Cue an early scene from “Karate Kid.” The kid himself walks into Cobra Kai dojo and discovers that his nemesis is the top student. If that wasn’t intimidating enough, the kid also encounters a meathead instructor, or sensei, as he’s laying out some raw facts. “Pain does not exist in this dojo,” the sensei yells out, “does it!” “No sensei!” And so on. “I thought that was kind of the greatest scene when I was grow up,” said Dan Yi — the same Dan Yi who, at 16, snuck out of his house in Fairfax County one morning to run the Marine Corps Marathon. Yi ran in high school and college, and said he at one point held the Virginia state marathon record for juniors. “I always sort of felt like the two-mile and three-mile were not very well suited to me,” he said. As a law student, Yi worked as a summer associate in Washington, D.C. This firm had a good deal, too. If an attorney took a summer associate to lunch, the firm would pick up the tab. So Yi started doing a lot of lunchtime runs with an attorney named Alan Pemberton, and afterward they would eat a lot of free sandwiches. After law school, Yi moved back to the D.C. area (he now works at the Department of Justice and lives in Alexandria) and resumed training runs with Pemberton. They started running in the early morning, though, to beat the heat, and because it was more convenient. “With jobs as lawyers,” Pemberton, of Silver Spring, said, “it’s so hard to keep up a regular schedule running at lunchtime, because you never know who is going to need you for a meeting or a call. But if you do it in the morning before the business day starts, it’s a lot easier to keep to a good schedule.” “That was the only way I could run,” Yi added. Soon they were joined by other lawyersslash-athletes interested in competitive distance running. Most live in the District. Yi chose a club name: The Dojo of Pain. And as far as the dojo (a Japanese term for martial arts studios that literally means “place of the way”), the runners - mostly lawyers working in D.C. - found Hains Point. Or, as Pemberton referred to it, several miles of “uninterrupted, no cross traffic, good asphalt,” which was good for long tempo runs and interval workouts … and marathon training. “There’s a lot pain in our dojo,” Pemberton said.
Lactate Stackers They met on a Tuesday morning at the entrance to Hains Point, by the holly tree across from the Tidal Basin. It was little more than two weeks after the Boston Marathon, and eight dojo members who ran it were in attendance. So was D.C.’s Rachel Clattenburg, two weeks after running 2:57:58, a 13-minute personal best, to win the New Jersey Marathon. JULY AUGUST 2014 | RUNWASHINGTON.COM | RUNWASHINGTON | 39