Pretty much every year I write something about how the level of the college athletes at the Hakone Ekiden just keeps going up and up. This year too, the performances by collegiate men at February's Marugame Half and last month's string of 10000 m time trial meets were off the charts. There's got to be a peak somewhere, but it doesn't look like it's anywhere close.
How much have things really progressed? Let's take a quick look at the level of the fields at some of the Hakones since 2005. That year there were 19 college teams and one select team, so for the sake of consistency these numbers represent the top 19-ranked teams in the field at each Hakone. With Hakone happening on Jan. 2-3 every year, the listed years are the Hakone year, with the performances listed happening in the calendar year before that.
Progression in the 5000 m from 2005 to 2020 was pretty steady, the largest jump happening between 2005 and 2010 at about 3 sec/km. After almost no change from 2015 to 2020 there was a major jump from there to 2025, the period covering both the pandemic when there were fewer road races and more focus on the track, and the widespread adoption of new spike tech. It happened so fast that 2020's top 5000 m runner Charles Ndungu of Nihon University at 13:25.32 wouldn't have made the top 10 at Hakone 2025. There wasn't a big singularity event like in the 10000 m and half, but there was slight further improvement between the 2025 and 2026 Hakone fields. 7 men went under 13:20 this year compared to 6 last year, and 25th-ranked Kaito Iida of Aoyama Gakuin University slightly beat out last year's #25 Ayumu Yamamoto of Koku Gakuin University 13:34.20 to 13:34.85.
Development in the 10000 m from 2005 to 2020 was pretty similar to that in the 5000 m with steady growth around 3 sec/km, then a massive jump between 2020 and 2025. Sub-28 was something special through 2015, then grew to 5 people in 2020 driven in part by an increase in the number of schools with a Kenyan athlete. Then last year that exploded to 20, fueled in part by a growth in the number of Kenyans to 7 but fundamentally driven by Japanese performances going through the roof.
The number of Kenyans held steady at 7 this year, but the overall number grew to 25, most of them in a string a school record performances at the Hachioji Long Distance, MARCH Taikosen, and Nittai University Time Trials meets at the end of November. The single-year progression from 2025 to 2026 was pretty similar to the 5-year ones from 2005 to 2010 and 2015 to 2020, and things hit the point that 2015's top dog Kenta Murayama of Komazawa University would have been ranked 19th this time around.
And then there was the half marathon, the main distance for Hakone runners. Not much really changed between 2005 and 2010, but for every 5 years through 2025 things improved at about the same rate, 3 sec/km, even in the 2020-2025 period when the 5000 m and 10000 m made massive jumps. There was a big increase that 5 years at the very top end, but overall it was pretty consistent with the 5-year segments before that.
Then things really took off this year when the National Collegiate Half Marathon moved from the tougher Tachikawa course to the Marugame Half, where top collegiate men could race against corporate leaguers and international competition. Things went from 1 sub-60 to 2 this year, 7 sub-61 last year to 16 last year, and 25th place from 1:01:59 to 1:01:16. Overall the jump was at least as big as any 5-year improvement that had come before it. The change to Marugame was a big part of that, but performances at November's Ageo City Half Marathon were bigger than ever too, so it wasn't just that.
Across all 3 distances the performance level increased this year, and the rate of increase seemed to accelerate as the distance increased, and the trend continued up to the marathon distance too. 13 Japanese collegiate men have run sub-2:10 in the marathon up til now. 11 of those have been since 2020, with Waseda University's Atsushi Sato running 2:09:50 at the 2000 Lake Biwa Mainichi Marathon and Chuo University's Masakazu Fujiwara taking the collegiate record to 2:08:12 at Lake Biwa in 2003. AGU's Yuya Yoshida and KGU's Hidekazu Hijikata did it in 2020, Yoshida running 2:08:30 at Beppu-Oita and Hijikata 2:09:50 in Tokyo. After 2 each in 2023 and 2024, a record 4 collegiate men did it in the year between Hakone 2025 and 2026, KGU's Goki Takayama running 2:08:50 and AGU's Kosei Shiraishi 2:08:42 in Beppu-Oita behind a collegiate record 2:06:07 from AGU's Hiroki Wakabayashi. That record stood for only 3 weeks, as Wakabayashi's AGU teammate Asahi Kuroda dropped a 2:06:05 debut at the Osaka Marathon.
The overall jump across distances from 2020 to 2025 is pretty easy to explain, but it's harder to say what exactly has changed between last season and this one. It's not one program with one particular focus or approach producing all the results, except maybe for AGU's increasing attention on pre-graduation marathon debuts, and I guess it's in line with trackflation and the big jumps in road performances everywhere else. But still, it's a big change in only one season. There still needs to be more attention paid to distances 5000 m and shorter for the very top level to go up, not something that's likely to ever happen given Hakone's sheer gravitational pull. But like I said at the beginning, the overall level keeps going up and up, and there's still no ceiling in sight.
Top 25 lists for 5000 m, 10000 m and half marathon for the top 19 teams at the 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2025 and 2026 Hakone Ekidens:
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