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Coming off a seventh-straight win at October's Morinomiyako Ekiden, five-time Mount Fuji Women's Ekiden national champion Meijo University led start to finish to win it again for the sixth year in a row Saturday in Shizuoka. Meijo's first four runners, Azumi Nagira , Nanaka Yonezawa , Miyu Yamada and Asuka Ishimatsu all won their stages to give Meijo what was pretty much an unbreakable lead. Undefeated in collegiate ekiden competition up to this point in her career, Meijo 3rd-year Nanase Tanimoto lost to Daito Bunka University 1st-year Sarah Wanjiru by 24 seconds on the 10.5 km Fifth Stage but still handed off to captain Yuka Masubuchi 1:04 ahead. Masubuchi ran a CR 19:27 for her 6.0 km to hand off to anchor Saki Harada on course record pace. On the tough anchor stage, 8.3 km climbing 175 m mostly in its second half, Harada proved the weak link on the team at only 5th-fastest in the field, but while that wasn't enough for Meijo to better its own CR Harada had no ...

Six-time defending national champion Meijo University came to Sunday's Morinomiyako Ekiden national university women's championships with the weakest team since before its reign started in 2017, but with a flawless team performance that saw all six women on the team make top 4 on their stage Meijo beat the odds to go home with a record-breaking 7th-straight national title. Previous dynasty Ritsumeikan University came out hard with stage wins on the first two legs of the 38.0 km race, but a win on the 5.8 km Third Stage by Meijo 2nd-year Asuka Ishimatsu on her 20th birthday turned a 6-second deficit to Ritsumeikan into a 31-second lead. That closed to 15 seconds by the end of the Fifth Stage, but another stage win from anchor Nanase Tanimoto was enough to give Meijo the win by 52 seconds. 2nd eight times in the last 10 years, Daito Bunka University landed there again thanks to a stage win on the 9.2 km Fifth Stage by Sarah Wanjiru and a wicked kick over the last 100 m on ...

The thing about dynasties is that sooner or later they're going to end. From 2003 to 2016 Kyoto's Ritsumeikan University won the Morinomiyako National University Women's Ekiden ten times and took 2nd the four times they didn't. But in 2017 Nagoya's Meijo University arrived on the scene and has won every year since then, its current streak of six national titles longer than Ritsumeikan's longest uninterrupted streak. Meijo holds the overall record of 2:02:57 for the 6-stage, 38.1 km course, slightly edited to 38.0 km this year, and its runners hold four of the six individual stage records. It keeps graduating top talent, most recently joint Third Stage CR record holders Narumi Kobayashi and Yuma Yamamoto , but head coach Katsuro Yoneda just keeps finding the top talent and helping it develop. But this season Meijo has been looking a little shaky. Out of last year's lineup, Fourth Stage CR breaker Nanase Tanimoto was 7th in last month's National Univ...

Returning to the track where she set the 3000 m Japanese all-comers' record of 8:32.53 and her 5000 m best of 14:44.83 last November, Margaret Akidor (Comodi Iida) led the results at the 306th Nittai University Time Trials with the 2nd-fastest 5000 m of her career. For whatever reason the meet's format was reversed from its usual setup, with men's 5000 m heats happening Saturday and everything else Sunday. In the women's 5000 m A-heat Akidor ran 14:48.91 for the win, almost 9 seconds up on Teresiah Muthoni (Daiso) who ran 14:57.56 for 2nd. Eva Cherono (Toto) just missed going sub-15 too, 3rd in 15:00.03. Hikaru Kitagawa (Osaka Geijutsu Univ.) was the fastest Japanese woman in the race, 5th in 15:55.79. The women's 3000 m saw a Japanese woman take the top spot, with Asuka Ishimatsu (Meijo Univ.) 1st in 9:14.07. Ayu Henmi (Toyota Jidoshokki) won the women's 1500 m A-heat in 4:22.52 and Nanako Izumi (Chiba Univ.) the 800 m A-heat in 2:15.83. The top six...

There was never any doubt that Meijo University was going to win a fifth-straight national title at today's Mount Fuji Women's Ekiden , but what they really showed was that they have the core of a team that is going to extend its dynasty at least another 3 or 4 years. 1st-year trio Azumi Nagira , Hikaru Kitagawa and Nanaka Yonezawa built up a 43-second lead for Meijo over the first three legs, Yonezawa taking 4 seconds off the CR for hers. 3rd-year Yuka Masubuchi added another 19 seconds to that, setting up 4th-year power duo Yuma Yamamoto and Narumi Kobayashi to deliver it to 2nd-year anchor Nanase Tanimoto to bring Meijo home up the ~170m climb of the final stage. Yamamoto made sure nobody was going to come from behind late in the race, taking Meijo's lead from 1:02 to 2:28 over the 10.5 km fifth leg. Kobayashi has had trouble performing up to her past level this year, but even though she lost 21 seconds she still managed to run the 3rd-fastest time on her stage. ...

There was never really any doubt that five-time defending champion Meijo University was going to become the first team in National University Women's Ekiden history to win a sixth-straight title. Star 1st-year Nanaka Yonezawa took the lead in the first 200 m and from there Meijo never looked back. Its first four runners Yonezawa, Asuka Ishimatsu , Yuma Yamamoto and Nanase Tanimoto all won their stages, Yamamoto tying the 21:37 CR held by teammate Narumi Kobayashi on the 6.9 km Third Stage and Tanimoto turning in the most impressive run of the day with a 15:14 CR on the 4.8 km Fourth Stage, 23 seconds under the CR she set last year and 50 seconds faster than the next-best runner on the stage. Captain Kobayashi was the only weak link in the lineup, 30:48 for 6th on the 9.2 km Fifth Stage, but anchor Yuka Masubuchi still had a 1:55 lead to work with on the 6.7 km Sixth Stage. Like Tanimoto, Masubuchi broke her own CR with a 22:04 that put Meijo's final lead up to 2:31. Wit...

One of the only races to resist the pressure to cancel as Japan's COVID numbers break new ground, the Kitakyushu Women's Invitational Ekiden took place Sunday in northern Fukuoka with top high school, college, club and corporate teams racing a short 27.2 km course through cold rain.  Only 21 of the 40 teams on the entry list started, but among them was defending open division champ Denso . Denso took the lead on the 3.8 km Second Stage with another course record run from CR holder Husan Zeyituna and held on through midway on the 10.4 km Fifth Stage, when anchor Yuka Matsumoto was caught by Nozomi Tanaka of the non-scoring Meijo/Toyota Select Team . The Meijo/Toyota hybrid crossed the line first in 1:28:05, Denso 51 seconds back to score 1st in the open division and claim a 2nd-straight win. But they were actually 3rd across the line. The local Chikushi Joshi Gakuen H.S. team led the high school division from the start, falling back a bit on the Second Stage but clocking t...

The 40th National Women's Ekiden took place Jan. 16, starting and finishing at Kyoto's Takebishi Stadium and covering 42.195 km in 9 stages. The race having been canceled last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, 2020 winner Kyoto took the top spot again in 2:15:05 to strengthen its position as the winningest team in event history with 18 national titles. Fukuoka scored 2nd, with Miyagi taking 3rd. Following up on her superb 31:28 CR on the National Corporate Women's Ekiden 's 10.0 km Fifth Stage in November, Shiseido corporate runner Rino Goshima put the Ishikawa prefecture team out front on the 6.0 km opening leg, beating members of the Tokyo Olympic team and finishing in 18:41, just 2 seconds behind the CR held by 5000 m NR holder Ririka Hironaka . Kyoto's Sakiho Tsutsui was only 9th, but over the next three stages the team worked its way toward the front of the field along with Fukuoka and Miyagi. On the race's Eighth Stage, 3.0 km reserved for juni...

video highlights by NHK Coming back from a win in her marathon debut at last August's Hokkaido Marathon, 2016 10000 m national champion Ayuko Suzuki anchored the Aichi prefecture team to the National Women's Ekiden title in a back-and-forth race with hosts Kyoto . An entertaining format with teams made up of the best junior high school, high school, university and pro runners from each of Japan's 47 prefectures, the National Women's Ekiden and its male counterpart next weekend in Hiroshima make up the peak of championship ekiden season. Aichi took the lead on the second of the day's nine stages thanks to a stage win by high schooler Yumi Fujinaka and from there to the end was never out of the top two. After a brief challenge from Chiba Aichi didn't get its first real threat until Kyoto pulled up even on the Fifth Stage, both teams handing off simultaneously to the Sixth. Kyoto fell as far as 26 seconds behind over the next two stages, but junior high...

Battered by the winds of the passing Typhoon #25, Jakarta Asian Games 100 m bronze medalist Ryota Yamagata (Seiko) ended a long season with a national title in the senior men's 100 m on the second day of the Fukui National Sports Festival . A 5.2 m/s headwind meant there was no chance of Yamagata achieving his goal of finally breaking 10 seconds on the same track where Yoshihide Kiryu did it last year, but Yamagata duly dispatched rivals Yuki Koike (ANA) and Takumi Kuki (NTN) to take the win in 10.58. The wind was almost as much of an issue in the senior women's 100 m, where Nodoka Seko (Crane) won in 12.21 (-2.8 m/s), and the junior races. Senior women's discus throw winner Nanaka Kori (Kyushu Kyoritsu  Univ.) doubled back with a win in the shot put, throwing 15.84 m. Junior high schooler Asuka Ishimatsu (Hamanomiya J.H.S.) beat older competition to win the junior women's 1500 m in 4:26.07, while Aaron Clay (Soyo H.S.) took the longest men's event of the...

Hyogo   Prefecture dominated the second half of Sunday’s National Women’s Ekiden , moving up through the field with three straight stage wins to take its first national title in 14 years. In a repeat of her performance at last month’s National High School Ekiden, Hyogo’s Nozomi Tanaka went out front early before getting run down late in the opening stage, leading Hyogo off in 5th. Over the first half of the race the perpetually strong Osaka and Nagano emerged as the frontrunners before a brilliant Fourth Stage course record by Ririka Hironaka brought Nagasaki into the picture. Nagasaki’s fifth runner Chikako Mori extended the lead Hironaka built to 37 seconds with a stage win, but behind her Hyogo’s Mai Ota brought a big run to pass Osaka and Nagano and move into 2nd. A stage win from sixth runner Yume Goto put Hyogo just 2 seconds behind Nagasaki, and with another pair of stage wins from its next two runners Chinatsu Tarumoto and Asuka Ishimatsu Nagasaki was over ...