It looked like it was going to be a big weekend, and it delivered. For the 3rd time in his career Suguru Osako broke the men's marathon NR, running 1 second under the standing record to take 4th in the Valencia Marathon in 2:04:55. All the way to 40 km he was steady on 2:58/km, 2:05:10 pace, and like a surprising number of other people in both the men's and women's races, there was a massive jump over the last 2.195 km from his projected finish time to his actual one. His run put Osako back on top of the Japanese charts, put the average of Japan's 10 fastest marathon times of the year under 2:06 for the first time, and got him into the L.A. Olympics marathon trials. Valencia has been trying to get top-tier Japanese athletes to come for years, and now that they finally managed to do it it paid off in a big way. Expect more next year. Back home, former Takushoku University captain Derese Workneh won a 3-way race against Toyota teammates Kazuya Nishiyama and Bedan Ka...
An article I wrote for Running Times magazine about acupuncture for runners is now up on the RT website. Click the photo to read. For the article I interviewed three prominent acupuncturists: Jiro Konno, the head of Tokyo's Idaten clinic where many of the country's top pros and university runners go for treatment, Hiroshi Kawaguchi, another Tokyo-based practitioner who has worked with Joan Benoit-Samuelson, and Russ Stram, a New York acupuncturist who worked on Arata Fujiwara the day after Fujiwara's course-record win at May's Ottawa Marathon. The article includes photos, such as the one above, of Stram's session with Fujiwara.
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