At the time of writing I have ran 11 marathons, my 10:th “celebration marathon”, I completed in Tokyo on Mars 29:th 2009. One of my closest friends, let’s call him Johnny, moved to Tokyo in the autumn of 2008. Johnny is by far the most positive and enthusiastic person I know, no one else is even close.
Unfortunately, I am not a enough talented writer to describe the overwhelming reaction I got from Johnny when I suggested that maybe I should come over and visit and we could participate in the Tokyo marathon. Let’s just say he liked the idea and we both signed up. If one should give Johnny some constructive criticism, it would be that he is not always quite as good at fully executing on all of his plans in life. Johnny’s previous experience from running marathons was one we did together in Monaco a couple of years ago, back then he kept me company for approx 5 km before he announced his withdrawal from the race, this time he was with me for a good 10 km before stating “I need a cigarette”.
Due to our limited knowledge of Japanese, or possible just due to not paying attention enough, what we did not know was that apparently there was also a 10 km race in parallel. So what seemed as an fairly unlikely coincidence, just where Johnny turned off the regular marathon path a finish line appeared. Johnny simple crossed the goal line and to his big surprise got a medal and a shirt and some other stuff. The 10 km medal turned out to look very similar to the official marathon medal, and later that day as Johnny proudly walked into to a café with the medal around his neck people stood up and applauded him on his achievement. This may very well be Johnnys proudest moment in sports.
When you are running marathons, you will a lot of the times see the same people that are running at fairly the same pace as you, sometimes they run pass you a little faster, a couple of km later you are the faster runner passing them and so on. In this race it was a tiger, a blue tiger (my guess is that it wasn’t really a tiger, but a rather small Japanese guy inside a tiger suit).
From the start to the very end of the race me and Tiger was never very far apart. In the beginning of the race I found his blue smiling face quite amusing. However, when you are starting to get tired your patience in general tends to drop, and after a while he started to annoy me. With only about 3-4 km left, I had not seen him for a while, when he suddenly passed by me with the same happy look. As I saw him disappear before me, I wanted to run up to him and simple push him of the path. I did not however, due to two reason, the first one is rather obvious, you just do not push blue tigers that close to completing a marathon, that would be insane. The second reason was that I was too tired to keep up with his pace, and I realized at that time that the tiger would beat me.
But then, with only a couple of 100 meters left, above all the Japanese head I suddenly saw two blue ears not very far ahead. With all my strength I increased the speed as much as I possibly could and just before the finish line I managed to run by him (I did need to pass him with some distance though, as otherwise his big blue nose would beat me to the goal line). Normally your first feeling after completing the 42195 meters is a mixture between happiness and relief, this time is was victory and my first thought was “Eat this, tiger b**ch”.
