Skip to main content

Get Paced By Your 5000 m National Champion, Only At Time Trials for Grown-Ups

by Brett Larner
photos by Ekiden News, Reiko.K and STITCHrunner
click here for more photos by Ekiden News

For the third year in a row, the staff of the Ekiden News website brought the experience of the elite time trial meet to the average runner, putting on the Otona no Time Trial meet, Time Trials for Grown-Ups, at Kinuta Park Field in Tokyo's western-central suburb of Setagaya on July 26.  Despite extreme heat over 500 amateur runners from back-of-the-packers to sub-15 seekers, kids to adults, took part in 1000 m, 1500 m and finely-graded 5000 m races, mirroring the experience of elite time trial meets like the Nittai University Time Trials and Golden Games in Nobeoka. 

London Paralympics 5000 m bronze medalist Shinya Wada

Each heat featured pacing from top-tier Japanese elite athletes, including sub-62 half marathoners Takuya Fukatsu, Tomoya Onishi and Yuki Yagi from the Asahi Kasei corporate team, London Paralympics men's 5000 m bronze medalist Shinya Wada and Yuki Kawauchi's middle brother Yoshiki Kawauchi, giving amateurs not only the experience of running in an elite-style race but the chance to actually run with and talk to some of their favorite athletes, as well giving many of the pros, isolated inside the system since high school, their first real interactions with ordinary runners.

Yuki Yagi and Ekiden News founder Takeshi Nishimoto

After a great popular response to last year's Time Trials where Sydney Olympics women's marathon gold medalist and former world record holder Naoko Takahashi featured on pacing duty, other elites simply turned up to check out the fresh atmosphere at the meet, another step forward in Ekiden News' mission to bridge the gap between elite and amateur and help popularize and share their love of another side of Japan's incredible elite racing world with the booming domestic amateur market, and vice versa.

Prominent among the people to just turn up was this year's 5000 m national champion Kota Murayama, a 13:19 runner and member of the Beijing World Championships team.  Murayama was so into the meet's format that he asked if he could pace a heat, jumping in unplanned to pace the I-Heat to break 20 minutes with one of the OTT's customized bib numbers.  I-Heat runner Yu Mito got the treat of a lifetime as Murayama took him out front alone ahead of the rest of the field, and Murayama got the entire track including Mito laughing with a self-parody of his much-criticized showboating win over then-future 5000 m national record holder Suguru Osako last month at the National Championships, sprinting away from Mito in the last 50 m, pumping his fists and shouting, "Oh yeah!"


Murayama stayed at the finish line to cheer on incoming runners, even helping out one struggling with the effects of the heat the way he would one of his own teammates.  You know Mito, the other runners, and all the fans crowding into lane 5 were loving every minute of it.  Murayama and the other pros were loving it just as much, all of them there without appearance fees and just because they liked the vibe of a group of outsiders doing it themselves, doing what they think needs to be done to both share and benefit what they love and doing it with total professionalism.  You have all the right ideals and an idea about what needs to happen to make things better, you find a way to put it into action, and people respond.  If only there were more grown-ups like that.

text (c) 2015 Brett Larner, all rights reserved
photos (c) 2015 their respective photographers, all rights reserved
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Most-Read This Week

Heisei Mountaineering Stops Takigahara SDF Base From Scoring 10-Year Streak at Mount Fuji Ekiden

by Koichi Iwasa of DogsorCaravan On Aug. 2 the 51st Mount Fuji Ekiden took place, starting and finishing in Gotemba, Shizuoka and covering 11 stages up to the peak of Mount Fuji and back down. Teams of 6 runners tackle the tough course, each running handling one uphill and one downhill leg with the 6th runner reaching the peak before turning around to head back to the exchange zone where they started. The Heisei Mountaineering Club team took the overall win in 3:50:39, beating 9-time winner Takigahara SDF Base by 2:07 and stopping them from achieving a 10-year victory streak. The independent team division and SDF team division were separated in 2005, and this was the first time that the winning independent team outran the fastest SDF team to take the overall title. The roster that Heisei Mountaineering put together for this year's race raised eyebrows among everyone familiar with the Japanese trail running scene. Handling the 5th and 7th legs was Ruy Ueda , winner of the Fuji M...
Post a Comment
Read more

How it Happened

Ancient History I went to Wesleyan University, where the legend of four-time Boston Marathon champ and Wes alum Bill Rodgers hung heavy over the cross-country team. Inspired by Koichi Morishita and Young-Cho Hwang’s duel at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics I ran my first marathon in 1993, qualifying for Boston ’94 where Bill was kind enough to sign a star-struck 20-year-old me’s bib number at the expo. Three years later I moved to Japan for grad school, and through a long string of coincidences I came across a teenaged kid named Yuki Kawauchi down at my neighborhood track. I never imagined he’d become what he is, but right from the start there was just something different about him. After his 2:08:37 breakthrough at the 2011 Tokyo Marathon he called me up and asked me to help him get into races abroad. He’d finished 3rd on the brutal downhill Sixth Stage at the Hakone Ekiden, and given how he’d run the hills in the last 6 km at Tokyo ’11 I thought he’d do well at Boston or New York. “I...
54 comments
Read more

Komazawa University One Step Away From Perfect Season With Hakone Ekiden Day One Win

Already the course record-breaker at the Izumo Ekiden and National University Ekiden this season, 2021 Hakone Ekiden champion Komazawa University came one step away from its first-ever triple crown of single-season ekiden wins as it won a highly competitive 2023 Hakone Ekiden Day One over defending champ Aoyama Gakuin University and last year's 6th placer Chuo University . Things got off to an unexpected start when Select Team runner Hayate Nitta of non-qualifier Ikuei University decided to take his one and only Hakone shot and run it up to his ability on the 21.3 km 1st leg even though the rest of the field opted to jog. At one point Nitta had a lead of almost a minute and a half, but as beautiful as it would have been for him to pull it off, Meiji University 's Shunpei Tomita and Komazawa's Kensuke Tsubura still managed to run him down in the final kilometer. Tomita took the stage win in 1:02:44, 1:02:08 half marathon pace vs. his 1:02:10 PB despite the slow s...
4 comments
Read more