japan running news

After a day off for New Year's Eve, the peak of championship ekiden season rolls on first thing on Jan. 1 with the 70th edition of the New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championship race. The top 40 teams in the country race 100.0 km in 7 legs in Gunma, starting at 9:15 a.m. sharp on New Year's Day. Unedited raw camera feeds from the live broadcast will be streamed live on Youtube above starting at 9:10 a.m., with the official TBS broadcast starting at 8:30 a.m. and streaming of the broadcast on TVer . During the race live results will be posted here . Every team has to requalify for the New Year Ekiden by running one of the 6 regional corporate ekidens in early November. Usually they're pretty similar in length and elevation change at around 80 km, making a rough comparison of where teams stand fairly straightforward. This time the East Japan race was only 74.6 km and the Kyushu race 89.3 km, meaning that going by average pace the East Japan teams had an advant...

At the 65th Karatsu 10-Mile Road Race Sunday in Karatsu, Saga, Shota Nakano (Honda) won in 47:30. Nakano graduated from Hiroshima's Sera H.S. before joining Chuo University . He ran the Hakone Ekiden three years in a row beginning his 2nd year at Chuo, winning the Third Stage his 3rd year. After graduating last spring he joined Honda, where he set a 1500 m PB of 3:41.47 at September's National Corporate Track and Field Championships. His other PBs include 13:24.11 for 5000 m, 28:00.86 for 10000 m and 1:02:49 for the half marathon. This was his first time racing the 10-mile distance. Yushin Akatsu (Komori Corp.) was 2 seconds behind Nakano in 47:32, with Daiki Nomimura (NTT Nishi Nihon) 3rd in 47:33 and veteran Keita Shitara (Nishitetsu) 4th in 47:35. Chikako Mori (Sekisui Kagaku) took the women's 10 km in 34:12 and Shiena Kanamori (Chikushi Joshi Gakuen H.S.) the high school girls' 5 km in 16:22. Taiyo Iwasa (Tosu Kogyo H.S.) won the high school boys' 10 km ...

ABC Television president Toshiaki Imamura , 62, held a press conference in Osaka on Jan. 24. There he talked about the new Expo Ekiden 2025 to be held in Osaka on Mar. 16, saying it was, "The first-ever showdown between the top corporate league and university teams." 9 teams from among the top placers at the Jan. 1 New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championships including winner Asahi Kasei and last year's national champ Toyota are scheduled to race, along with the top 8 from November's National University Ekiden and one Kansai Region Collegiate Select Team. The field of 18 teams will start at Expo Memorial Park in Suita, Osaka, site of the 1970 World Expo, and cover roughly 55 km in 7 legs to the finish at Yumeshima, Osaka. At the same time, Susumu Hara , head coach of this year's Hakone Ekiden winning team Aoyama Gakuin University , voiced public criticism, saying, "This is a serious race between the two leagues, and some of the top corpora...

No big surprises at the New Year Ekiden , where 2025 kicked off with a battle between favorites Toyota , Honda and Asahi Kasei that came down to a sprint finish in the last 800 m of the 7-leg, 100 km race. 2017-2020 New Year Ekiden winner Asahi Kasei took the lead from the start with an opening leg win by Sonata Nagashima . On the longest leg, the 21.9 km Second Stage, Yuto Imae from the team most expected to challenge the big three, GMO , made it to the front, but with a great run from Tomoki Ota the defending champs Toyota took the lead on the Third Stage. Samuel Kibathi held on over the short Fourth Leg, but on the Fifth Leg Yusuke Nishiyama showed fatigue from his 2:06:54 at Fukuoka a month ago and was run down by Olympic steepler Ryoma Aoki from 2022-2023 New Year winner Honda and Asahi Kasei's Shuho Dairokuno . Looking very strong over a longer distance than he'd usually run, Aoki opened a 10-second lead on Dairokuno that Honda's 6th runner Toru Kubota turned...

The New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championship kicks off 2025 early, with streaming starting at 9:00 a.m. local time January 1st and the race going off at 9:15. At 7 legs totaling 100 km it's the peak of the year for the corporate leagues, the reason they have teams and bring in Kenyans. Last year Toyota led from the Second Stage to the finish, outrunning 2022-2023 winner Honda and 2017-2020 winner Asahi Kasei to take the national title for the first time since 2016. How is Toyota looking this year? On the one hand they've picked up fresh incoming talent like last year's Komazawa University captain Mebuki Suzuki . On the other, some of its key players like Tomoki Ota and Ren Tazawa have been dealing with injury, and at November's Chubu Region qualifying race Toyota lost by a minute to Toyota Boshoku , who broke the Chubu CR. A lot of Honda's A-list was missing from its lineup at the East Japan Region qualifying race , where it was only 7th out...

In the first major race of 2024, Toyota took the lead on the 2nd leg to hold off two-time winner Honda for its first New Year Ekiden national title since 2016. The 12.3 First Stage had a 7-way sprint finish, with Naoki Ota (Yakult) taking the top spot over Hazuma Hattori (NTT Nishi Nihon) in 34:42 and 35-year-old Minato Oishi (Toyota) 4 seconds back in his final New Year Ekiden before retiring. On the new 21.9 km Second Stage, Ota's older brother Tomoki Ota (Toyota) immediately went to the front, initially with company from 2:06 marathoner Yohei Ikeda (Kao) and Ken Nakayama (Honda) but soon on his own. Ota, 2nd at last month's NR-breaking 10000 m National Championships, took advantage of a tailwind to win the stage in 1:01:40, a 59:25 half marathon equivalent, and hand off to new teammate Ren Tazawa . Tazawa, 4th at the 10000 m National Championships, split 27:35 en route on the 15.4 km Third Stage, and after Felix Korir held the lead on the new 7.8 km Fourth Leg it w...

That's right, it's the best time of the year, championship ekiden season, five major championship ekidens across six days of competition spread over 11 days starting Sunday. We'll be focusing all of next week on the lead-up to the peak of it all, the 100th Hakone Ekiden, and won't be able to do detailed previews of the other races, but below is a quick guide to what's coming up, when, and who is broadcasting it. In pretty much all cases there's no official streaming, so if you're outside Japan you either need to get a VPN, subscribe to a service that lets you watch Japanese TV internationally, or take your chances with something like mov3.co . Sunday, Dec. 24, 10:20 a.m.: 35th National High School Girls' Ekiden The top high school girls' team from each of Japan's 47 prefectures and 11 regional champion teams head to Kyoto to race 21.0975 km divided into five stages. Last year Nagano Higashi H.S. had a surprise victory over top-tier Sendai Ikuei...

After finishing 11th at the Jan. 2-3 Hakone Ekiden's 99th edition to end its 3-year streak of making the 10-deep podium, Tokyo Kokusai University announced on Jan. 18 that head coach Yuji Oshida , 60, will resign. After also finishing 8th at October's Izumo Ekiden and 11th at November's National University Ekiden Oshida's resignation came as a way of taking personal responsibility for the program's drop in competitive level. He will be replaced by veteran coach Saburo Yokomizo , 83. A graduate of Chuo University , where he won Hakone's 8th leg during his senior year, Oshida was the gold medalist in the 1500 m at the 1986 Asian Games. After working as assistant coach at Honda and Chuo, including for Chuo's 1996 Hakone Ekiden win, he has been head coach at Tokyo Kokusai since the program's inception in 2011, building it up from zero in consultation with fellow Chuo alumnus Yokomizo. Tokyo Kokusai first qualified for the Hakone Ekiden in 2016. In 2020 i...

Despite losing two key members of its first-ever winning team from last year's New Year Ekiden , one to injury and one to poaching by another team, Honda put together an even faster overall performance to take its second-straight corporate men's national title Jan. 1 in Maebashi, Gunma. Hideto Kosode got things off to a great start for Honda, tying for fastest on the 12.3 km opening leg. Kenyan Justus Soget was the weakest link on the team, dropping to 7th on the 8.3 km 2nd leg, but a decent run from Shoya Kawase on the 13.6 km 3rd leg brought Honda back up to 3rd overall. Naoki Koyama turned in the first of three critical performances in a row, taking the lead on the race's longest stage with its 3rd-best time, 1:04:38 for 22.4 km. Tokyo Olympics steeplechaser Ryoma Aoki only had a 12-second lead over last year's 4th-placer Mitsubishi Juko at the start of the 15.8 km 5th leg, but despite playing it conservatively for the first 5 km he still walked with its faste...

The first big race of the year worldwide every year is the New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championships, 100 km in 7 stages through Gunma northwest of Tokyo. TBS broadcasts it live domestically starting at 8:30 a.m. local on Jan. 1, with the broadcast to be streamed live on TVer . TBS will also be streaming live, unedited feeds from three different camera trucks too starting at 9:00 a.m. You'll probably need a VPN to get around geoblocking for both TVer and the unedited feed above. Live results will be here , and JRN will be covering the race live on @JRNLive  and Instagram to help you make sense of what's going on, and on the ground from the course. Buy us a coffee to help make the first of three straight days of live ekiden coverage possible. Last year the Honda team won for the first time in the race's 66-year history. Anchor Hidekazu Hijikata promptly jumped ship for CR holder Asahi Kasei , a product of 2020 rule changes around restrictions on team ...

Like you'd expect, marathons and ekidens were the main stories of 2022 on JRN. But 2 of the 3 most-read this year were about track 10000 m, one that speaks to another area of the incredible depth here, and another that organizers would probably like to forget about. This was 2022 as JRN readers saw it. Thanks for reading, and please consider subscribing in 2023 . 1. Aoyama Gakuin Breaks Own Course Record for Sixth Hakone Ekiden Win in Eight Years - Jan. 2-3 After opening a lead of almost a kilometer on the first day of Japan's biggest race , Aoyama Gakuin University turned that into a margin of over 3 km to win the 98th Hakone Ekiden in course record time. 3 of the 10 stages saw new course records , with incredible depth on almost every one of them. Preview . 2. JAAF and NHK Apologize for Camera Crew Interfering With Men's 10000 m National Championships - May 9 After an oblivious camera crew walked onto the track as the race was still happening, clotheslining Shinji Mita...

Thursday's public holiday is the traditional date for the East Japan Corporate Men's Ekiden , the first of the regional qualifiers for the Jan. 1 New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championship. The New Year Ekiden is the only one of the major championship ekidens without a seeded bracket guaranteeing top-placing teams a spot at the next year's race, something that forces every corporate men's team to run the regional qualifier right in the middle of fall marathon season. Liberalizing that setup would have a measurable effect on men's marathoning, but like everything else in Japan vested financial interests and politics keep things the way they are. This year the East Japan race, which covers the greater Tokyo area and further north, returns to the roads of rural Saitama for 76.9 km in 7 stages after spending the pandemic on a loop course inside a park in the city of Kumagaya. 31 teams are entered, a massive increase due to the move to allow club teams to...

On Sept. 1, New Year Ekiden national champion Honda announced that Hidekazu Hijikata , the 5th-fastest Japanese marathoner ever with a best of 2:06:26, has left its team. Following his departure, Hijikata will transfer to the Asahi Kasei team, 3rd at the New Year Ekiden. Hijikata was a successful ekiden runner at Koku Gakuin University , running a 2:09:50 marathon debut at the 2020 Tokyo Marathon while still a student there. After joining Honda, he ran a massive 2:06:26 PB at the 2021 Lake Biwa Mainichi Marathon. At the Jan. 1 New Year Ekiden this year he anchored Honda to its first-ever national title. Following up with a 2:08:02 at the Tokyo Marathon in March, he secured his place at the September, 2023 MGC Race Olympic marathon trials. In a statement Hijikata said, "Thanks to everyone who has shown me support the last two and a half years. I'll always be proud of having run for Honda, for having trained with their fantastic coaching staff, and for having gotten to run nex...

The level at the Hakone Ekiden just keeps going up and up.  Every year it seems like it can't go any further, and then it does. 3 stages this year had new course records, 9 out of 10 legs had at least one all-time top 10 mark, and 4 stages had 4 times inside their best-ever 10. In the absolute sense, shoes have played a part in that over the last few years, but in a relative sense the best college teams have at least equalled the top of the corporate leagues, and the teams behind them are getting closer and closer to the same level. At this year's 98th running on Jan. 2 and 3  Aoyama Gakuin University broke its own course record to make it 6 wins in 8 years. AGU clocked 10:43:42 for the complete 10-stage, 217.1 km course, an average of 2:57.9/km the entire way. How does that compare to Honda , which won the New Year Ekiden corporate men's championships on Jan. 1? Honda ran 4:51:04 for the 7-stage, 100.0 km course, averaging 2:54.6/km over an average 14.3 km stage lengt...