The Monthly Milestone (May 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 June

Substack Stats

I ended April with 743 subscribers and I am ending May with…736! Weirdly enough this was the number of people I started April with. I’m hoping the ones who are here are the ones who are enthusiastic about my posts.

Monthly Training Stats

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

May run total: 241.3 km (April: 272.4 km)
May walk total: 53.0 km (April: 23.6 km )
May run/walk total: 294.3 km (April: 296.0 km)
May elevation total: 1,735 m (April: 4,750 m)

May was a bit of an unusual month for me. I started the month still kind of in recovery mode from the ultra I did at the end of April, and for half of May I was out of the country. I got a decent amount of running done (for what it was), but it was still a bit behind where I would have liked to have been. The increased walking bit a bit of work here though, so my overall monthly total wasn’t too bad.

Race/Event results

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

• May 2nd: 20:36. 10th overall (3rd in age group) (Instagram pics here)

• May 4th: 20:36. 2nd overall (2nd in age group) (Instagram pics here)

• May 9th: 20:19. 9th overall (3rd in age group) (Instagram pics here)

• May 16th: 20:20. 19th overall (5th in age group) (Instagram pics here)

• May 23rd: 20:09. 9th overall (1st in age group) (Instagram pics here)

parkrun, USA!

May was an active parkrun month. There was the みどりの日 (Midori no hi: Greenery Day) National Holiday on May 4th, meaning I was able to get an extra parkrun in. That parkrun was held at Oiso Undo Koen, meaning I got to experience a bit of different scenery. I also took part in the Sunnyvale Bay Trail parkun on the 23rd. This was my first experience of doing a parkrun in the USA. The course was a little bit longer than 5K, so although my 5K time was under 20 minutes, my official parkrun time was just over 20. Still, it was my best time of the month, so I’ll take that.

For more details of my US trip, I wrote a travel blog about it. For those who missed it, it can be found below:

I was able to take part in my usual beach sprinting events three times three times. Those are always a good session.

Sprinting!

My karate and iaidō training has been a bit behind recently due to my travel schedule. I trained where I could but many of the lessons overlapped other commitments. I plan to be back in full swing by mid-June.

Reading list

I finished two audiobooks in April:

• Warhawk by Chris Wraight

This book was great but it didn’t go down in the way the memes claimed it did. The whole book was focusing very much on a confrontation between the White Scars and the Death Guard at the Siege of Terra (Book 6 btw). Very cool story…but the end is nigh.

• A Runner’s High by Dean Karnazes

I took a break from 40K to listen to a running book I had in my library. Dean Karnazes is a really inspirational writer. In this book he wrote about ultrarunning as an “Older, Wiser, Slower, Stronger” runner. His family is more grown up and he had new, unexpected challenges associated with that. Everything works out very well in the end and it was an absolute pleasure to experience.

I had one ongoing audiobook in April:

• Echoes of Eternity by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

The siege is getting further and further into the palace. All hope is seeming to be lost. There’s a big focus on the Blood Angels so far but I still have a long way to go.

Final Thoughts and Hopes for June

My trip to the US thew a bit of a spanner into the works. Traveling knocked a few days off my schedule and jet lag and my schedule made it a bit difficult to run (not to mention the lack of runnable roads in the area). I tried to get in at least 5K on most days but this was obviously not idea. (Slight weight gain but I should get over this quick).

My next race is the Hida Takayama Ultramarathon (100 km) on the second week of June. The total elevation for this run is 1,530 meters. It is also all on roads and has a time limit of 14 hours. I’m running this ultra with a friend so as long as I get my conditioning back on point it shouldn’t be to bad a run. Nobeyama appears to be a much more challenging course.

Next week I will write a breakdown of the course to prepare myself for it, so stay tuned for that one.

Other than that race I have nothing else on my calendar until December. I will be looking around for other events to enter (possibly more trail runs), but I will see how it goes. I’m kind of looking forward to just leaving things open for a while and doing my own training.

But for now, I’ll focus on my running conditioning, completing Hida, and then getting back into the full swing of martial arts training.

Thank you to all my readers

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

Osu!