Skip to main content

Team Asahi Kasei's Masaya Shimizu Takes First-Ever Victory in Nobeoka Nishi Nihon Marathon

http://hochi.yomiuri.co.jp/sports/etc/news/20080224-OHT1T00205.htm
http://www.umk.co.jp/news/headline/20080224.html

translated and edited by Brett Larner

Masaya Shimizu of Team Asahi Kasei won the Nobeoka Nishi Nihon Marathon on a windy Feb. 24 in a time of 2:13:06. It was his 4th full marathon and first time winning at the distance.

18 seconds behind Shimizu was Team Kyudenko's Tomonori Onitsuka, with Kentaro Nakamoto of Team Yasukawa Denki 3rd in his marathon debut. Team Asahi Kasei's Muneyuki Ojima, running his final marathon, was 9th.

Shimizu launched a spurt at 30 km, breaking up the lead pack and turning the event into a match race against Onitsuka. Attacking at 41 km, he managed to break contact with Onitsuka and run away to his first victory. Both runners were slightly off their PB times.

Conditions at the start were 6.4 degrees with 35% humidity and NNW winds at 6.1 m/s.

Translator's note: Team Asahi Kasei continues its strong showing in the marathon this year. Asahi Kasei runner Tomoya Adachi ran 2:11:59 to win the Feb. 3 Beppu-Oita Mainichi Marathon in his debut, and teammate Hiroyuki Horibata was 9th in the Tokyo Marathon on Feb. 17, likewise debuting in 2:11:47.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Most-Read This Week

Ageo City Half Marathon Preview and Streaming

This weekend's big race is the Ageo City Half Marathon , the next stop on the collegiate men's circuit. Most of the universities bound for the Jan. 2-3 Hakone Ekiden use Ageo to thin down the list of contenders for their final Hakone rosters, and with JRN's development program that sends the first two Japanese collegiate finishers in Ageo to the United Airlines NYC Half every year a lot of coaches put in some of their A-listers too. That gives Ageo legendary depth and fast front-end speed, with a 1:00:47 course record last year from Kenyan corporate leaguer Paul Kuira (JR Higashi Nihon) and the top 26 all clearing 63 minutes. Since a lot of programs just enter everybody on their rosters you never really know who on the entry list is actually going to show up, but if even a quarter of the people at the top end of this year's list run it'll be a great race, even if conditions are looking likely to be a bit warmer than ideal. Chuo Gakuin University 's Reishi Yoshi
Post a Comment
Read more

19-Yr-Old Munakata Breaks Miura's U20 NR to Win Ageo City Half Marathon

The Ageo City Half Marathon is always big, the main race that the coaches of Hakone Ekiden-bound university men's teams use for firming up their entry rosters for the big show. That makes what's basically an idyllic small town race into one of the world's great road races, with depth unmatched anywhere. One of the top-tier people on the start list at 1:02:07, Kodai Miyaoka (Hosei Univ.) took the race out fast, but the entire pack was keying off the fastest man in the race, Reishi Yoshida (Chuo Gakuin Univ.), 1:00:31. Yoshida reeled Miyaoka in before 5 km and kept things steady in the low-1:01 range, wearing down the lead group to around 10 including his CGU teammate Taisei Ichikawa , a quartet from Izumo and National University Ekiden runner-up Komazawa University , 2 runners from local Daito Bunka University , 2:07:54 marathoner Atsumi Ashiwa (Honda), and Australian Ed Goddard . Right after 15 km Komazawa went into action, Yudai Kiyama , Hibiki Murakami and Haru Tanin
Post a Comment
Read more

New Year Ekiden Field is Set

We're deep into championship ekiden season. Over the last two weekends the six regions making up the corporate leagues held their qualifying races for the Jan. 1 New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championships. The New Year Ekiden is one of the only national-level championship ekidens that doesn't give its podium finishers auto-qualifying spots for the next year, meaning every team has to run the regional races every November. It's not hard to see how that eats into the fall marathon season and how doing it the same way they do for all the other big ekidens, including the corporate women's national championships later this month, and having the top teams auto-qualify, would open up the fall schedule and improve Japan's performances in men's marathoning. But it is what it is right now. In place of an auto-qualifying spot for podium finishers, the national corporate federation redistributes the wealth of qualifying slots available in each region based
Post a Comment
Read more