Tom and I continued our training for the Tokyo Marathon 2010 this morning with our longest run yet – 22.5km around the south of Tokyo.

It was great fun, as we weren’t following any prescribed route, rather, just left Naka-Meguro at 7.30am and headed in the general direction of Rainbow Bridge, taking any road which looked interesting.

Here’s our route. You can view this is 3D in Google earth by downloading this file.

View the widescreen version here.

South Tokyo Half-Marathon

Map your trip with EveryTrail

Here’s a few of the embedded photos:

We found some big deserted roads down by the harbour

Rainbow Bridge

Tom’s on a boat

Bizarre… a man playing a piano on a roof

Secret 5-foot tunnel under the Yamanote line – being held up by Tom

Some kind of rich religious chemistry cult?

Passed by the legendary parasite museum

Us at the end of 22.5km

Feel’s good to have done that. Good start to a Sunday.

Today was a very good day.

It started off as most Monday’s do – volunteer work at city hall. I went extra early today, in order to finish early and meet George an hour before our lunchtime appointment at the Ritz-Carlton Tokyo re. Japan Podshow – George and I deserve a break at the end of our 6-month stint! It was about then that I posted this photo – note Tokyo tower in the background. I wrote a short blog to accompany this on dannychoo.com.

I also briefly posted the following photo to this blog by mistake – I’m posting by email a lot of the time and made a little mistake with the email address, sending it here instead of just to Flickr.

I tell you, that place is incredible. Lunch is pretty reasonable too, starting at 3,500yen. We had the Chef’s special which would have been 4,500 yen (had we been paying More info here. Mondays are Ladies Day – 4 for the price of 3.

I note from the site that dress is ‘Casual Elegance’ – George and I were there in our jeans and T-shirts!

The staff were extremely friendly. Linda, the pr manager whom we’re working with to make this happen, is very kind. The catering and restaurant managers knew that we’d be visiting and came out to say hello too, which was nice.

We have a preliminary date set to shoot the last episode of Japan Podshow for late next month – our venue may well be the most expensive suite in the whole of Tokyo (and possibly Japan?) – it’s 3,300 metres of floor space, over 50 floors up. Whilst we’re pencilled in, if someone books it, we’ll use another suite.

We’re thinking this will be something along the lines of Cirque du Soleil.

Sat down at starbucks, posted another live blog to Dannychoo – and then later got an email from a stranger – who turned out to be the person who sat at that table just prior to me, had read my post on DannyChoo.com and also coincidentally had discovered Japanpodshow, and had seem me walking around with a tripod – small world!

After doing a bit of podcast editing I met up with Kamasami Kong of the Metpod, and together we attended a Media Tectonics gig at which Twitter/real life friend 1rick was presenting. Great stuff. very sexy keynote.

Also bumped into Christine there who presented with me on our podcasts from Wireless Japan Expo. Oh, and Lem Fugitt of Robot Dreams – whom we’ll be working with to make some videos at the international robotics expo in November – very excited about that!!

Also met Ian Thomas Ash, producer / director of The Ballad of Vicki and Jake – a hard-hitting documentary which will have its Japanese premier this Sunday in Nakana Zero Hall. The second film in this series will be out in December.

Anyway, Ian, a very nice man, lives not all that far away, and could do with a hand getting his work out there, and we could learn a lot from him and possibly borrow some equipment, so I hope we’ll do some work together.

All in all it’s been a fabulous day. Opportunities are continuing to present themselves as and when needed. I think we’ll be able to do some fantastic stuff this autumn, and hopefully start to benefit financially from the effort too!

Anyway, back to the full time job in 8 hours!

Joseph

(p.s. ‘Sutarto’ is japanese for ’start’!)