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Time for bed, need to wake up early tomorrow to get ready. This’ll be interesting…

Update: Guess who finished? :) My “unofficial” time (using my Nike+) is 1:54:09… I’ll have to wait for the actual chip time to be posted to see how I did. My left leg is a bit sore but not as bad as it was before.

Oh. I haven’t told you about my left leg hurting me? Oops… I’ll have to fill you in on that later.

But anyway, I finished! I had to do this race since it starts and finishes right across the street from my house, and being able to come home and relax and shower and everything while the post-race festival is still going on is so nice. I’ll do a more detailed update once the results are in.

In other news, today I registered for the Annapolis 10 Mile Run at the end of August. I didn’t get a chance to do any running during my trip, but I think that with all the walking I did I still got my exercise. Tomorrow I’ll have to resume my running schedule.

P.S. – Safari 5 came out today, and from what I can tell so far, The Glenn Fitzpatrick Times loads perfectly fine. Hooray for HTML5! Maybe I’ll see what I can do to soup it up with CSS effects sometime.

It took only about 15 minutes to go through passport control, our luggage was already on the luggage carousel, and the customs inspection was a 3-second glance at my customs form and a quick wave through by a sanitation-masked customs officer.

We changed our money at the currency exchange and stopped to figure out how to get from the airport to the hotel. There are two ways to get to the hotel from the airport: either you can take a bus or a train, and both cost about the same (3000¥ vs. 3110¥), and both take a little more than an hour from start to finish. Since we could see the entrance to the train station at the airport from where we were sitting, we figured we might as well go that route.

A friendly station worker saw us standing in line at the self-service kiosk for purchasing train tickets, and she took us to where there were more self-serve kiosks and though the machine had an option for English display, she gave us step-by-step explanations in English how to purchase tickets. The next train was leaving in 10 minutes, and after a split-second of uncertainty since Carrie and I both had large and/or heavy luggage (“Ten minutes?? Where do we have to go to catch the train? Oh, just over there? Ah, okay.”) I bought the tickets for the next train departing. For some reason I had a thought in the back of my mind to purchase a receipt, and it’s a good thing that I did, too.

I showed my tickets to a lady working at a ticket gate and she fed them into the gate, and I retrieved mine at the opposite end of the ticket gate. Carrie showed her tickets to the lady and followed. We made it down to the train and after a quick run along the side as we tried to figure out which car we were in (we didn’t notice that we were in car #4 after we had already stowed our luggage in car #7), we made it to our designated seats in car #4, seats 1A and 1B, and sat down. At least, we assumed they had to be our designated seats since my ticket reservation said that I was in car #4 seat 1B, and Carrie had already lost her ticket. It seems that she didn’t notice that the tickets were to be retrieved at the opposite end of the ticket gate — the lady working the gate took her ticket and waved her through, and she figured that was all that needed to be done. I tried to deflect some of the blame by saying “we” made a blunder, but she saw it and said that it was her blunder, and we sat there for our train ride and hoped that nobody would come along to collect tickets.

We felt jetlagged — more like a travel hangover, actually — and tried to rest a bit to calm our nerves. We had a brief scare when a man who looked like he collected tickets walked past us toward the front of the train with something that looked like a portable ticket-machine, but thankfully it seems that nobody collects tickets on this train. At least, not today, on this particular train.

Our only issue with the lost ticket was wondering how we would be able to leave the station with only one ticket between us. We saw the exit faregates and had to stop and think of what to do for a brief moment, but then we saw the information office next to the faregates, so we went in there and explained our issue to the girl behind the counter and showed her my ticket, my reservation, and the receipt I requested when buying the tickets, and she had a supervisor come out and she explained our issue to him in Japanese and he waved us through. Crisis averted! That was enough adventure for us for one day.

Our hotel is directly across the street from the train station, only a 2 minute walk from exiting the station and through a small shopping arcade. We checked in, made it to our room on the 30th floor, and since Carrie had a sore back from sitting on the plane and a headache from traveling, she took some Excedrin and lay down for a nap while I took a shower to get the grime of travel off of me before I took a quick nap as well. We figured we’d nap for about 30-40 minutes (until 6 PM) and then we’d venture out to find something for dinner. Well, the alarm went off at 6, and I think we figured that we needed more rest so we set another alarm for 7 but the next thing I knew was that it was 11 PM and I couldn’t remember the second alarm going off. At that point it was just time to stay in and sleep off the jet lag, and make a fresh start in the morning. I had weird dreams, though… something about our hotel room being part of an aquarium (maybe because this hotel has an aquarium attached to it?), and everybody wanted to come over to party in our room, and even John Tesh showed up and needed a place to stay, and since he’s a fellow fraternity brother of mine I was only happy to oblige him with a spot to crash.

Mealtime. Codfish with rice and salad and a buttered roll and cookies. And REAL SILVERWARE. I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever had actual non-plastic utensils on a flight. It’s possible that I’ve never had real silverware and have only used plastic.

The flight attendants are telling people to stay in school or else you’ll end up as a flight attendant.

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2:15 PM EST / 3:15 AM Tokyo, 1500 miles into the flight, somewhere over Manitoba -

You’re not supposed to smoke in the bathroom on an airplane… so why does it have an ashtray? Maybe if you started to smoke and forgot and needed somewhere to extinguish your cigarette? But then why is there another ashtray on the outside of the lavatory door, too?

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5:00 PM EST / 6:00 AM Tokyo, somewhere over the Yukon -

I just woke up from a 3 hour nap, and I probably only slept on the plane for about an hour more than that. I think I’m just going to stay awake for the remaining 7 hours 30 minutes of the flight to pretend that I just woke up at 6 AM and see how that might help me cope with jet lag.

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6:40 PM EST / 7:42 AM Tokyo, 3800 miles into the flight -

I watched the movie “CQ” on my iPad; I’d seen it before, but it’s got to be one of my most favorite movies. At one part, the main character’s father showed up at an airport for a layover, and had to be helped off the plane since he had lost his glasses during the flight, and explains his need for assistance further by saying “I took a sleeping pill and ate all the ice cream.”

I didn’t think that they still served ice cream on airplanes until they came by with our “breakfast” (I say breakfast since it’s 7:50 AM at the destination): Turkey hot dogs and Häagen-Dazs ice cream!

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8:20 PM EST / 9:20 AM Tokyo, crossing the international date line -

Carrie’s in flight entertainment system froze up early on the trip, so she tried to sleep and tried to watch movies over the shoulder of the passenger in front of her. We just had the attendant reset her system; apparently it runs Linux.

I’m currently on Continental flight 9, waiting to leave Newark for a trip to Japan for 9 days. We’re still boarding. I’m not exactly looking forward to a 14-hour flight, but at least it’s nonstop.

This is only my second trip to Japan – my last trip was about 6 or 7 years ago for about two weeks. My few semesters of college-level Japanese are slowly coming back to me, but I’ve got my phrasebook just in case.

I’m going to try to keep this updated while I’m away depending on internet connections available. On my last trip to Japan I kept travel notes too, except those were scribbled down using my Handspring PDA (which was pretty cutting edge for its time!). It’s a lot faster to type out my travel notes using my iPhone’s keypad, though.

It’s probably time for me to end this post; we’re still boarding, but I have a feeling that we’re going to be leaving soon.

NEW PERSONAL RECORD FOR RUNNING 1 MILE!

I only did a 2 mile run today (per my training schedule), but I rocked (ha, I originally wrote “rocket”) it and ended up with a new personal record for the mile: 7 minutes 50 seconds! My previous record for the mile was 7 minutes 56 seconds, set back on October 14, 2009.

The funny thing is that I wasn’t even trying to beat my record, and I actually didn’t even feel that thrilled about my run; I felt ok, but it didn’t feel that fun to me today. I think that the reason I beat my record was because I started my run by listening to this song:

Mile 4 and the last .25 miles were courtesy of Andrew W.K. and his song “Party Hard” -- I had it on repeat for mile 4, and it was conveniently automatically chosen by my iPod during my last quarter-mile push:

I’m not quite sure where I placed, but by looking at the video and counting the people that were ahead of me, and the people that I appeared to pass, it seems that I might have placed 10th overall? There were several dozen participants, so I guess that’s not too shabby to place in the top ten. I had to run a little less than top speed after seeing someone take a spill in front of me on the bridge, but otherwise it was a good run. Don’t get me started on the grouch working in the running store that was where the signup/finish line was… after the race, someone said that there was water in the store, and after I went in and got a small cup of water from the watercooler, this employee came over:

Employee: “Can I help you?”
Me: “No, thanks, I’m just looking.”
Employee: “The water is for customers only.”
Me: “…Oh. I’m sorry, someone outside said that there was water in here.”
Employee: “No, that’s incorrect.” *scowl*
Me: “Oh. Sorry.” *leaves store*

I mean, WHO DOES THAT? It’s a RUNNING STORE! You’re located at the FINISH LINE of an (admittedly small) event! People are going to be walking into your store because you have something they want, and you’re just going to be unfriendly? I need to get new shoes soon, but now I know where I’m not going to be going, especially since there are at least two or three other running stores nearby that I can think of off the top of my head, too. No need to mention the store’s name since I’m not going to promote them any time soon, but you can see it in the background of the video if you’re that curious. Blech.

Sunday was my first real long run for my marathon training. Even though I had two or three previously-scheduled since deciding to run the marathon, I wasn’t able to do those runs since I came down with bronchitis a few weeks ago and only just recovered last week. So, Sunday I ran 10 miles in 1:53:56. It felt really good except my left hip really started yelling at me around mile 8, but it felt better yesterday after I did my cooldown and took some Advil, and it’s feeling much better today.

I need to see about getting some new running shoes soon. I’m going to pass 200 miles on these shoes this week (which is also 200 miles since I originally started running back in February of last year), and with my running schedule I’m going to exceed 400 miles by July 4. I can’t believe that in about a month and 3 weeks I’ll have run about as much as I have in almost a year and a half, but I guess that training for a marathon will do that.

I’m really enjoying listening to Two Gomers Run a Marathon while I prepare for this marathon. Since my last post I’ve been listening to a lot of their early season 2 episodes while I wait for each week’s regularly-scheduled episode to be posted, and I really have to be careful so that I don’t start laughing out loud at my cubicle at work, but it really is that funny. Definitely recommended!