Skip to main content

Chien Breaks TPE NR, Iwata Betters ID-Class WR - Weekend Track Roundup


The last weekend of the academic and fiscal year saw at least 5 meets with good results domestically and abroad. Kicking things off Friday was the Maurie Plant Meet in Melbourne, where Tomohiro Shinno and Naoto Hasegawa took 1st and 3rd in the men's high jump, both of them only clearing 2.18 m along with 2nd-placer Roman Anastasios. 12 other Japanese athletes were in action on the second day of the meet on Saturday, where 3000 mSC NR holder Ryuji Miura ran 3:42.84 for 6th in the men's 1500 m. Nagiya Mori had a better one in the men's 3000 m with a 7:45.40 for 4th. Both Yota Mashiko and Rui Suzuki cleared 8:00 too, Mashiko's 7:53.84 the 2nd-fastest ever by a Japanese-born high schooler. Abigail Fuka Ido and Nagisa Takahashi both placed 3rd in their events, Ido going 23.85 (-0.9) in the women's 200 m and Takahashi clearing 1.82 m in the women's high jump.


8 Japanese men were at The TEN in California to run 10000 m. In the B-heat won by Edward Marks in 27:54.98, Jinichiro Kameda was the fastest of the 3 Japanese men in the race, taking 8th in 28:38.21 with Ren Umezaki 9th in 28:40.28 and Yuma Shimo 13th in 28:54.45. The A-heat didn't go much better. Ayumu Yamamoto, Kotaro Shinohara, Kaisei Okada, Shoya Kawase and Ryuto Igawa had all run between 27:35 and 27:51, 3 of them under 27:40, but in a race where the top 2 broke 27 minutes, 9 went under 27:30 and 12 under 28 minutes, the Japanese group took 18th through 22nd of 24 finishers. Yamamoto had the fastest time at 28:29.05, the next 3 all coming in within 7 seconds of him and Igawa another 10 seconds back in 28:46.85. It wasn't exactly the most effective use of resources.


At the last Nittai University Time Trials of the school year, 800 m NR holder Ko Ochiai wrapped his 1st year at Komazawa University with a 3:38.60 PB to win the men's 1500 m fast heat., but the bigger news was in 4th place. Tzu-Chieh Chien ran his last race in the Sendai Ikuei H.S. uniform, dropping a 3:41.88 Taiwanese NR that also bettered the Miyagi prefecture high school 1500 m record. Picking things up the next day, Juntendo University's Haruka Yamamoto won the men's 3000 m B-heat in 7:56.06 to lead the top 4 under 8 minutes. His Juntendo teammate Hiroto Yoshioka was the only one to break 8 in the A-heat, running a 7:54.88 PB for the win.

Yuma Nishizawa delivered one other sub-8 3000 m, winning at the Tokyo Boshoku Time Trials meet in Aichi in 7:59.91. His teammate Takuya Hanyu had a good double, running 8:02.69 for 4th in Heat 1 behind Nishizawa, then coming back 5 minutes later to pace Heat 2 and cross the finish line 1st in 8:25.27. Further back in Heat 1, Paralympian Yuki Iwata took just under a second off his own ID-class world record, finishing 13th in 8:19.89.

At the Nihon University Time Trials meet, Yuki Hashioka opened his season with a solid 8.14 m (+1.2) for the win. Other decent performances included a 78.24 win by Yuta Sakiyama in the men's javelin throw and a 5.50 m clearance in the men's pole vault by Tomoya Karasawa.

© 2026 Brett Larner, all rights reserved

Buy Me A Coffee

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
What went wrong for the boys during the 10? Why does it seem that the Japanese struggle so much outside of Japan?
April 1, 2026 at 2:24 AM
Brett Larner said…
It's a good question about this race, especially given the good results at the Maurie Plant Meet and Berlin Half the same weekend. One of the JPN runners in the fast race at the Ten texted me later and said it was "really humid," but given all the other great performances it's hard to see how that could only have affected the JPN athletes, especially as they are from different coaching groups and environments.
April 1, 2026 at 10:25 AM
Post a Comment

Most-Read This Week

Waseda Leads Top 7 Teams Under Izumo Ekiden CR, Ivy League Best-Ever 3rd (updated)

3rd last year, Waseda University scored its first Izumo Ekiden win since 2010, taking almost 2 minutes off the CR and leading the top 7 teams under the old record of 2:07:51 for the complete 6-stage, 45.1 km course. Waseda was 16 seconds back in 7th after the First Stage, but its 2nd runner Ojiro Honda made that up easily and put them 6 seconds out front. A massive 22:56 CR for the 8.5 km Third Stage by Shadrack Kipkemei (Nihon Univ.) dropped Waseda back to 2nd even though its runner Ryuki Suzuki broke the old CR too, but back-to-back CR on the next 2 stages by 1st-year Haruki Niizuma and Shunpei Yamaguchi put anchor Shinsaku Kudo out of reach of the rest of the field. Kudo duly won the 10.2 km anchor stage in 29:00, bypassing a 2:06 time entirely for a new 2:05:56 CR, just under 2:48/km average pace for the complete course. Defending champ Koku Gakuin University struggled a bit in the first half of the race but came on strong in the longer second half with 4th and 5th runners...
8 comments
Read more

Kipyegon Repeats, Toyo Wins Hakone Ekiden Qualifier in First Appearance in 21 Years

Back for the first time in 21 years after a disastrous 14th-place finish at the 102nd Hakone Ekiden this past January, Toyo University hit one out of western Tokyo's Showa Kinen Park with a solid win at the Hakone Ekiden Yosenkai, the half marathon that serves as the official qualifying race for the 103rd Hakone Ekiden. The top 10 teams in the Hakone auto-qualify for the following year, with the rest having to run the Yosenkai in October with a squad of 10 to 16 runners out of which the top 10 score on aggregate time, with the 10 fastest schools joining the Hakone field and top individuals from non-qualifying teams names to the Kanto Region Student Alliance select team to make up the complete Hakone field of 21. Driven in large part by an aggressive run from 3rd-year Yu Miyazaki , one of only 2 Japanese athletes to go with the big African contingent up front, Toyo won in 10:31:30, 1:03:09 or 2:59.6/km per athlete. As the first team to have broken the 3:00/km average pace barrie...
1 comment
Read more

Ngetich and Mutiso Take Down Tokyo Legacy Half CR

In its 5th edition the Tokyo Legacy Half Marathon scored 2 new course records via Kenyans from the Ikaika agency, with 10 km WR holder Agnes Ngetich blasting 3 minutes off the old record to win by over 4 in 1:04:23, and Alexander Mutiso skimming just 1 second under the CR for the win by 5 seconds in 59:51. The 2 races played out completely differently, even if the paydays were the same for the winners. Surrounded by an envelope of male runners all the way to the final 100 m, Ngetich was out hard on the downhill in the first 5 km, hitting it on sub-64 pace in 15:08 before leveling out on the flat middle 10 km. Her next 2 splits projected to 1:04:09 and 1:04:17, and even with the uphill back to the stadium in the last 5 km she didn't fall far off from that, winning in 1:04:23. Runner-up Tabitha Njeri Kamau was nearly a mile back in 1:08:28, with Kamau's Mitsui Sumitomo Kaijo teammate Kazuna Kanetomo dropping a 1:10:17 PB for 3rd. Now an independent, track Olympian Kaede Ha...
2 comments
Read more