Clair de Lune, Passion Chocolat

As planned, I ran up to the Clair de Lune in the Marui just across from Ueno Station, which is about a kilometer closer each way than going to the main store. Taking the shortest route, I run down a short seedy hostess bar street, which is no big deal (it's well lit and loudspeakers repeat the local police saying that I shouldn't trust anyone who tries to lure me in and that such action is illegal, though there are still people in front of individual clubs/bars who presumably know what they can get away with; probably they'll talk to you if you go up to them, but otherwise are just standing there or talking to each other while they wait for someone interesting to come along) and then the crowded back streets of cheap shops and food stalls on the other side of the main street, but it's okay.

I hadn't looked around in the basement of Marui before, just verified that Clair de Lune was there (and they're right at the bottom of the escalator), so I hadn't noticed that it was mostly eat-in places rather than counters for take-out, not like the department store food areas, maybe more like parts of Tokyo Midtown, but cheaper. Anyway, I could eat in-at a spacious counter next to the cake shop counter. I got the Passion Chocolat, though there were a few other more basic options that I haven't tried yet, and I probably should have chosen a piece having more chocolate, since there was variation in the balance between them and I was given a choice. Still, it was a good flavor, as good as I've gotten in good passion fruit and chocolate cakes from elsewhere, maybe even from JPH, though the bottom biscuit did not impress me. The aftertaste of the cake was sort of gingery, which I couldn't detect over the passion fruit when I was eating it and also might be unrelated to the biscuit. The biscuit was not bad, just it was a dense chocolate cake with no particular character and I wanted something more dramatic to contrast with the passion fruit and chocolate cream/mousse. There was some crunch element between cake and cream as well, but also not sufficient to make much impression. It was definitely good cake and I wasn't really disappointed, but it's going to be hard to keep this shop in the quite excellent group, which I knew from the beginning. I need to get another cake from Del'Immo before visiting Clair de Lune again, since it's a potential rival.

Senju History and Culture course

Today was the week's big run. Started cloudy and there was a little rain, but it was okay and warmer than yesterday.

First I had to get to the beginning of the course, which took 44'43''86 for 7.3 km, which comes to a moderate 6.13 min/km. The course as I marked it seems to be 7.99 km, although with deviations I ran about 8.4 in 54'22''87, which is a slow 6.47 min/km, not bad for a first H&C run. Not that I was perfectly following the course. I recall seeing a marker on the far side of the main road indicating that I should have passed to the east side of Ueno Station along the south side of the road before crossing, but I'll need to check that next week and update the map as necessary. One other course deviation between the posted map and my previous map that I did investigate at the time was where there were lots of turns without help, until I found a tile on a straight bit that said I should have just turned, so I could track it back one block to another tile indicating the complement turn. Also, Minowa Station was tricky and I crossed a main road (Route 4) that I didn't need to and then followed it north past where I should have turned until I hit a railroad line and followed that enough east to know that it was not the one I needed it to be for me to be on the correct road and then pulled out the map and was able to pinpoint where I actually was. Managed to get back to where I should have been and was pondering which of 4 roads branching off was the correct one (during all of this, the sun would have been useful, or a compass). At this point, an older Japanese man offered help in English, so I showed him the map and what road I wanted. It took him a little while, but eventually he told me I was where I had definitely just come back from, to the north, and that I was still south of where I actually wanted to go so I should go north (pointing south) past the McD. As expected, people don't know where they are, which direction is north, what side of the street they are on, and/or how to read a map, but I thanked him, let him walk away in the direction that he had just recommended, and, after a suitable pause, went back and tried the road that I had been considering previously, which turned out to be correct (eventually, there were marker tiles confirming this, but this course is not the best marked on the street of the ones I've been on). Mostly, a nice enough route, certainly better than just following Route 4, which I think I've done in going to Saitama, although you still have to get back to Route 4 or some major street to cross the rivers. I've considered this because I marked a shop over by Kanamachi Station as "worthy", so if it turns out to actually be, I'd like a better route than either of the two that I've used in the past. It's outside by current range for a round trip, so no hurry.

I decided that P. Fr. Inamura Shozo might be a worthy shop, and, anyway, it's the best up in that area that I know of, so I thought that I'd at least get a cake to post, since if I did decide it was worthy, I could go back next week when I hope to follow an H&C course branching off from today's, namely, the Kototoi H&C course. The distance was 5.4 km, but I failed to stop my chronometer until after purchasing, so all I know is that it took less than 45'15''38 (the wait was not that long, but probably more than 5 minutes). The 6.7 km I used to get to Yotsu Station with cake took 46'29''06, which is a very slow 6.94 min/km, so I'll treat the early one as very slow too, for purpose of tracking speed as a measure of running capacity. I did another 1.1 km to Natural Lawson for ice cream (because I made kabocha tarts yesterday, whose appeal I'm failing to see, so I'm going to try eating one with ice cream, since pumpkin pie seems to be just an excuse for eating ice cream, as far as I could ever figure out), which was also very slow.

So for today, I have 13.2 km of very slow, 8.4 of slow, and 7.3 of moderate, so 28.9 km, within the 25 to 30 km goal. For the week, then, I have 17.5 km of very slow, 19.4 km of slow, 15.3 km of moderate, 7.2 km of fast, and 6.1 km of very fast, which is 65.5 total on 5 days. That's a 18.9 km and 2-day increase, and probably reflects my current capacity more or less, so I should be careful about how much I increase from this in a given week. In terms of intensity, that's a 6.1 km increase in very fast and 13.3 km increase in fast+ (all new for both), although only a 6 km increase in moderate+, so mainly I'm just not holding myself back from running fast. The rest of the increase is in slow (8 km) and very slow (4.9 km), as I try to get my total up closer to my pre-injury amounts.

The cake from Inamura Shozo is the Black Dandy, for ４８０ yen, and is a flour-less chocolate cake: sponge alternating with ganache. I figured correctly that it would survive rough handling. It's good, maybe very good, as chocolate cake, and does not offer any surprises. I think I'll leave this shop as just "good" and be satisfied with having blog post on this shop, which is worth knowing about if you're in Tokyo.