This past Sunday I ran my first 10k! It was also my first race in Japan.
I ran in the Jubilo Iwata Marathon. The word "marathon" here is used loosely. It basically means any long distance race. The Jubilo Iwata Marathon had a 3k, 5k, 10k, and half marathon. So despite the name, there wasn't even a full marathon.
Jubilo is the name of Iwata's soccer team. Jubilo means "joy" in both Portuguese and Spanish. Thank you, Wikipedia.
I had to get up at 6:30 so that I could meet up with Jonathan at the station around 7:40 and take a bus to Yamaha Stadium. The line for the bus was super long and wrapped around the block, but luckily the line moved pretty quickly because buses came often. I think we got on a bus around 8:00.
When we arrived at the stadium we walked a bit to find the place to turn in our bags. We attached our numbers to our shirts, our time chips to our shoes, and checked in our bags. A few weeks ago we had received packages in the mail with our numbers, safety pins, time chips, luggage tags, and t-shirt tickets. It was a really nice, organized system.
The 10k started at 9:40. It was very crowded at first and a little hard to get around people, but it thinned out pretty soon for me because I'm slow. Jonathan had a hard time during most of the race though.
