Kasamatsu Track Meet

Today was the final day of the three day track meet at Kasa Matsu park. It was a very exciting three days. Tuesday I woke up at the ungodly hour of 5:00 am in order to get to school by 6:30. The bus left school at 6:45 and it was an hour dive to the meet. I couldn’t run in this one, and I might not be able to compete at all, but hopefully I will. I went to cheer on my team mates, to spend some time with them, and to get out of school for three days. The stadium was an hour away by bus, so I caught up on my sleep. When we got to Kasa Matsu the sun was already up. It rises really early here. We entered the park and to my surprise there was a stadium with a track. Not only that, there was another track for warming up. I looked at a map and I couldn’t believe how big the park was. It was the biggest and most impressive athletic facility I’ve ever been to, in the U.S. or in Japan. The stadium was enormous, with a full size track and soccer field in the middle. It wrapped all the way around, and probably could fit 20,000 or more. Then there was another track without any seating. This was were all the athletes were doing their weird exercises and warmups. I got a chance to walk around the park and take pictures on the second day. In addition to two full size tracks, it had soccer fields, at least 20 tennis courts, a building with a basketball arena, an outdoor climbing wall, two baseball diamonds, running paths, a wooded area with a brook, a huge building that housed an indoor swimming pool, skating rink, and a gymnasium, and open free fields. It was like putting Central Park, James Park, and Robert Crown Park together, with room to spare.

Needless to say I loved the place. It’s probably my favorite place I’ve been to so far. I really liked being outside all day, enjoying the weather instead of inside a school building. It felt really good to be surrounded by free space with lots of possibility. I went for some very long runs around the complex. My explorer spirit took me inside both of the huge buildings, but I only got pictures of the basketball court. That building appeared to be locked but there were bikes parked outside and it turned out there was a hidden entrance. Walking around was fun but the main attraction was the meet itself. It was the longest meet I’ve even been to, three full days. It was male and female, which contributed to the length. They also refused to start more than 8 people in any race. Even the 1500m and the 5000m were run in heats. They had tons of events, events that I’ve never seen in high school before. They had a steeplechase that was very entertaining. It’s a 3000 meter (just shy of two miles) race with large hurdles placed intermittently. One of the hurdles has a water obstacle after it. Imagine running a long race, and then having to jump fairly high every hundred meters. It looked exhausting. I’ve always wanted to do a steeplechase. They also had the 400m hurdles, I’ve only every seen the 300. They also had javelin, and hammer throw. It was an impressive number of events, especially for the facilities at the high schools I’ve seen. There were a lot of schools, at least 100. I guess they all deal with poor facilities in order to get the best track for meets.

Tuesday I watched my team’s 4 x100 meter relay. That was exciting. We didn't place. Our track team is really small, especially compared to some of the schools I saw. There are 7 boys on the team, and 6 at this meet, including me. I was just watching. Wednesday was the 800 meter dash, the only other event. Today everyone just watched. I ran a time trial. 2:13. Whew. It means I have some work to do if I want to run under 2 minutes this school year. It was interesting to see how the Japanese were compared to Americans. Fast was the answer. Every event was comparable to what I’ve seen done at Evanston. I think our team was a bit better at the 100 meter dash, and certainly at the 5000 meter run, but they had some really fast runners. I was a little surprised, I kind of expected the Japanese to be a bit slower in everything. This is not the case. The cheering was different though. Almost every team had coordinated cheers. One person would yell something, then the rest of the team would respond. This could go one for 5 minutes at a time. The most common word used was “faito”, which is a Japanese adoption of the English word fight. It’s used the same way we use “let’s go”.

It was a good break from school, even though I’ve only been in school for three weeks. It was also a good chance to get to know my team better. I now know everyone’s name. Wednesday on the walk to the convenient store for lunch, I talked with Nomura for quite some time. It was probably the longest conversation I’ve had with anyone outside of my host family since I’ve been here. It felt really good because it means that my Japanese is coming along, and I’m closer to becoming friends with the team. I’ve found that when it is just me and one, or possibly two other people I can have a semi-conversation. But when there are any more than that it becomes too difficult to follow along. If someone tries to talk to me, I can usually understand because they go slower and use words I know, but I have almost no chance of understanding what one Japanese person says to another. That’s my biggest barrier to partaking in conversation right now. But I know I’m making progress.