Okinawa Marathon

It could have been super humid and rainy during the run. Instead, it rained overnight and stopped half an hour before the race! When the clouds cleared, it got quite sunny. It took a 1:45 hour bus ride from Naha to get to the starting venue. Including the day before for the expo, it was a lot of traveling back and forth over the two days on a local city bus. The course had 1400 ft of vertical and downhill, which is quite unusual for a road race. It’s under par for trail races. The expo was quite skimpy, just the customary running gear in a few booths. There was enough food on offer at the two rows of food trucks, but nothing like what I saw at the Osaka marathon. After all, it’s a small city race. Too bad they wouldn’t give me one of the souvenirs on their tables even though I flew from California to run this race. There were some fun photo ops: a huge horned bull, a HIMARS launcher, some Taiko drummers, and a nice tunnel view back down onto the city. It was a big loop around a part of the island, so there were many rolling hills, nothing undoable as it was all on road or sidewalk. There were many AED runners to help ailing runners, as well as volunteers with cooling spray along the side of the course and many people offering all sorts of snacks, even cans of beer! For a small city race, it was fine to do just once.