japan running news

Championship ekiden season wraps up Sunday with its last two big events. In Kitakyushu, the 35th Kitakyushu Women's Invitational Ekiden brings together top high school, college and corporate league teams to race a short 27.2 km in five stages, with the longest leg split in two for the high school teams. University teams are absent this time except for one select team made up of women from the area, while the corporate league division has nine teams and the high school division 22 plus another select team. 2023 Queens Ekiden national champion Sekisui Kagaku is the top seed, its entry roster including members of its national title-winning lineup, Yuma Yamamoto , Rina Sasaki and Chikako Mori . Its closest competition is Queens 8th-placer Iwatani Sangyo , which has five of its six runners from the national championships entered including Kaede Kawamura , winner of the anchor stage at last weekend's National Women's Ekiden . 2023 National High School Ekiden winner Kamimura ...

Aoyama Gakuin University brought the first century of the Hakone Ekiden to a close with a dominant performance that took over two minutes off its own course record to put an end to defending champ Komazawa University 's hopes of becoming the first team to win all three major university ekidens two years in a row. After a hard-fought opening day that saw both teams break the Day One course record , Aoyama Gakuin's Akimu Nomura needed to hold its 2:38 lead over Komazawa over the downhill Sixth Stage, 20.8 km with a steep climb at the start and an ~800 m drop to the exchange zone, and when he opened it to 4:17 the race was all but over. Komazawa's Taiyo Yasuhara initially closed incrementally on AGU's Kento Yamauchi on the 21.3 km Seventh Stage, but Yamauchi turned it around in the second half to outrun Yasuhara by 27 seconds. AGU head coach Susumu Hara had put two of his best runners on the next two stages in an evident plan to cover any scenario in which Komazawa wa...

The bar was raised again for the Hakone Ekiden's 100th running on Jan. 1-2. Wednesday night at the Meiji-Aoyama Gakuin-Rikkyo-Chuo-Hosei pentangular MARCH Taikosen 10000 m meet in Machida, Tokyo, hosts Aoyama Gakuin University dominated with 10 of its members running new sub-29 PBs, 6 of them going sub-28:30. AGU 4th-year Issei Sato led the way with a meet record 28:11.00 to win the fastest heat, 2nd-year Asahi Kuroda following up great runs at both the Izumo and National University ekidens with a 28:15.82 PB for 3rd and 4th-year Genta Kuramoto just getting under 28:20 with a 28:19.31 PB for 4th. 2023 Hakone runner-up Chuo University and some of the other teams that just ran the Ageo City Half Marathon on Sunday had a lighter presence, but 2 Chuo runners did go sub-28:30, 4th-year Jin Yuasa taking 2nd behind Sato in a PB 28:12.17, and 3rd-year Haruki Abe running a 28:26.58 PB for 6th. The fastest finishers from Rikkyo University and Hosei University both clocked PBs, R...

A new event bringing together top high school, college, corporate league and club men's teams, the Okukuma Ekiden was held for the first time Sunday in Kumamoto. 42.195 km split into 7 stages for the high school boys' division and 4 stages for the others, the race saw Nagano's Saku Chosei H.S. become the first team across its finish line in 2:07:16. The Toyota Kyushu corporate team was 2nd overall in 2:07:32, with local Kyushu Gakuin H.S. 3rd in 2:07:52. The new ekiden, which mirrors the format of the Kitakyushu Women's Invitational Ekiden, was originally scheduled to have taken place in 2020. But after two years of pandemic-era cancelations, the inaugural running didn't take place until this year. It was an impressive success. The high school boys' stage lengths were almost the same as those at December's National High School Ekiden, 10 km, 3 km, 8.25 km, 7.9 km, 3 km, 5 km, and 5.045 km. Other divisions ran stages 10 km, 11.25 km, 10.9 km, and 10.045 ...