Tatsuno 10km

Three weeks after I ran the Himeji Castle race, I was back in action for another race, this one a 10km in the neighbouring city of Tatsuno. I had a relatively light training schedule in the time between the races, but my leg had recovered to where I wasn't feeling it anymore, so I was pretty sure I could run this race with no problems. As I thought that my poor 5km was due to lack of conditioning and not my calf, I didn't expect to do well over twice the distance.
Inexplicably, when the race got going, I felt really good. It wasn't a course necessarily designed for fast times - it was fairly hilly, and it was a windy day to boot - but I was able to crank out stronger kilometer splits than I had expected. I tried to keep myself in control until the halfway point. By then I realized I was having a good race and good just go with it, so I tried to push it all the way back to the finish. I ended up just dipping under 40 minutes, well ahead of the 42-minute goal I had set for myself. After college, it's been quite rare to surprise myself with a good performance (bad surprises have been much more common, sadly). Usually, if I am in good shape, there is some indicator, and sometimes I talk myself into thinking I'm in good shape when I'm not. My biggest positive surprise of recent years was a half-marathon in Munich; even there, however, I hadn't run a race in the previous four months, and retrospectively I could see that I had done better training than I had thought. Here, however, I had run a regular schedule of races that all suggested I wasn't in great shape, so this was maybe the most inexplicable race I've run lately. Looking back, all I can point is that the evidence suggests that my calf problem was bothering me a lot more in the Himeji Castle race than I had thought.
Even with a good time, I got crushed by the winner of the race. A couple of high school teams showed up, including one that is apparently among the best teams in Japan. One of their runners won in 30:10, with a teammate second in about 30:30. These times are both faster than my college's school record, and only about 40 seconds behind the fastest high school time in the U.S. last year. That's a fairly ridiculous level of performance for a relatively small road race.
The reason I ended up at this race was because several of the teachers at my previous school had signed up to run, so I was going along with them. These teachers have decided to run in the inaugural Kobe City Marathon in November, so this was their training race. Six other teachers ran; two did the 10km with me and four did the half-marathon. I think everyone ran well, and hopefully they'll be ready for the marathon in November. This is a very nice group of teachers; one of them had made shirts for everyone. He put the names of all the teachers running on the back under the heading "Road to Kobe City Marathon". He included my name and gave me a shirt. If, in the pictures, you wonder why I'm not wearing my usual green shirt, it's because I was sporting the one they gave me that morning.
-Jason