Tourist pace

WEEK 39

This week’s first is named in honor of my good friends Jill and Geoff who coined the most wonderful term for running in a city at a slow pace.

These two feel about running the way most of us feel about walking. Or riding in a car. It’s their preferred mode of transport. Their legs are such efficient carriers of forward momentum that they get less tired running than they do walking. Even up hill. Even at altitude. Even as tourists. Even with a hangover.

J&G routinely arrive in a new city, drop their bags at the hotel after a red-eye no less, suit up (even wearing the occasional plastic garbage bag in the rain) and head out to explore. They’ve pulled this off in Monte Carlo. Hyderabad. London. New York. Countless other locales. And so, tourist pace is born.

I, on the other hand, have a complicated relationship with running. I mostly don’t care for it but do it because it burns calories quickly, and eating is really the point of one’s day. When running outside, I stay on familiar routes, along the Embarcadero in San Francisco, or by the Hudson in New York. When traveling, I only run outside if I know the city and there is a defined path, like along the Charles River in Boston.

But the combination of running and “touristing,” let’s call it, has never drawn me in. For one thing, as an urban explorer, I tend to look up constantly. I like paper maps. I like not sweating.

Now is the time to get over myself, I decide, and bring tourist pace to the streets of Tokyo. Get this: I had so much fun, I did it twice.

Friday morning, I woke just after sunrise to a cloudless 45-degree morning and Mt. Fuji looming outside my window (albeit 60 miles away). Two colleagues had convinced me to join them on a run through the city – their first in Tokyo as well.

Setting off at a lovely tourist pace (I explained the back story), we headed west of the hotel towards Aoyama and Yoyogi Park – areas I know very well in fact. But I will admit that running at dawn through these primarily retail neighborhoods – long before the city wakes up – was an entirely new experience for me. We passed still sleepy locals walking their dogs, a few other runners, delivery trucks and sidewalk sweepers. And quite unexpectedly, on Omotesando-dori we passed a line of at least 100 people, some wrapped in sleeping bags, queuing for a pop-up face mask store. We looked at them like they were crazy, and they returned the stare.

The highlight of the run was the Meiji Shrine – a place I had last visited on New Year’s Eve a decade ago. Given the very early hour, there were at most 10 people praying, following the traditional Shinto prayer pattern: bow twice, clap twice, bow one last time. The reverberance of the clapping will stay with me…

Here was our Friday morning route:

And a three-dimensional view from the 53^rd story of the hotel.

Saturday morning I was at it again, this time alone and ready to explore a new area – running a circuit I came up with from Roppongi to the Imperial Palace and back along the Akasaka Palace grounds.

Around 7:00 am, I stepped out of the hotel, turned a different direction than the day before, and the whole thing became instantly more challenging.

I carried my phone for safety reasons, but promised myself I would navigate only using a sliver of a paper map to get myself the 3K from the hotel to the Imperial Palace grounds. I ran at an easy tourist pace along narrow sidewalks, passing tiny shops and restaurants. No one was out.

My quiet street then spit me out onto a wide boulevard dwarfed by imposing government buildings. At this point, I doubted my own GPS superpowers — shouldn’t I be there by now? — but kept on it, the lone jogger. This was not the most attractive part of the city, but after cresting a small hill (Tokyo is shockingly hilly), I saw the moat around the Imperial Palace grounds and the Sakuradmon Gate where I’d planned to start my palace circuit.

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It turns out that the Imperial Palace loop is one of the great urban runs, a 5K uninterrupted route around the perimeter of the palace grounds. I joined the flow – counter-clockwise mind you – and fell into step with huge groups of Japanese runners. Although I often feel like a running imposter, here I had found my tribe.