Sunday morning broke cold and clear and I followed my kitchen routines, plowing through a pile of oranges and frying up some chikuwa (kind of like hotdogs made out of fish). After half a pot of coffee I felt too full to race, but then again two weeks of hot pot, beer, and dirty air in China had already set me a world away from competitive running. I lingered in the kitchen until the last possible moment and then announced my departure to the morning unconscious and biked through silent neighborhoods to city hall.
There was far more than the hodgepodge of Susami runner folk that I had expected. Hoards of young men, too many to match with the local demographics, bopped around in matching warmup jackets which identified them as members of highschool teams from around the southern part of the prefecture. Tanabe was particularly well represented, beginning with the “Aa-ru-staas” and the “Supaa-JK” teams. At the local level were teams made up of the soccer, baseball, and table tennis clubs. Horitani Sensei quickly found me and brought me to meet an Allstar who is apparently the 8th fastest (under 19 years old) 800m runner in Japan. I smiled, wished him well, and walked toward the bus that would take the runners for stages 3 and 4 into the mountains. (Each ekiden team is composed of 7 runners who combine to run the 17.5km from Samoto down to Susami — I was assigned the 3.5km 4th stage). Horitani Sensei’s silent, serious son Takumi sat beside me on the bus as it labored up the ridiculously narrow switchbacks causing the fish sausage to churn in my stomach.
Colin’s students line up for the kids’ race
At the village or rather settlement of Okauchi (Stream) the stage 4 runners were dropped and I took off for four miles of warmup along the area’s namesake. The ekiden began at 10am, but it was nearly 10:30 before the baton (actually it’s a sash) was handed to me by my city hall teammate. With a motorcycle escort, I zigzagged out of Okauchi, climbed a short hill, and then began a series of descents, pounding downhill at sub-4:30 mile pace. I’ve run these roads countless times since arriving and I always tend to do the downhill portions running backwards inorder to preserve knees and quadriceps, so I knew that I would be in some serious pain later for having committed to this (in fact, I could hardly move on Monday and Tuesday). I finished my 3.5km in 10:00 and passed six teams in the process. All six of these teams would later pass us back, but nevertheless City Hall went on to it’s best finish and fastest time in the 17 years that records have been kept for this race.
Mayor’s Fake Finish Photo-OpFrom the end of my stage I jogged the last 8km back to Susami where Carrie was standing at the finish line having just witnessed City Hall’s final runner, the mayor himself, stumble across the finish line. Inside the community center a crowd of men and teenage boys was stuffing themselves with rice balls and soup ladled from two cauldrons at the center. The computer-generated results were already out with a complete breakdown of how fast each stage had been run. I tried to converse with a couple of my students but it made them nervous, so I stood alone slurping some vegetable soup and watching the community mingle. A staff member notified me that my time was identical to that of the 800m star. This actually made me question how much of a star he could really be if he couldn’t run any faster than a guy who’d been sitting on trains for two weeks.
Colin at EkidenThen came the invite. It had seemed inevitable and, indeed, there was no way that a bunch of city hall boys could pass up this chance to celebrate distance running by gathering together to drink shochu (liquor) and smoke. It was planned that everyone associated, no matter how remotely, with the City Hall ekiden team would meet at 5:30 at a small restaurant around the corner from our house. Besides feeling obligated, Carrie and I could not miss what was our first opportunity to eat in a Susami restaurant. I readied myself for debauchery by returning to the mountains for another 18 miles of running and reflection — probably a bit much for the body, especially when later I found myself kneeling on numb, tired legs and quenching my thirst with alcohol for a too long evening. It was all men except for Carrie and we supped on sukiyaki which is basically like Chinese hotpot, but with beef rather than lamb, and without the intensity of spice or variety of vegetables. The conversation ranged from topics I couldn’t follow (most), to who was once or twice divorced, to repeated rehashings of the ekiden, including mentions of how fast so-and-so had run in 1998 and how fast someone else had run the same stage this year. I’ve never seen unfit, heavy smokers discuss distance running for so long and with such love and hope that perhaps next year they may run a bit faster. Food and drink (far more of the latter, unfortunately) was served by an elderly husband and wife who were simultaneously tending to a couple of drunken fishermen who occupied the two bar stools beside the stove — that was it: one long table and two bar stools, a nice size for a restaurant actually. Carrie kept whispering — she whispers often in Japan– that the witching hour would soon be upon us when without warning everyone would stand and leave. The hour arrived, but with it an invitation to head down the street to a Sunaku (“Snack”) to sing karaoke and continue our celebration of athletic performance. Carrie urged that this was the opportunity that I needed to hang out with other “guys” and then high tailed it for home. True, I’d not been to a sunaku either, but I really didn’t feel like beginning Sunday night. Nevertheless I trooped along to the playhouse-sized tavern where I was immediately disarmed by the sight of the same proprietor to whom we had just said goodbye standing behind the bar in a fresh apron. Apparently, the missus runs down the street and opens up her sunaku whenever her restaurant clients have a post-meal hankering for howling along with synthesizers. I could no longer think and after a 27-mile day and so much kneeling, my legs were screaming for relief. Instead, I got a glass of shochu and the karaoke bible of every known pop song in every known language. In retrospect I wish I had selected something in Russian, for through the back-slapping and synthesizer they never would have known the difference. Their standard order of performance was to sing verse one and then down four straight glasses of beer — probably as a way to distract from the awful flute interludes — before recommencing with verse two. Eventually I managed Bridge Over Troubled Water with the mayor before excusing myself amid a flurry of embraces and kisses. The gauntlet of kisses was particularly unexpected and as I stumbled home I wondered anew about this gathering of proud divorcees.
