Skip to main content

Asian Championships, Hyogo Relay Carnival, Nagano Marathon and More - Weekend Preview

The weekend's main action comes on the track, both at home and abroad. The main action comes at the Doha Asian Athletics Championships, a dry run for this fall's World Championships at the same new Khalifa Stadium where the athletics world will congregate in September. The Japanese national team is solid, with standouts including Jakarta gold medalists Yuki Koike in the men's 200 m, Seito Yamamoto in the men's pole vault and Keisuke Ushiro in the decathlon, men's 3000 m steeplechase bronze medalist Kazuya Shiojiri, 2018 World U20 Championships women's 3000 m gold medalist Nozomi Tanaka in the 5000 m and the resurgent Hitomi Niiya in the women's 10000 m. JRN will be on-site throughout the Asian Championships to cover the action live and in support of Tanaka and Niiya. Entry lists are available here.

A few members of the Toyota Jidoshokki women's team and the U.S.-based Takeshi Okada (Berkeley) will be at California's Mt. SAC Relays, but most people not on the Doha team have opted for Kobe's Hyogo Relay Carnival. With places on the line for this summer's World University Games national team and the chance to get in decent times ahead of the May/June National Championships the focus is on the 1500 m, 3000 m steeplechase and 10000 m for both men and women, with what may also be a decent women's 5000 m also on the bill. The women's Grand Prix 10000 m includes the three fastest women worldwide last year, Pauline Kamulu (Route Inn Hotels), Minami Yamanouchi (Kyocera) and Grace Kimanzi (Starts), while the men's includes six sub-28 Japan-based Kenyans led by 2018 world-leader Stanley Waithaka Mburu (Yakult).

The qualification window for September's MGC Race 2020 Olympic marathon trials closes at the end of this month, and at the Nagano Marathon at least two men, Asuka Tanaka (Hiramatsu Byoin) and Shoya Osaki (Chudenko) have a realistic chance of making it, Tanaka needing to run 2:11:47 and Osaki 2:11:12. Their competition includes Kenyan Alfred Kering and Tanzanian Ezekiel Jafary, with Kenyan Valentine Kipketer going head-to-head with high-volume marathoner Hiroko Yoshitomi (Memolead) in the women's race.

© 2019 Brett Larner, all rights reserved

Buy Me A Coffee
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Most-Read This Week

Australian YouTuber Handed Lifetime Ban by Ageo City Half Marathon After Running 1:06 with Another Runner's Bib (updated)

After discussion with their race's chief JAAF referee, on Nov. 27 the organizers of the Ageo City Half Marathon handed down a lifetime ban from their event against 36-year-old Australian Matt Inglis Fox  for running the Nov. 15 race wearing the bib number of another JAAF-registered runner. The incident came to light after Fox posted on his personal Instagram account that he had run a PB of 1:06:33 and finished 203rd in Ageo with a 10 km split of 31:03, along with photos and video of himself in the race wearing a bib number beginning with 11. Fox did not appear in the results by name or in that time or place, the closest match being a 1:06:54 gross, 1:06:50 net finish time with a 31:21 10 km split for 18th place in the JAAF-registered division and 209th overall by bib number 1129, registered to a non-Japanese Tokyo-resident club runner. The club runner, Harrisson Uk , readily confirmed that he had given his bib to Fox, saying, "I gave my number to Matt. It wasn't me."...
82 comments
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