Saturday 25 February 2012

Tokyo Marathon - 12 hours away

As I sit in my hotel room digesting my pasta dinner and typing this blog entry, I look at my last post and believe that it has been almost a month since I wrote something. My training and preparation for the Tokyo Marathon has consumed a large amount of my time in the last month, but I'm here now and that's all that matters. In 12 hours, I will be at the start line with approximately 35,000 other runners to run 42 kms. Weather conditions say its going to be fairly cold (below 10 C) and cloudy. 

The day before a marathon is when I usually attend the Expo to pick up my bib for the race. At the Expo, there are numerous vendors selling products and offering free samples. The Miami Marathon in 2011 was probably my favorite Expo. There were many products available at great prices, good crowd control and I walked out with tons of free shit. Today's Expo in two words can be described as fucking crazy. The Expo was held at the Tokyo Big Sight, an enormous convention center. You could definitely feel and hear the excitement upon entering. I estimate that there was at least 4000 people at the convention center when I was there. While I'm no expert at these matters, it was insanely crowded.

The Big Sight

Entering the Big Sight


Nike, New Balance, Adidas and Asics all had their own booths to start with, each having a podium with guest speakers. When you have a guest speaker, there comes a crowd and with that crowd comes cameras. This is Japan after all (I can say this as I am part Japanese). Figuring that I did not want to add the the already ridiculous crowd control issues, I limited the number of pictures I took. Below are some of the pics that I did take. I would like to elaborate more on the Expo experience, but I have to get to sleep.

The Asics Stage 
That's one way to sell shoes. I think this was taken from one of Al Bundy's daydreams.

This is not practical.

Nike still makes the coolest stuff around. This the the Japan Exclusive LunarGlide 3.

Left: Official Tokyo Marathon Entrant Shirt
Right: Nike Run TYO shirt





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