Today was the 2015 Kyoto City Marathon. Just as when I blogged about the 2012 Kyoto City Marathon, I went out with the Nikkor 300mm f/2, but new this time is that I intended to try to photograph two acquaintances who had told me their intended pace and sent photos of what they were wearing.

To help increase my luck in picking out two faces from 16,000 runners, I set up a bit past the halfway point just before a turnaround, so runners were going both directions in front of me. If I suddenly noticed a friend going by one way, I'd have a few minutes to properly prepare for photographing their return.

Unfortunately, I was literally 30 seconds too late to take my intended route to the spot... I saw the road become closed off right in front of me, so I ended up having to make a meandering path around traffic cutoffs, and I arrived to my intended spot 15 minutes later than I planned.

It was hard not to notice this guy's amazing head of hair. He seems to be a force of nature... I was able to find his web site, where he identifies himself as a surgeon, musician (piano/guitar/vocal), and obviously an athlete. He even has his own custom-designed shirt... he's the “Ricka” of “Team Ricka”.

I was getting dizzy after 20 minutes of trying to pick faces out from the moving crowd, and thought I'd missed them both, when suddenly one pops into view!

It was about three minutes to the turnaround and back, so I watched and waited...

I wasn't able to pick her out again... that's how crowded it was. On the chance that she'd paused along the way to rest, I lingered for a while and took in the colorful crowd...

She happened to glance right at me as I snapped a picture, which is why I include it here. A web search for her name (Katherine Lee Ming Sze) shows her in lots of race results.

A few minutes past when Elena should have returned by, it started to rain, so I packed up to go home.

The rain had stopped by the time I got home, so I left my scooter at home and walked out to the finish to scope out a good place to spot someone far enough away to take pictures. I find an appropriate spot 360m before the finish, looking down a 140m segment of road that slopes down to my position.

The other person I was looking for, Jeremy White, is a member of the “Cycling Kyoto” Facebook Group that I've recently joined. I've never met him, but when he mentioned he was going to run the race, I asked for his pace an a photo of what he was wearing.

There were a bazillion Caucasians with “blue shirt and green number bib” and especially after not having been able to find him at the first spot, I held little hope finding him here, but I kept scanning far ahead with the big 300mm lens, and lo and behold he appeared.

The photo above, with proper focus missed, really shows that I don't have the skill to use this lens in this situation. I love using a manual-focus lens, but even at these distances, f/2 leaves a pretty thin depth of field and I'd set up such that the runners are doing their best to move out of the plane of focus as quickly as possible.

I want to say that this is not the lens for this situation, but I could make it work better if I had better skill. But I want to use it anyway because it's such an exceedingly rare kind of lens (there are only a few hundred in existence), so it has the chance to give me results no one else could get.

Mostly I feel I failed — none of the results here are photographically what I had hoped for — but the quality of the subject matter makes up for it. Folks who see themselves in the pictures like them, and that's probably the most important measure of success.

It would be another hour before I expected Elena to come by, so I looked for fun and interesting folks in the crowd...

At one point I noticed the banner for the running club that Elena is a member of, but I was growing hopeless about being able to pick her out of the ever-increasing mass of runners. Just look at how the numbers had swelled:

I didn't expect Elena for another 20 to 30 minutes, during which the numbers would only swell...

... which makes it all the more shocking that I actually noticed her 25 seconds later:

Having had success in plucking the two needles, I wandered back towards the finish...

I ran into a number of folks I knew in the few minutes I was walking home, including Elena who had thrown street clothes over her running clothes and was headed to the subway...

Elena looked less tired than I felt. She often does 12-hour 100km mountain runs, so a little thing like a marathon doesn't work up much of a sweat, I suppose. Out of my league.

Elena is Russian and I assume she speaks English just fine, as any Westerner I've ever meet in Japan does, but at the gym we speak only Japanese to each other. It feels weird because it's such a rare thing (English is the lingua franca among Westerners and many non-Japanese Easterners as well), but it's The Right Thing. We're in Japan, after all.

Anyway, おめでとう (congratulations) to Elena, Jeremy, and everyone who finished, or even attempted, the race. As for myself, I feel like a winner too, for being able to get up so early on a Sunday. Time for a well-earned nap! 😉

(But first I'll send photos to all the folks I could track down.)