Yamaguchi

Work trips continue. I was in Kofu last month helping a pharmaceutical factory prepare for an FDA inspection. Then went to Belgium and Germany at the beginning of this month to help a client audit two of their suppliers. Then I handled the actual FDA inspection in Kofu, and am now on day two of seven business days in Yamaguchi, also for an FDA inspection.

When on the road this way, I vary wildly between slothful and spartan lifestyles. It is very hard not to eat the most sumptuous thing available for every dinner. Lunches are usually a bento box in the factory. Between (suppressed) anxiety about the job and the cold-block-o’-rice nature of the bento, I have little appetite until the day is over. That is when appetite comes roaring back.

It is vastly preferable when I have someone to eat and drink with on the trip. Yesterday, I got to meet Jim Rion, who lives up the coast from here toward Hiroshima, in a city called Hikari. We met in the middle in Shunan, near Tokuyama Station, which is the next station from where I am on the Shinkansen. Jim is a sake expert. We became acquainted on Twitter. He just published a book called Discovering Yamaguchi Sake. If you are interested in sake, you would and should enjoy his book. Yesterday he took me to a great izakaya and taught me a lot about sake, over good sake and food. Not being on Twitter anymore is good for me, but I am constrained to admit that the site has led to me meeting many excellent people in real life. Jim is such a one.

Shunan has a food called yakimen, which is flour-based noodles that contain seaweed, placed on a hot domed griddle with meat and nori and other things. It is a fine food. I had two helpings.

But regardless of the dietary situation, the only thing that really decides whether I feel good or don’t during a work trip is running. If I run in the morning, I feel good. End of story.

So I have set a daily reminder from Siri to sleep in running clothes. Being in the running clothes when I wake up removes one major mental hurdle to getting out and running. Having my work clothes set out and ready for after the run also helps. Yesterday I would have run but it was raining hard. That wouldn’t always stop me but I have new running shoes that I don’t want to get wet and make stinky by leaving them that way in the hotel room all day.

But this morning I ran a modest 4km. As always, it was completely worth it and I feel great as a result.

Full disclosure: Over half the run was through unremarkable station and residential areas and under a national road. (Most runs from which I share a nice scene include a lot of this.) But after that was the reward: A lovely section of fields and the paths among them, like the one above. Soil in this part of Yamaguchi is sandy and light-colored, and drains well for a lightly cushioned running surface.

Running does a lot of things for me. A couple that I really like are: It places mental images in my brain (such as the image above) that I can reflect on during the work to distract myself when necessary; and the feeling of muscles and joints having been taxed is nice to savor throughout the day. I sometimes have the photos I took from the morning run on my iPad during the day to stare at. There is a nice tiny feeling of escape from the work at hand. Mind you, I don’t dislike the work of auditing or interpreting. My mind, though, gets bored in specific moments and seeks out some distraction. Maybe this is a deficiency of mine, to not be fully present the entire time. And at important moments I am fully present. But in any case this harking back to the morning run is a helpful coping mechanism.

Here are some other scenes from the run. Nothing spectacular. Just pleasant. Pleasant is plenty good.

(This last one in particular pleases me because it is a memory of having to go through a bit of brush to get to the road to run back to the hotel to be able to get ready and then head to the work site. Runs sometimes result in a tiny morning crisis that has to resolved before the job. Having solved that crisis, the brain is less perturbed by things that happen in the job.)