Championship Ekiden Qualification Weekend

Championship ekiden season is on the way, and this weekend two of the main events will hold their official qualification races.

Saturday in Tokyo's western suburb of Tachikawa is the Hakone Ekiden Yosenkai half marathon, a chance for collegiate men to be on the starting line of the world's #1 race this coming January. 10 universities are already qualified for the Hakone Ekiden by having finished in the top 10 at this year's race, and at the Yosenkai another 10 will join them. 41 universities from the greater Tokyo area will run from 10 to 12 men each and are scored on the total time of their first 10 finishers. The fastest 10 teams go on to Hakone, pure and simple. Top individuals from teams that don't qualify will also be named to a select team, as long as they're Japanese citizens, to fill out Hakone's field of 21. NTV will broadcast the race and its tense qualifier announcement ceremony live starting at 9:25 a.m. Saturday local time, with official streaming on TVer for those in-country.

Meiji University is ranked at the top of the field, a Hakone regular knocked out of the seeded top 10 this year by last year's Yosenkai winner Juntendo University. 2020 Yosenkai runner-up Chuo University is Meiji's toughest competition for the team win, but what really matters is just making the top 10. Kanagawa University, Nittai University, Takushoku University and Josai University look pretty secure to pull that off, but beyond that it gets interesting. Hosei University and Kokushikan University are in the grey zone of Hakone regulars vulnerable to programs trying to get back into elite status like Yamanashi Gakuin University and Senshu University, ones perpetually on the cusp like Tsukuba University and Reitaku University, and up-and-coming programs like Surugadai University and Keio University. Chuo Gakuin University throws an additional variable at the equation, a perpetual Hakone qualifier that somehow blew last year's Yosenkai and didn't make the cut.

Sunday in rural Fukuoka is the Princess Ekiden, the qualifying race for November's corporate women's national championship Queens Ekiden. 31 teams will race 42.195 km in 6 stages in pursuit of a place in the top 20. The ones that make it will join the top 8 from last year's Queens Ekiden at next month's national championship. TBS has the live broadcast starting at 11:50 a.m. Sunday local time, with multi-channel streaming on Youtube. JRN will cover the race live on @JRNLive.

Daihatsu leads the field, missing 8th place at Queens last year by just 9 seconds. Edion, Tenmaya and Shiseido were all just seconds behind, making it a close race up front. But like at the Yosenkai, this is a qualifying race and what matters most is getting into the qualifying bracket. Down around the 15th to 25th-ranked level you've got a mix of traditionally minor teams like Nitori, Shimamura and Toto, fallen greats like former national champ Daiichi Seimei, and new teams like SID Group. At the collegiate level making nationals can impact a coach's career, but at the corporate level it can make the difference to a team's existence the next season. Amid a post-Olympic pullback and the ongoing economic impact of the pandemic, this year that's truer than ever.

Measuring Marathon Courses by Bicycle

http://news.searchina.ne.jp/disp.cgi?y=2013&d=0110&f=column_0110_034.shtml translated by Brett Larner The full marathon is a sport where you compete over 42.195 km, but how do they go about measuring that distance? Today we're going to look a little bit at how they go about certifying the distance of a marathon. The reality is that major international marathons use a bicycle to measure the distance. This rule is an international standard, and the same method of measurement is used everywhere. It was put into place in 1986. In order to ensure that the same method is used everywhere, a bicycle that meets IAAF specifications must be used for measurement. In the case of Japan's major marathons, to be certain that the distance is correct a provisional measurement is first made. Before the course is certified using a bicycle the course is measured using a 50 m-long length of wire to determine that it is in fact 42.195 km. When a bicycle is u...

Ai Hosoda Announces Retirement

photo © 2025 Victah Sailer/Photo Run, all rights reserved On Jan. 8 the Edion women's corporate team announced that Ai Hosoda , 30, will retire at the end of March this year. The Tokyo Marathon will be her last race. At Nagano Higashi H.S. Hosoda ran in the National High School Ekiden her 2nd and 3rd years. During her 3rd year at Nittai University she won both the 5000 m and 10000 m at the Kanto Region University Track and Field Championships, going on to win the bronze medal in the 10000 m at the World University Games in her 4th year at Nittai. After graduating she joined the Daihatsu corporate team, debuting at the 2019 Nagoya Women's Marathon in 2:29:27. 2 years later she transferred to Edion. She qualified for the Paris Olympics marathon trials at the 2022 Nagoya Women's Marathon and finished 3rd in the trials in the fall of 2023, but was later bumped down to Olympic alternate after another athlete ran a faster time. Instead of the Olympics, Hosoda ran the 2024 Ber...

Nat'l University Ekiden Updates Here

Looks like I just went over my update limit on Twitter - sorry, it's the first time I've tried to use it for this. I'll look for another option next time. In the meantime I'll add updates to the comments below. Not sure if that has a max too but I guess we'll find out. Update: Part one of the Nationals commentary can be found here .

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