Skip to main content

World Championships Marathon Men Preparing for the Worst in Beijing Air Quality

http://www.daily.co.jp/general/2015/04/14/0007915752.shtml

translated by Brett Larner

2015 Beijing World Championships men's marathon team members Masakazu Fujiwara (34, Team Honda), Masato Imai (31, Team Toyota Kyushu) and Kazuhiro Maeda (33, Team Kyudenko) left from Tokyo's Narita Airport on April 13 for a tour of the World Championships race course.  Along with the course, a major concern is the increasingly serious problem of air pollution in Beijing.  Steeling himself for the worst, Imai commented, "There's nothing I as an individual can say that will improve the situation, so you just have to accept it as normal and run.  The conditions will be the same for everybody." 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Most-Read This Week

Koku Gakuin Goes For the Triple Crown - 2025 Hakone Ekiden Preview

The biggest road race of the year is days away, with the Hakone Ekiden entering its second century on Jan. 2 and 3. 20 university teams and one select team race 217.1 km in 10 legs from central Tokyo to the mountains near Mt. Fuji and back, with Nippon TV broadcasting the whole thing live and nationwide to an audience in the tens of millions. TVer is streaming Day One here starting at 7:50 a.m. local time on Jan. 2, and Day Two here at 7:50 a.m. again. If you've got a VPN you should be good to go. JRN will be on-site at the Day One finish line and Day Two start line and will be doing some coverage on @JRNLive . At October's Izumo Ekiden and November's National University Ekiden Koku Gakuin University , Komazawa University and Aoyama Gakuin University went 1-2-3, and the main question at Hakone is whether it'll be the same order again. Komazawa is the heavyweight legacy school of the three, with 8 wins and 18 top 3 finishes at Hakone in the last 25 years under ex...
4 comments
Read more

Defending Champ Aoyama Gakuin Takes Hakone Ekiden Day One By a Kilometer

Chuo University came out hard on Day One of the 2025 Hakone Ekiden , leading from the gun until partway through Hakone's great equalizer, the uphill Fifth Stage. Gunning for his older brother Yamato Yoshii 's 1:00:40 CR for the 21.3 km opening leg, Chuo's Shunsuke Yoshii went it alone, coming up short of the the record at 1:01:07, 1:00:33 half marathon pace, but almost a minute and a half ahead of nearest competitor Yudai Kiyama from Komazawa University . Itta Tameike ran what would normally be a great time on the 23.1 km Second Stage, 1:06:39, but behind him collegiate 5000 m, 10000 m and half marathon record holder Richard Etir of Tokyo Kokusai University , Soka University 's top man Hibiki Yoshida and last year's Second Stage winner Asahi Kuroda of defending champion Aoyama Gakuin University all broke the 1:05:49 course record to cut Chuo's lead down to 40 seconds. In Hakone's first 100 years only two runners had ever broken 66 minutes on the Secon...
2 comments
Read more

Aoyama Gakuin Breaks Hakone Ekiden CR for Second Year in a Row

2024 Hakone Ekiden course record breaker Aoyama Gakuin University was 3:16 up on 2023 winner Komazawa University at the end of Day One of the Hakone 2025, an even bigger margin than last year when it was 2:38 ahead of Komazawa and went on to win the 217.1 km overall race in a course record 10:41:25, beating Komazawa by almost 7 minutes. There was almost no chance Komazawa could close the gap today on the return trip of Hakone Day Two. But that doesn't mean they didn't try. Komazawa 3rd year Aoi Ito was just off the CR on the ~800 m downhill 6th leg in 57:38, but even with a run that good he lost ground when AGU's Akimu Nomura proved a hypothetical, breaking the 57-minute barrier for the 20.8 km leg with a 30-second CR of 56:47. Post-race Nomura said that he had spent the whole year training to run 56, and he executed perfectly. And put AGU 4:07 ahead, hopeless, except for a ray of hope. Injured for most of 2024 and running his first race since March on only 6 weeks of...
1 comment
Read more