Pierre Hermé and laps

Got cake from Pierre Hermé at Isetan today. Before eating it (or dinner), I went to Meiji Jingu Gaien and did laps. My goal was 7'30''/lap for 8 laps. My experience was 1st lap is a final warm up, 2nd lap the sweating starts, 3rd lap the muscles start to feel it, 4th lap I was hungry, 5th lap I felt like a furnace, can't remember what I thought at the 6th other than this was the lap that would determine whether I was going to have trouble, 7th picking up my feet was becoming more of a problem, and 8th (or maybe earlier) the heavy puffing started and it became an effort to keep up the pace. The times were good: 56'15''96 total, laps in order 7'03'', 7'11'', 7'10'' (so I managed to not slack off like last time), 7'00'', 7'04'', 6'59'', 6'56'', and 6'54'', with the average just under 7'02''. So I should try 7'15''/lap for 9 laps next time, although that's going to be hard (and long).

The cake for today is the Tarte Infiniment Vanille, which is a standard there, but not on the Japanese web site (a search gets a lot of French hits). It's 756 yen, so I'll probably not buy cake tomorrow, although I'd like some French bread to go with my homemade curry. This tart is vanilla all the way through, I think. The base, inside the shell, is a more dry vanilla, whereas the top is a rich mousse (I might go back tomorrow and double check the card at Isetan), now that I've eaten it. A french description is that it is white chocolate ganache and vanilla (what I figured), and vanilla mascarpone cream, which I don't know how to recognize. Anyway, this has a rich full vanilla flavor, and feels like a lot of cake, despite its small size, because of the richness. Definitely a great cake, but that's what I expected and what I went for.