This year's Osaka International Women's Marathon was a race run with a high level of methodicalness, starting slower than the planned 3:19/km but ramping up until the lead pack was skimming around the 2:20:15-30 projected finish level. After hitting halfway in 1:10:13 with a group of 6, by 25 km only 4 were left up front, sub-2:19 runners Workenesh Edesa , Stella Chesang and Bedatu Hirpa , and the debuting Mikuni Yada , and when the last 2 pacers stepped off at 30 km it was Yada who went to the front. Despite never have raced longer than the 10.6 km Third Stage at November's Queens Ekiden where she had helped the Edion team score its first-ever national title, Yada was very, very impressive, fearlessly surging from 12 km and never letting up, even laughing and smiling to fans along the course. When she started sustaining a pace around 3:15/km the projected finish dropped under 2:20 and all the way down to 2:19:28 by 35 km, and even when all 3 of the more experienced ru...
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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