Honorary Olympians

Our pre-race publicity shot

It is not everyday that one gets the chance to run in an Olympic stadium under a fire burning in the Olympic cauldron, but that is how I spent last Sunday afternoon. It was a memorable event.

Daniel, myself, Cato, and Thomas ran an ekiden, a Japanese long-distance relay race. None of us had done one before, and being Australian, Norwegian, and Canadian, we didn’t quite know how it all worked. Thomas did a great job taking care of registration and organizing things on the day.

There were over 400 four-person teams participating in the Number Do Ekiden, but everything seemed well-organized and went off without a hitch.

As it was our first race we had chosen a short ekiden, 18 kilometers in total, with Daniel running the first 6k leg, myself on the second 4.5k leg, Cato on the third 3k leg, and Thomas running anchor on the final 4.5k leg.

It was a hot, humid day, but fortunately the race started at 4pm, so it was not as bad as it might have been. All went well, apart from when I got confused towards the end and almost did an additional lap of the stadium.

We are the champions!

As with most Japanese races, a number of runners dressed up, with wigs, traditional Japanese dress, and one particularly masochistic team ran the entire distance inside a cardboard box! Despite that they managed to avoid last place, coming in second last to a rousing reception.

As we were unhindered by lugging a box around we did pretty well, finishing 71 out of the 408 finishing teams, with a total time of 1:24:50. Daniel ran his 6k in 24:38, my 4.5 was 21:55, Cato’s 3k was 17:03, and Thomas brought us home with his 4.5k on 21:16.

We finished off the day with a trip to an Izakaya (Japanese pub) and then some karaoke. A good end to a great day!

Starting video, shot by Thomas on his iPhone. The running box comes on-screen at 0:44.