My experience as a pacer for the project helped me grow

RRC member interview

Text: Shun Sato

7th Course A2 Team (Goal: Sub-3 hours 10 minutes) MVP Keiichiro Iiyama

Injured during relay marathon

At the Beyond race last December, I achieved a personal best of 3 hours, 9 minutes and 7 seconds, and to be honest, I felt quite impressed.

About a month before Beyond, I ran a time close to my personal best in the Ageo Half Marathon, and in high spirits, headed to the relay marathon. I was told that if I placed highly, I'd qualify for the Tokyo Marathon, so I got greedy and entered (laughs). I thought I'd already warmed up in the half marathon, so I ran about 500m at top speed, and pulled a muscle in my hamstring...it was pretty painful. A week later, the Tsukuba Marathon was held, but naturally I couldn't run, so I switched my goal to Beyond. Fortunately, it was only a minor injury, but I got carried away after the half marathon and continued running when I should have stopped, which was careless of me, and a misjudgment on my part.

The power of support felt

Beyond is a circular course, so I was looking forward to getting energy from the support of everyone at RETO every time I came back after completing one lap. I had asked for water, but each time I completed a lap, a different person gave me water, which was very encouraging and gave me strength.

Changes in Attitude

A big part of the reason I was able to achieve my personal best this time was because my attitude and awareness towards training and marathons had changed. I'm a first-year student, and at first I only ran on my days off, and hardly ever ran before or after work. Now, if I have time, I run before or after work.

I realized how naive I was

What motivated me to start running was a training session in Futtsu last year. The training session was held in conjunction with a project, and although some people were unable to attend due to rain in the forecast, everyone involved in the project participated. After the run, as we talked about training methods and our thoughts on marathons, I reflected on myself and realized that my mindset towards training was still lacking.

Inspiration from peers

I was particularly inspired by what E (Katayama) said. People who achieve results run long distances, but E told me, "Instead of just running long distances, it's good to add a 20km run the day after the official RETO training session." When I started incorporating this practice, my running clearly changed, and my monthly running distance increased from 200km to 300km. I also started using Strava, which was recommended to me, and seeing that everyone else was running really motivated me. Now, I feel sick if I don't run, or rather, it feels like my day doesn't start unless I run (laughs).

Experience gained from the project

The opportunity to work as a pacer for a project was also very meaningful for me. To lead runners to success as a pacer, it's not enough to simply run averagely; you have to plan the schedule leading up to the main race, analyze the course, and think about things like who will hand out gels and water and when. The difficulty of a marathon is that even if you do all of that, you won't achieve your goal, but when I applied that to my own race, I realized I still had some shortcomings. In that sense, it was a great experience, and I learned a lot. I would like to use what I learned in future marathons to get a little closer to my goal of a sub-3 time.