L'Atelier du Sucre: first cake, Sanguine

As planned, I ran the Shibamata History and Culture course, or at least I ran most of it. After the Shibamata Taishakuten temple, there are not any signs until the park, so I don't seem to have exactly the done the final part correctly. I suppose I should try again, which I should do anyway, since I want to get back to the cake shop. The run there was about 10 km/h apparently, which is faster than I expected. I was trying not to press it, since this is my longest recent run. I had the same speed from the end of the H&C course to the cake shop, but then dropped down to the high end of 8 km/h on the way home, not surprisingly, though some of that was navigation issues and a lot of it was the quite heavy crowds on the streets for the cherry blossom viewing. Total distance was between 42.5 and 43.0 kilometers, so I met my goal of a marathon length run. I'll do two shorter runs next week, am busy the week after that, so maybe I'll try a 50 km run in three weeks, though I haven't planned out where to go yet. I still have maybe three more H&C courses to do, but that last couple are ~100 km, so probably not until the fall, if ever.

The Shibamata course is pretty nice, although the temple entrance shopping street was packed, so so running it would be better to skip that. Like many courses, the beginning is not marked that I could see, and no signs after the temple until you get to the end (or near the end), where they have of the full-sized maps. Otherwise, it seems like a nice neighborhood, especially compared to the bleak view running east from Tokyo, though that is skewed by the fact that I need roads that will connect me reasonable well between bridges.

The cake was the Sanguine, that is, blood (orange), which is used with one layer of cream. There is also Bergamot orange, which I suppose is the slices on top. The other cream layer is milk chocolate. The bottom has chocolate crunch and paliné. I done that this is sandwiched between probably a almond biscuit, though I haven't backed either for a while, so I'm not sure that I could distinguish from a hazelnut one. It was simple and cheep (only 400 yen), but I'll have to say it's excellent, so I'll have to get back there, which is not very convenient, but maybe I'll work it into a longer training run.

Note that I was fairly restrained after all the gorging the previous two days and did not have any other snacks along the way, or even a sports drink (which would probably be bad if it were hotter and I was sweating more). I did have a couple English muffins with tea milk jam immediately upon getting home.