Henri le Roux and Akasaka Palace laps.

Bought cake first and then went home and did laps.

The laps were around Akasaka Palace, which is a 3.3 km course and has the most slope for the distance of anywhere I run regularly. I initially thought that I should do 3 or 4 laps for a long run, but of course, that takes time and I had work today and will work tomorrow. I went fast and recorded a good time for 2 laps, so I considered quitting there, but it's hard to stop once you get going, so I split the difference and did 3 laps for the first time and left 4 laps for a different day. Four laps around Akasaka Palace is the same distance as 10 laps around Meiji Gingu Gaien, but the Akasaka course is hilly and farther away, and so is tougher.

Times were 17'06''81, 17'21''75, and 18'14''90. The last up-slope was tough to stay running at the beginning, and obviously my time increased a lot for the last lap. I'll probably have to start slower if I want to improve my 3-lap average, or at least to bring down my maximum lap-time for a 3-lap run. As it was, I didn't break my record for 1 lap, but went from under 20' to under 17'30'' for 2 laps (each and average), and got 3 laps under 18'30'' each and 18' average, which is pretty good.

My motivation for wanting a long run to begin with was holiday weight gain. My scale says that my body fat percentage is not up, but I don't trust its reliability for that (it consistently goes down several percent between morning and night, which seems unlikely, but I don't know how much it natural varies during the day).

Since the first cake was great, I went back to Henri le Roux at Isetan for a second type: Mousse aux Chocolat Madagascar for 540 yen. I'm not sure whether the chocolate is from the company Chocolat Madagascar or is just made from Madagascar chocolate. It's mousse, but between layers of dense, finely layered biscuit. It was very good and I'm going to say it was great, although it's a little subtle, which is nice sometimes.

If I find a third great cake there, I'll designate them great, but they don't have that many more kinds of cake (everything else was sold out today, but I got the one I was after), so it will be tough. Of course, the Tokyo Midtown shop has great Kouign Amann, so it could give them a "great" for that, but it's not cake and is at a separate location, so I'll leave them as "worthy" with a special note to visit the Tokyo Midtown shop for the Kouign Amann.