18 Under 28 Minutes for 10000 m, 115 Under 29

18 Under 28 Minutes for 10000 m, 115 Under 29 - Weekend Track Roundup

Friday and Saturday were one of the busiest weekends of the year on the track, with high-level time trial meets going on across the country as Japan's best runners tuned up for championship ekiden season. All told 18 men broke 28 minutes and 115 went under 29 minutes for 10000 m.

This year Jakarta Asian Games steeplechase bronze medalist Kazuya Shiojiri (Juntendo Univ.) took a more conservative approach to prepping for the Hakone Ekiden than his 27:47.87 at last year's Hachioji Long Distance meet, opting to run his home ground Juntendo University Time Trials meet on Friday instead. Shiojiri won the 10000 m A-heat in 28:58.16, notably closing with a 58-second final lap.

Rio Olympics 10000 m silver medalist Paul Tanui (Kyudenko) also gave Hachioji a miss in favor of staying close to home, winning Friday's Time Trial in Nagasaki 10000 m A-heat in 28:20.03 by a margin of over two and a half minutes. Jakarta Asian Games marathon silver medalist Keiko Nogami (Juhachi Ginko) won the women's 5000 m A-heat in 15:48.76.

The Hachioji Long Distance meet was the place to be on Saturday, seven heats of 10000 m at Hosei University in Tokyo's western suburbs. The A-heat was the biggest 10000 m in the world this year, with 19-year-old Ethiopian Dadi Tulu Merga (Yasukawa Denki) outkicking Kenyan Bernard Kimeli (Fujitsu) to lead 14 Japan-based Africans under 28 minutes in 27:25.86. National record holder Kota Murayama (Asahi Kasei) was the only Japanese man to finish the A-heat, targeting a sub-27:45 time but ending up 17th in 28:10.39. 5000 m national record holder Suguru Osako (Nike Oregon Project) dropped out halfway through after having finished 4th in the D-heat in 28:33.92 in his first race since setting the marathon national record last month in Chicago.

The Japanese men in the B-heat had better luck, with the top four breaking 28 minutes. All-time Japanese #2 Tetsuya Yoroizaka (Asahi Kasei) won in 27:55.85, narrowly edging out 2:06:54 marathoner Hiroto Inoue (MHPS) who cleared 28 minutes for the first time in 27:56.27. 3rd and 4th--placers Hiroki Abe (Meiji Univ.) and Takuya Fujikawa (Chugoku Denryoku) also went under 28 for the first time, Abe's 27:56.45 making him the fastest university man this year. 2:07:57 in Chicago behind Osako, Taku Fujimoto (Toyota) ran a PB 28:08.30 for 8th. A-heat finisher Kota Murayama's twin brother Kenta Murayama (Asahi Kasei) won the C-heat in 28:12.53.

Abe and a few of the other top university men went for faster times in Hachioji, but most collegiate men and some of the best women were at Yokohama's Keio University for the Kanto Region University Men's Time Trials meet, 12 heats of men's 10000 m and two for women. Teammates Keita Yoshida and Taisei Hashizume of four-time Hakone Ekiden champ Aoyama Gakuin University led the A-heat in PBs of 28:27.40 and 28:28.08, with Ichitaka Yamashita leading rival Komazawa University's contingent with a PB of 28:31.89 for 5th. 25 of the top 28 finishers in the A-heat ran PBs, the top 25 all breaking 29 minutes. Yuka Suzuki (Daito Bunka University) took 1st in the women's A-heat in 32:37.54 to lead the top five under 33 minutes.

Six days after setting a Swedish national record of 1:02:09 at the Ageo City Half Marathon, David Nilsson ran Saitama's Heisei Kokusai University Time Trials 10000 m A-heat as a recovery run and tuneup for next weekend's Kumamoto Kosa 10-miler. Alternating the lead with runners from Chuo Gakuin University and the Raffine corporate men's team, Nilsson dropped a 2:46 final 1000 m, kicking away from Rafine's Kenta Fukumura to win in a season best 29:33.54. In Kosa Nilsson will face Shiojiri, Kenta Murayama and other stars of this weekend's action. Also at Heisei Kokusai, 47-year-old Hiro Tonegawa ran 14:56.65 in the 5000 m, a mark believed to make him the oldest Japanese man ever to break 15 minutes.

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...

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...

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...

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