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Running The Original 2020 Tokyo Olympics Marathon Course Part Two - Men's Marathon

Pre-corona, today would have been the men's marathon at the Tokyo Olympics, originally in Tokyo, then bumped off to Sapporo. For the sake of completion, for the third year in a row I ran most of the Tokyo course at the time that the race would have happened, starting at 6:00 a.m., taking temperature and humidity measurements every 30 minutes, and finishing back at the Olympic Stadium at 8:15 a.m. around the time that many of the top men would have been coming in.


Like last week's run at the original time of the women's marathon, conditions today wouldn't have been a problem for anyone who had done any kind of preparation to run a summertime marathon. Counter to the forecast, which predicted sunny skies the whole way, right before the schedule start time cloud cover rolled in over the city, helping to keep temperatures down. Humidity was high, but as per the forecast the temperature actually went down over the first 90 minutes. The humidity rose in relation to the cooler temps, and especially around the Imperial Palace turnaround between 30 and 35 km where the moats contribute to typically higher humidity, it got a bit muggy.

But as the sun started to burn though the clouds, which dissipated to a thin layer after 90 minutes but stuck around to take the edge off any direct sunshine, a breeze came up that kept things cool to skin over the last 45 minutes. The humidity dropped sharply after the uphill at 40 km, making for what would have been a fast and comfortable last 2 km back into the stadium.


In terms of heat index readings, things were pretty comparable to last week with the women's race. In that case conditions barely ticked over into the "caution" range until the very end when they tripped the "extreme caution" wire at a point when almost everybody in the field would have been finished. In this case they were at the higher end of "caution" most of the way, then just crossed the line into "extreme caution" over the last 45 minutes. But it's worth pointing out that between the continued cloud cover and the breeze that came up around that time, the last 45 minutes felt more comfortable than the half hour before that. As with last week, my pace was faster than last year, my fluid intake was about half, and I ran the entire way with a mask. No problems.

So was the IOC's decision to forcibly pull the marathons out of Tokyo and stick them in Sapporo justified? In the case of the women's marathon the conditions in Tokyo last weekend were good enough that there would have been only a marginal gain. For the men, Sapporo is having a freakishly cool weekend, just 19˚C this morning. It was really windy, but with the shoes and everything else it seems like an Olympic record would have been inevitable. The IOC would have looked like geniuses. Props to whoever is reading their crystal ball, that's great, pat yourselves on the back. But basically there was no real problem in Tokyo, the city hosting the Olympics. I'll leave the final word on that to somebody way more qualified to leave a final word, a two-time Olympic marathon 4th-placer.


All throughout the run today, even at 6:00 a.m., there were people out running the course in commemoration of what might have been. One guy going the other way wearing a Tokyo 2020 t-shirt and some kind of official ID gave me a quick bow on the run. I started today at Nihonbashi, the 10 and 20 km point, so that I could finish at about the same time the top men would have. Coming back to Nihonbashi at around 28 km after the turnaround by Tokyo Tower, I'm pretty sure I saw Yuma Hattori, one of Japan's Olympic marathon team members, running out the other way at 10 km. Same build, same form, same hair length as in the picture he posted on Instagram on Friday, wearing Japanese national team kit with sunglasses and a hat pulled low, about the right kind of pace he would have been doing for a long jog.

I saw him face to face in Asakusa last year with a support bicycle. This time he was on the other side of the street, all by himself, so I can't be 100% sure, Let's say 80% sure. Totally in character for him to be out there by himself doing a run in memory of what might have been, though, even if it was only two days after running the Sapporo course. Let's hope that he and everyone else who should have been competing in Tokyo this summer somehow beat the odds and still get to do it next year, even if it's just in Sapporo.

© 2020 Brett Larner, all rights reserved

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