You're most well-known for Noguchi's gold medal, but as a corporate league coach athletes you developed kept breaking national records.
At the Unichika team Nobuko Kono got the 400 m, 800 m and 1500 m records. At Wacoal, Mariko Ikeda got the 800 m record, Masako Matsumoto and Miho Ishibashi both broke the 1500 m record, Atsuki Ri got the 3000 m, Tsukumi Fukuyama the 10 km, Megumi Fujiwara the 20 km, Kaori Kumura the half marathon, Rika Ota the 5000 m Asian record, and, before she went to the marathon, Izumi Maki got the 20,000 m world record along with the 5000 m and 10,000 m.
There were also Ikuko Tamura's 1500 m national record and mile Asian record, and of course Noguchi's records. It's quite a list.
Back in the late 50s and early 60s the longest distance women could run was 800 m. The first year they had a women's 1500 m at the National Championships was 1969. After that, with the 3000 m, 5000 m, the 10000 m, women had more and more opportunities to run distance events too. If you take on a high school graduate and monitor them for a year or two you can see what kind of event they're best suited for. But in the beginning I didn't have any knowledge about effective application of interval training, exercise physiology or the like. I bought books with my tiny little salary and studied training methods, but the more I read the less I understood. So, I took my training plans from my own career as an athlete and adapted them for women.
Can you give us an example?
Let's take the women's 1500 m. If you think in terms of the time difference between the men's and women's national records and high school records, it gives you an indication of how the pace should be set. Figuring out the right amount of recovery time during workouts, trying to manually measure heart rate while keeping track of start times, in the beginning I was really fumbling in the dark. How many reps of 200 m to 400 m intervals for an 800 m runner, how many reps of 400 m to 1000 m for a 5000 m runner, it all changed depending on the event. After a training block, in the final stages of preparing for a 1500 m race if an athlete did 1000 m plus 200 to 300 m hard with short recovery, I could check their condition and started to be able to see when they were about to drop a record. I'd tell them, "You're going to break the national record," and then they'd go and really do it.
In the marathon, Yuko Arimori won medals at the 1992 and 1996 Olympics. In Sydney and Athens Naoko Takahashi and Noguchi both won gold. On the track the last women's medal was Masako Chiba's bronze at the 1997 World Championships. At last year's Tokyo Olympics three women made the top 8 in their distance events, led by Ririka Hironaka's 7th-place finish in the 10,000 m. Good, but no medals.
They had success with running aggressively. All they're missing is the sprinting ability to be able to match the foreign athletes at the end. The shorter the distance, the harder it is for Japanese athletes to be competitive. Nozomi Tanaka did a good job to finish where she did.
Did you have Maki switch to the marathon after running the 10,000 m at the Barcelona Olympics and 1993 World Championships because it was too hard to get an Olympic medal on the track?
Arimori got the silver in the Barcelona Olympics marathon with a 2:32:49. I was surprised you could get an Olympic silver with a time like that. A year later Junko Asari won gold at the World Championships in 2:30:03. I told Maki, "You're not going to win a world-level 10,000 m no matter how hard you try. Let's do the marathon." She answered, "I hate marathons. I want to stay focused on the 10,000 m for Atlanta." But in January, 1996 she won the Tokyo City Half Marathon in 1:08:18, a national record. Even the day before that race she was still saying, "I hate road racing," whenever I brought up the marathon, but after the race she immediately switched to saying, "Let's do the marathon."
Of the three Olympic selection races for Atlanta, Tokyo International had already happened in November and Osaka International was only 2 weeks later. No chance she'd be ready for that, so all we could do was do some express training for the last race, Nagoya International that March. She had an injury during those two months and I didn't think she'd be able to run, but she did, and she won it in a solid 2:27:32 in her debut and sealed up her place on the Olympic team. Noguchi watched that race and joined our team because she wanted to emulate Maki. 8 years later she achieved what Maki and I had dreamed of.
The trials race for July's Oregon World Championships takes place at the Olympic Stadium on May 7. Everyone is focused on 19-year-old Seira Fuwa, the 2nd-fastest Japanese woman ever at 30:45.21. If she finishes in the top 3 she'll make the team, but she's coming off an Achilles tendon injury and isn't at 100%.
Achilles tendon injuries are the Achilles' heel of many a fast runner. 30:45 is fast, but she's too thin. She's 154 cm and only 37 kg? I'd like to see her around 42 to 43 kg. I think her university staff are trying to manage her nutrition, but there are top-level women's distance teams and high school ekiden teams that restrict their runners' diets and get angry at them if they eat. Some coaches think the lighter you are the faster you'll run, and there are some who give their athletes iron injections to treat anemia. I know of one athlete who had to run in a sauna suit to lose weight even though it was the middle of summer and ended up fracturing her pelvis.
Iron injection increases hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood and increases endurance, but while many coaches may use this to produce faster times there's also the danger of damage to internal organs from too much iron. A lot of coaches haven't even done basic study on problems related to menstruation in female athletes. The JAAF created guidelines to restrict misuse of iron injections in 2019. That action came way too late. Japanese track and field is behind the times.
translated by Brett Larner
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