The second run in my Art of Running series took place this morning in central Tokyo, and saw me joining the Sunday morning crowd for a section of the Imperial Palace circuit, before branching off towards Aoyama. Creating the eye of The 21km Imperial Duck required pausing the tracking software for a section of the run, then restarting when I reached the right spot. I also found that leaving home with only 60% battery on the iPhone 4 is not a good idea if you have two hours of GPS tracking and music planned. Finished it with 2% battery remaining!
It was really interesting doing the beak as I’ve never been to that part of Tokyo before, was stunned to fund such a big park that I’d never been into until now.
It was also useful to identify further issues I might encounter with the GPS tracking. Runkeeper has a tendency to crash in certain situations, and Google Earth just doesn’t have the resolution I need. I was also using Nike+ on my iPhone 3GS, and Runkeeper running with a second Runkeeper account in my bag (that captures the entire run, without pauses).
Here’s the route in Google Earth
