Kamakura Trail Run with Namban Rengo

When organising a trail run, its unlikely you would take into account the location of the US president, or the ministers and leaders of any country for that matter. But even with the APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation) in town, we hadn't figured this would affect our run around the hills surrounding the historic and beautiful town of Kamakura.
The first hindrance was the lack of lockers at the train station, none available for security reasons. Lockers were removed long ago in the UK and US, for fear of bombs being planted etc but they're so useful when you're in a new town, for all kinds of travellers. Instead we had to plead with the restaurant owner to the west of the station to leave our bags with them, we'd be eating there later so a safe choice.
After that the APEC leaders decided to delay our run further by blocking the main road up to Tsuruhachimangu shrine. Before they could pass, the police had closed the roads to all traffic. Large crowds of people were standing along the road waiting to see who or what would pass by, was it Obama? Lots of excitement but in the end the 3 white buses with some bureaucrats waving out the rear window was quite an anticlimax, and an added delay to the start of our run.

Heading out east from the main temple, Tsuruhachimangu, to Zuisenji, then the start of the Tenen hiking trail. The trail is steep in places, a lot of the climbing is at walking pace and certainly where there are steps. But most of it is in dense vegetation so it very quickly feels like you're in a deep forest, even though you're obviously only minutes away from a large city.

I've walked this course before on a day with clearer skies when you can see across the ocean to Mount Fuji, but even today its really nice to be able to stop at the several viewpoints and admire the scenery. Lots of other running groups out today, but Namban Rengo have the largest group, 15 rengo out in force.

The tenen trail ends (or starts) at Kenchoji temple, and if you run east to west then this means you get into the temple grounds for free, which we felt was paid for by the hard effort we had put in to get this far. The group split in half here, one group heading back to the station for a 10km run, the other half crossing the road and heading northwards to pick up the Daibutsu trail for a km or so. We dropped down to Zeniarai Benten shrine for a habitual stop. This temple has a small cave at the rear of the ground where people wash money (coins and notes) in the spring water. By doing this, the money is said to pay back more than its face value, so a real bargain if it comes true.
The Daibutsu trail leads of course to the famous big buddha of Kamakura, but the feeling in the group at this stage was to head to the coast and away from the tiring ups and downs of the trails. After the delayed start, it was clear we would not get back to the restaurant for the booked time if we stuck to the hills.
The sea looked so inviting, and Peter took the plunge whilst we continued towards Enoshima and back, Jay wouldn't be happy if we had covered less than 20km for the day.


After a quick sento which was too hot to be relaxing, but at least we were clean, we met the others in the okinomiyaki restaurant. Most of us were pretty tired by this stage, so when faced with do-it-yourself meal we could easily have sat back and let some enthusiastic person do the cooking. Instead, it was left to me to cook and order some food, which was quite a disaster as the other table seemed to have a mountain of food, whilst we had a few strips of meat and some bean sprouts. And with Kylie being a vegetarian, she even couldnt eat the vegetarian omelette after someone sprinkled the dried bonito fish flakes over them. But at least the beers were flowing and it was all good fun.

On leaving the restaurant John was missing his shoes! Never heard of this before in all the places over the years Ive been in Japan, that someone has taken, by accident or otherwise, a pair of shoes from the entrance to a building. The restaurant offered a pair of slippers, several sizes too small, but a spare pair of running shoes was supplied by Peter for the journey home. I wonder if the shoes will one day be returned to their rightful owner, as often happens in this country?

Thanks Jay for orgainising this trail run, it was a great day out with the Namban Rengo running club.