultramarathons by the same organizer I have my eye on right now. 1) The Nobeyama Ultramarathon (a 100k held in May), and 2) The Hida Takayama Ultramarathon (a 100k held in June). Nobeyama is looking to be the most attractive right now but it’s so far ahead of time that entry is not open yet. I’ll keep an eye on this for a big challenge next year.
And of course, I’ll be keeping my eyes open for other events I can reasonably enter.
June in Japan is the rainy season. The rain and heat is going to start messing with my training but I’ll do my best to keep chipping at it. I have some ideas penciled into my schedule but still not too many concrete plans yet. I usually like to have something set in stone so I have something substantial to aim at. But I do sometimes enjoy training without any real purpose. The concept of ‘training for a marathon’ or something like that is kind of alien to me right now. If I’m asked to do a marathon in 2 weeks, that usually means I need to do less so I can recover properly. Staying on the grind is the way.
Thank you to all my readers
I hope you had a fantastic May and are ready to get after it during June.
Osu!
Anthony