Kameoka New Year’s Day Road Race

Many Japanese people like to welcome in the New Year by viewing the New Year’s first sunrise. January 1st is seen as an auspicious day, believed to be representative of the whole year that has just commenced. Therefore, the day is supposed to be full of joy and free of stress and anger, whilst everything should be clean and no work should be done.

For my part, I took in the New Year’s sunrise as I walked to the train station, in a bid to join nearly a thousand other hardy souls who were beginning the New Year as runners hope to carry on; with fresh air, the open road, adrenalin, joy, pain, and the optimistic pursuit of achieving new goals and personal bests. The highlight of the race schedule was a 10K race. I chose the 5K event, partly because I have a preference for this distance.

The 5K began at 10:05am, 5 minutes after the mass start of the 10K, with 300M of a running track, before hitting the main road outside the sports stadium that was hosting the event. Turning onto the road we were faced with a bracing, icy, head wind. The 5K and 10K races were both out and back affairs along the same straight stretch of road, so to pass the back runners in the 10K race, the fast 5K lads and lasses had to run the majority of the first half of the race in the middle of the road.

The turnaround point was a giant 6 feet tall red traffic cone with ‘5KM’ emblazoned across it. I’d passed a junior runner just a few metres before the cone, so tried to put in a burst as I turned away from the head wind. The nearest runner ahead of me was about 20 metres in front of me at this point. I decided to aim to at least keep that gap at the same distance, or close it if possible. It was wishful thinking. The gap gradually increased as we travelled along the gently undulating road back to the track, passing a convenience store, an American style diner and rice paddies along the route.

Entering the track stadium with 400M remaining, I looked at my watch for the first time in the race. It showed that I’d been running for 16 minutes 08 seconds, which meant that I was well off my target time. Wanting to start the year as I meant to go on, I stole myself to finish as strong as possible and crossed the line in 17 minutes 24 seconds.

After a week of living it up during the festive period, it was not a surprise that I was so far away from my race target. Still, running a race on January 1^st sets the tone for the year ahead. It’s a fresh year, and I came away from the race with a renewed sense of determination to make progress towards beating my 5K and 10K personal bests in 2014.