Skip to main content

Mara Yamauchi Defends Matsue Title

by Brett Larner

Beijing Olympics women's marathon 5th place finisher Mara Yamauchi (U.K.) outran Yuri Kano (Second Wind AC) for the second time this year to defend her Matsue Ladies Half Marathon title. Strong winds kept times slow overall, but Yamauchi won by nearly a minute in 1:10:09 with Kano 2nd in 1:11:02. Meijo University runners took 3rd through 5th place to sweep the National University Women's Half Marathon Championships and assure Meijo of solid representation on the national team at July's World Student Games.

The expected three-way battle up front did not take place when 2009 Osaka International Women's Marathon winner Yoko Shibui (Team Mitsui Sumitomo Kaijo) felt some discomfort in her left knee and opted to jog the 10 km race as a guest runner. As in February's Kagawa Marugame International Half Marathon Yamauchi went out hard, covering the first 5 km in 16:17 to Kano's 16:36 with a large pack led by Meijo runners Kikuyo Tsuzaki, Sayo Nomura and Seika Nishikawa running a more conservative 17:02. Yamauchi then continued to widen her lead, running each of her subsequent 5 km splits faster than Kano. Kano in turn widened her lead over the top pack through 15 km, but between 15 and 20 km she lost 11 seconds to the Meijo runners.

The final 1.0975 km were a game of chase, as Tsuzaki and Nomura continued to close on Kano, who likewise narrowed the gap to Yamauchi. In both cases the margins were too large, however, and the final finish order remained as it had been throughout much of the race. Yamauchi and Kano will next face each other in April's London Marathon. Tsuzaki will be selected for the World Student Games and is likely to be joined by at least Nomura.

Complete results for the 2009 Matsue Ladies Half Marathon are available in PDF format here. The race will be broadcast nationwide on Mar. 17 from 2:55 a.m. to 3:50 a.m. on Fuji TV. International viewers should be able to watch online through one of the sites listed here.

2009 Matsue Ladies Half Marathon
1. Mara Yamauchi (U.K.) - 1:10:09
2. Yuri Kano (Second Wind AC) - 1:11:02
3. Kikuyo Tsuzaki (Meijo Univ.) - 1:11:53
4. Sayo Nomura (Meijo Univ.) - 1:11:54
5. Seika Nishikawa (Meijo Univ.) - 1:12:04
6. Ayaka Ohira (Team Daihatsu) - 1:12:13
7. Satoko Uetani (Kobe Gakuin Univ.) - 1:12:29
8. Seika Iwamura (Team Daihatsu) - 1:12:30
9. Manami Takemori (Team Sysmex) - 1:12:34
10. Misato Tanaka (Team Sysmex) - 1:12:40

(c) 2009 Brett Larner
all rights reserved
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Wow! Mara is 36 years old and she won 2 half marathons. Her personal best for the marathon should be much faster than 2:25:03.
March 17, 2009 at 7:56 AM
Post a Comment

Most-Read This Week

Hakone Champ AGU Hits 50 km a Day in Spring Break Training Camp

Having scored its 3rd-straight Hakone Ekiden win this past January, Aoyama Gakuin University spent the Golden Week spring holidays training on the Myoko Plateau in Niigata from May 2-6. Along with the champion men's ekiden team, the first 2 members of AGU's new women's long distance team Nodoka Ashida and Kairi Ikeno , and AGU alumni and 2026 New Year Ekiden champion GMO team members Yuya Yoshida and Asahi Kuroda also took part in the training camp. Depending on the day's training schedule, mileage at the camp was over 50 km a day. AGU men's captain Kaito Nakamura confidently said, "This Golden Week training camp is where we lay the foundations for our 4th-straight Hakone title." A lot of people spend Golden Week on vacation, but the AGU ekiden team spent their time working hard on Myoko's rolling land amid the sprouting leaves of spring. On the 2nd day of the camp, May 3, team members woke up at 5:00 a.m. to do their warmup. The team assembled a...
1 comment
Read more

Everything You Need to Know About the 2026 Hakone Ekiden

The Hakone Ekiden is the world's biggest road race, 2 days of road relay action with Japan's 20 best university teams racing 10 half marathon-scale legs from central Tokyo to the mountains east of Mount Fuji and back. The level just keeps going higher and higher , hitting the point this year where there are teams with 10-runner averages of 13:33.10 for 5000 m, 27:55.98 for 10000 m, and 1:01:20 for the half marathon. It's never been better, and with great weather in the forecast it's safe to say this could be one of the best races in Hakone's 102-year history, especially on Day One. If you've seen it then you know NTV's live broadcast is the best sports broadcast in the world, with the pre-race show kicking off at 7:00 a.m. Japan time on the 2nd and 3rd and the race starting at 8:00 a.m. sharp. If you've got a VPN you should be able to watch it on TVer starting at 7:50 a.m. on the 2nd , and again at 7:50 a.m. on the 3rd . There's even a 2-hour high...
3 comments
Read more

70th Yamagata-ken Judan Ekiden

The 70th running of the Yamagata-ken Judan Ekiden happened over the start of the Golden Week holidays, a 3-day, 29-leg race covering 306.9 km around the northern prefecture of Yamagata. There used to be a lot more of these races where people from the prefecture run for their hometown teams on a Tour de Whatever prefecture or area it happens to be held in, but Yamagata's is one of the few to have survived this long. And amazingly enough, local broadcaster YBC live streamed the entire thing on Youtube. There aren't many corporate teams in the mostly rural area, so runners from the ND Software corporate team played a heavy role, its 2 best runners Masato Arao and Ryoma Takeuchi winning their stages on Day 2 with Takeuchi doubling to anchor the Kita-Murayama team to an overall 5th-place finish, and Koichi Shoji breaking the 2nd leg CR on Day 1 and winning the 2nd-to-last stage on Day 3 to play a key role in the Yamagata city team taking the overall win in 16:06:51, 3:09/km ...
1 comment
Read more