japan running news

The winner of the first Marathon Grand Championships Olympic trials race is starting down a new road leading back to the Hakone Ekiden. Set to retire at the end of March, 2021 Tokyo Olympics marathon team member Shogo Nakamura (33, Fujitsu) will take over as head coach at Meiji Gakuin University in April in a quest for its first-ever Hakone appearance. According to a source involved in the situation, Nakamura has been hired to lead Meiji Gakuin to Hakone by the 2028-29 academic year. Nakamura's career as an athlete garnered great respect, especially his serious attitude toward competition and the patience and endurance he developed through marathon running. Still on the cusp of retirement, Nakamura is unproven as a leader. But last year he entered the Waseda University Graduate School of Sport Science with the aim of becoming a professional coach. While balancing his academic work with his racing he studied top sports management at the same place Susumu Hara , head coach of 9-t...

At a press conference on Feb. 9 the JAAF announced that the Marathon Grand Championship (MGC) race, Japan's marathon trials event for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, will be held Oct. 3, 2027 in Nagoya. Details on the course will be announced at a later date. The MGC race was first held before the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and again before the 2024 Paris Olympics, both times in Tokyo. 16 men including Paris Olympics 6th-placer Akira Akasaki (Kraftia), national record holder Suguru Osako (Li-Ning), 2022 Oregon World Championships marathon team member Yusuke Nishiyama (Toyota) and 2025 Tokyo World Championships team member Yuya Yoshida (GMO) have already qualified for the 2027 race, along with 9 women led by Mikuni Yada (Edion), who set a debut marathon record 2:19:57 at last month's Osaka International Women's Marathon. Paris Olympics alternate Ai Hosoda (Edion) has qualified but has announced that she plans to retire after next month's Tokyo Marathon. source article: ht...

The Beppu-Oita Mainichi Marathon was a strictly amateur race on the women's side, Chika Yokota running a 2:43:45 PB for the win. But with 6 spots at the L.A. Olympics marathon trials on the line all the Japanese men were obsessed over getting their places reserved early. 2 first-half falls knocked Ethiopian Abe Gashahun and 2024 Nobeoka Nishi Nippon Marathon winner Yota Ifuku out of the race, but the rest of the field rolled on steadily just under 3:00/km. The pace crew took them to 30 km in 1:29:45, 2:06:15 pace, and at that point there were still 20 in it including the home soil favorites Yuya Yoshida and Asahi Kuroda . Inside the last 10 km Ethiopian Getachew Masresha went to the front, followed initially by the debuting Takato Suzuki but let go by the rest of the pack. Once Masresha was about 10 seconds ahead Kuroda, the collegiate record holder and CR breaker on the Hakone Ekiden's legendary uphill Fifth Stage a month ago, picked it up in pursuit. After Kuroda ran ...

Tokyo Olympics marathon trials winner Shogo Nakamura will retire at the end of this fiscal year on Mar. 31, 2026. On Jan. 23 he released the following statement on his sponsor Fujitsu 's corporate team site. To everyone who has supported me I have decided to bring my career as a competitive athlete to its end and retire. I started running in 5th grade, and over the many years since then it has been my life. I'm really happy to be able to end it as part of the Fujitsu team. I've been with Fujitsu since I graduated from Komazawa University , and thanks to Fujitsu's flexibility and support I was able to keep Komazawa as my training base and make it all the way to the Tokyo Olympics. Getting there was a major milestone in my career and remains a prized memory. After reaching that height I started being with the Fujitsu team full-time, and under the leadership of head coach Tadashi Fukushima and the rest of the coaching staff I entered a new phase of my career aiming to co...

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...

It's another massive weekend of racing in Japan before championship ekiden season really hits. Proving that it's always time for track time trials, Saturday's Edion Distance Challenge meet in Osaka has high-level women's 3000 m, 5000 m and 10000 m races on the menu. 5000 m NR holder Nozomi Tanaka will take her annual stab at the 10000 m against Dolphine Omare , Tabitha Njeri Kamau , Pauline Kamulu and more, with domestic competition including Queens Ekiden First Stage winner Kana Mizumoto . Anchor stage winner Rina Sasaki leads the 5000 m A-heat with support from Lucy Nduta . Streaming starts at 12:05 p.m. local time. Complete meet schedule and entry lists here . Sunday is the 50th running of the world's #1 10-miler, the Kumamoto Kosa Road Race . This is really the last big tuneup for the New Year Ekiden and Hakone Ekiden, and every year it's fast up front with the kind of depth of quality you see in the bigger half marathon and marathons. There are too many...

The Fukuoka International Marathon is back Dec. 7 with exactly the kind of boutique field it's had over the decades. Up front are two of the home soil stars from February's Osaka Marathon, Kyohei Hosoya , 2:05:58, and Shunya Kikuchi , 2:06:06. Their toughest competition comes from Djibouti NR holder and 2023 Beppu-Oita Mainichi Marathon winner Ibrahim Hassan , 2:06:13, and Yusuke Nishiyama , who ran a 2:06:31 PB in Tokyo last year despite getting caught up in a fall in the early going. There's a layer of 5 2:07 men, 3 at 2:08 and a lone 2:09 runner below them, a total of 6 sub-2:10 Japanese men competing for 6 places at the L.A. Olympic marathon trials for anyone who goes under 2:09 here with support from 7 internationals from 5 countries. The Konica Minolta corporate team hasn't shown incredible aptitude for the marathon, but its 1:01:04 half marathoner Ren Yonemitsu is an interesting debut. Check back closer to race date for info on streaming and following from out...

Yesterday the national corporate federation JITA announced major changes to the New Year Ekiden, the corporate men's national championship race around which the entire year is structured. Other top-tier ekidens like the Hakone Ekiden, the National University Men's and Women's Ekidens, and the Queens Ekiden corporate women's national championships all have a seeded bracket, allowing top-placing teams to auto-qualify for the following year's race and exempting them from running in the yosenkai qualifying races the next season. This frees up the best of the best and lets them do other things, whether it's the Izumo Ekiden for university men, overseas fall marathons for women, or whatever. The JITA has stubbornly refused to put a seeded bracket into the New Year Ekiden over the years, meaning every corporate men's team has to run one of the regional corporate ekidens that took place the last two weekends in order to get back to the national race, even the prev...

An Olympian in the marathon at the Tokyo Olympics, Shogo Nakamura (Fujitsu) announced on his social media that he has entered Waseda University 's Graduate School of Sport Science with the start of the new academic year this week. A graduate of Mie's Ueno Kogyo H.S. , Nakamura went to Komazawa University before joining Fujitsu in 2015. His senior year of high school he was 3rd overall and 2nd Japanese in the 5000 m at the National High School Track and Field Championships, and in the fall the same year he ran what was at the time the 7th-fastest high school mark ever, 13:50.38. At Komazawa he scored four individual stage wins across the three big university ekidens. In 2019 he won the MGC Race, Japan's marathon trials for the Tokyo Olympics, where he was 62nd in 2:22:23. Nakamura indicated that he would be studying "top sports management" under professor Takeo Hirata . "I'll be balancing competition and academics," Nakamura wrote. "I'm r...

A year out from her disappointing finish at the 2024 Osaka International Women's Marathon , 29-year-old Mizuki Matsuda (Daihatsu) returns to race it again this Sunday. "A place on the Tokyo World Championships team is on the line," she says. "I'm running to try to get name on the list." Last year Matsuda finished 3rd , her first time not winning it in 4 Osaka Women's starts and putting an end to her dream of making the Paris Olympics. Matsuda couldn't follow when Honami Maeda (Tenmaya) took off at halfway. "There goes my Olympics...." she says she thought as she watched Maeda pull away. Post-race she immediately started thinking about retiring, telling herself, "You put up a good fight." But 2 weeks later when she appeared as a special guest at the Ehime Marathon the words of encouragement she got from the mass-participation runners there spoke to her. "I'd never realized that I was an athlete that so many people cared ...

  The Chugoku Denryoku  men's corporate team has announced that team member Naoki Okamoto , 40, will retire in January. Born in May, 1984, Okamoto went to Tohaku J.H.S.  and Yura Ikuei H.S.  before enrolling at Meiji University . His 2nd year at Meiji he helped it make it through the Hakone Ekiden qualifying race for the first time in 14 years and ran Hakone at the end of that season in 2005. He went on to run it his 3rd and 4th years too, placing 6th on the First Stage and 9th on the highly competitive Second Stage. After graduating in 2007 he joined Chugoku Denryoku. He was a regular on its team at the New Year Ekiden, winning the Fifth Stage in 2010. But where he really made his name was the National Men's Ekiden, held every January in Hiroshima where Chugoku Denryoku is based. Running it 19 times, he passed a total of 134 competitors in his career there and came to be recognized as one of the event's icons. He also won its Seventh Stage in 2009. In the marathon, ...

With renewed confidence, Japan's Olympic marathon team will face the total 438 m elevation difference hills of Paris this summer. The members of the women's and men's marathon teams for August's Paris Olympics appeared at a press conference in Tokyo on Mar. 25 in conjunction with the Japan Marathon Championship Series III (JMC) awards gala. Women's Olympic trials winner Yuka Suzuki (Daiichi Seimei) said she was riding a wave of motivation in the wake of the new women's national record. When she watched Honami Maeda (Tenmaya) set the record at January's Osaka International Women's Marathon on TV, Suzuki said she was, "absolutely stunned." Her coach Sachiko Yamashita told her afterward, "When someone breaks the NR, things change," and Suzuki found herself saying, "I want to take my shot." After training for a great run in Paris, she said, "I definitely want to break the NR in one of my marathons after that." Mao...

On Mar. 1 the organizers of the Mar. 10 Nagoya Women's Marathon announced that Ai Hosoda (28, Edion) has withdrawn due to a muscular injury on the inside of her left leg. Hosoda placed 3rd at last October's Paris Olympic marathon trials behind winner Yuka Suzuki and just 7 seconds back from 2nd-placer Mao Ichiyama to take a provisional spot on the Paris team. But at January's Osaka International Women's Marathon Honami Maeda ran a 2:18:59 national record to replace Hosoda on the team. Nagoya is the last chance for Japanese women to make the team, which would require them to be the top Japanese finisher and beat Maeda's time. Hosoda's withdrawal means that her hopes of making the Paris Olympic team have now come to an end. source article: https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/5b008a275315959366708842d2411e6658c7ef05 translated and edited by Brett Larner

Komazawa University Takes Overall Hakone Win for First-Ever Triple Crown Ekiden Season Sweep - Jan. 2-3 After winning the first day of the 2023 Hakone Ekiden , Komazawa University joined the exclusive club of teams to pull off the triple crown of wins at the Izumo Ekiden, National University Ekiden and Hakone, dominating the second day to win by just under two minutes over Chuo University . Both teams and 3rd-place Aoyama Gakuin University made the all-time top 10 fastest times , and five men ran the equivalent of a sub-1:01 half marathon. TV viewership was high, with ratings of 35.0% . JRN's pre-race preview . Suzuki, Ichiyama, Koyama and Akasaki Paris-Bound - Japan's Olympic Marathon Trials - Oct. 15 At the Marathon Grand Championship race, Japan's trials for the Paris Olympics and the most difficult marathon ever to qualify for, Yuka Suzuki , Mao Ichiyama , Naoki Koyama and Akira Akasaki all scored places on the Olympic team by finishing in the top two. Ai Hosoda ...

Paris Olympics marathon team member Akira Akasaki is the first man from Kumamoto to make an Olympic marathon since the father of Japanese marathoning Shizo Kanakuri 100 years ago. Akasaki finished 2nd in October's Olympic marathon trials to make the Paris team, only the second man from Kumamoto prefecture to ever make an Olympic marathon team after Kanakuri at the 1924 Paris Olympics. On Nov. 6 Akasaki visited the town of Tamana in Kumamoto to pay his respects at the great Kanakuri's grave. At Tamana City Hall he was greeted by applause from city workers. Akasaki's coach at the Kyudenko corporate team, Kazuharu Takai , and his Takushoku University -era coach Masahiro Okada , were also in attendance to celebrate his achievement. Afterward Akasaki visited Kanakuri's grave to pay his respects and inform the legend's spirit that he will be running in the Olympics too. "Kanakuri was the creator of the Hakone Ekiden, and I was lucky to run it four times," sai...

The second edition of the Marathon Grand Championship race, Japan's marathon trials for the 2024 Paris Olympics, happened Sunday in less than ideal conditions in Tokyo, with heavy rain throughout the race, temps in the mid-teens, and even a tornado warning in Chiba east of the city as the race went on. The top two in each race earned guaranteed spots on the Paris team, with the 3rd-placers earning provisional places and a target on their backs in the upcoming winter domestic marathon season. The winner at the first MGC in 2019, Honami Maeda (Tenmaya) took the race out on 2:23 pace with a pack of 14 in tow. Most of the favorites were there, including her Tokyo Olympics teammates Mao Ichiyama (Shiseido) and Ayuko Suzuki (Japan Post), newcomers Ai Hosoda (Edion) and Rika Kaseda (Daihatsu) and more. One surprise was that Maeda's Tenmaya teammates Natsuki Matsushita and Mizuki Tanimoto , both sub-2:23:15 runners, hung back in the second pack in the early going, and it wasn...

  Could this be the biggest weekend of road racing Tokyo has ever seen? Maybe. Saturday is the qualifying half marathon for the 100th Hakone Ekiden . Sunday is the Tokyo Legacy Half Marathon , but that’s just a minor counterpoint running simultaneously with the main event, the 2nd Marathon Grand Championship race , Japan’s marathon trials for the 2024 Paris Olympics. TBS will show the men’s race starting at 8:00 a.m. local time with streaming on  TVer , which should be viewable internationally with a VPN. NHK is handling the women’s race ad-free at 8:10 a.m., with streaming on NHK+ . You can try mov3.co/ntv and mov3.co/nhk too. JRN will cover it all live on @JRNLive . Japan first held a single-race Olympic trials race in 2019 ahead of the home soil Tokyo Olympics, and it was the toughest marathon ever to qualify for. The basic standards were the same for women this year, sub-2:24:00 or two races averaging 2:28:00, but even tougher for men, sub-2:08:00 or two races averaging...

Scheduled to happen in parallel with the MGC Race Paris Olympic marathon trials, the Tokyo Legacy Half Marathon has announced the elite fields for its second running Oct. 15. Straight from this spring's Barcelona Half Marathon, Gladys Chepkurui and Charles Langat are the top internationals coming in from abroad at 1:05:46 and 58:53. Chepkurui's only real competition is Japan-based Dolphine Omare , winner at last year's National Corporate Half Marathon in 1:07:56. Langat has more serious competition from Japan-based Alexander Mutiso , 58:48 at last year's RAK Half among others, and another five in the mid-to-high 59-minute range. Sub-27:20 10000 m runners Evans Keitany , Jonathan Ndiku and Timothy Kibet should also factor in. Given that the race will happen at the same time as the Olympic marathon trials there aren't a lot of high-level Japanese athletes in the race. The top woman in Mao Kiyota , 1:11:18 at this race last year, with Toyo University 's Kazuki...