I'm sitting in Matterhorn, a famous cake shop 3 minutes from the station in Gakugaidaigaku (about ten minutes from Shibuya). The reputation is well-deserved - I've just eaten the orange cake in the picture - it was delicious! Do ask where it is at the police box if you're ever in the neighbourhood.
I think I deserve a treat though. This morning, myself and two friends who will be running the Tokyo Marathon in 6 weeks ran our longest training run yet - 29km (18 miles). Our time was pretty good too.
The route we took followed a part of the actual marathon route - starting in Shinagawa, going up to Nihonbashi, then further north to Asakusa. From there it was back down to Ginza, then west through Roppongi, Ebisu, finishing at Naka-Meguro. (See the route and stats as tracked by my iPod touch here:
bit.ly/29kmTokyo
Being a Sunday morning the streets were really quiet. The weather's been great today too, and best of all my legs held out to the end! Around the 25km mark I really began to hurt though, so put my headphones on to listen to some motivating music - Red Hot Chilli Peppers did the trick!
I was also trying out the technology for the race itself - the emobile 3G to WIFI device I blogged the other day really is great, and means the iPod is a lot more useful as it can be connected to the internet anywhere. I'll probably run a Tweet-to-voice app on it - viewers of the live video can send comments via Twitter, and those tweets will automatically be read to me whilst running!
I had a problem with my iPhone though - it got stuck in Zoom mode - meaning I could only see one section of the screen at a time as it was so big. So, I couldn't enter my passcode, and thus couldn't use it! When I got home I looked up the problem and found that it's actually a 'feature' that I had accidentally turned on - you tap the screen with three fingers and it enters zoom mode, tap it again and it goes back to normal (has to be switched on in the iPhone settings).
Anyway, time for more cake :-)
What are you doing this Sunday? Hope it's more relaxing than my morning was!
Joseph
