japan running news

Japan's outdoor Grand Prix season kicks off Saturday in Kumamoto at the Kanakuri Memorial Meet . Streaming will be at the link above starting at 9:30 a.m. local time. Complete timetable and start lists . Main events and some noteworthy entries: GP Women's 800 m Heat 2  - 12:10 p.m. All-time JPN #4 Ayano Shiomi , 2:01.01 GP Men's 800 m Heat 2  - 12:30 p.m. GP Women's 3000 mSC  - 2:45 p.m. All-time JPN #4 Yuzu Nishide , 9:38.95 All-time JPN #5 Manami Nishiyama , 9:39.28 South Korean NR holder Ha-Rim Cho , 9:53.09 GP Men's 3000 mSC  - 3:05 p.m. All-time JPN #2 Ryoma Aoki , 8:18.75 All-time JPN #5 Yutaro Niinae , 8:19.54 All-time JPN #7 Hibiki Obara , 8:22.64 All-time U20 JPN #2 Tetsu Sasaki , 8:29.05 All-time U20 JPN #3 Soma Nagahara , 8:30.37 GP Women's 1500 m Heat 2  - 3:35 p.m. Teresiah Muthoni , 4:02.54 Margaret Ekalale , 4:09.64 all-time JPN #3 Ran Urabe , 4:07.90 All-time JPN #6 Tomoka Kimura , 4:09.79 All-time U20 #5 Mei Sakiyama , 4:13.67 GP Men's 1500...

Saturday is the first big meet on Japan's outdoor middle and long distance circuit, the Kanakuri Memorial Meet in Kumamoto. This year it's also hosting the 10000 m National Championships , making for an extra-long and extra-quality field overall. Top finishers will pick up places on Japan's team for next month's Asian Championships in South Korea, a key step in earning world rankings points to get onto the home team for September's Tokyo World Championships that makes Kanakuri more valuable than ever. Streaming is scheduled to be here and will run through most of the day, with the meet-closing men's and women's 10000 m having a separate broadcast on NHK BS starting at 19:30 local time. Start lists for most events are here . 10000 m start lists are here . Live results are here . A-heat event previews: Women's 800 m  - 11:00 High schooler Rin Kubo  is the only Japanese woman to have broken 2 minutes, with a 1:59.93 last July. Is she going to get any fast...

The last big track time trial of the season, probably, Saturday's Edion Distance Challenge had its biggest result in its smallest event. With only 3 women on the starting line, the 3000 mSC saw Miu Saito from Nittai University move up from all-time Japanese #9 to #8 with a 9:45.62 PB that put her almost 35 seconds ahead of her closest competitor. Panasonic 's Nanami Watanabe took the women's 5000 m fast heat in 15:29.67, but a lot of the main competition, Kae Gyu from National Corporate Women's Ekiden winner Japan Post , Yuma Yamamoto , Risa Sasaki and Tomoka Kimura from runner-up Sekisui Kagaku , top-tier collegians Nanaka Yamazaki , Nanase Tanimoto and Haruka Ogawa , and others just looked tired. Only 8 women broke 16 minutes, and with 7 others going sub-16 in the B-heat better seeding might have produced better races. Some Japan Post runners did do well in the women's 10000 m fast heat, with Miyaka Sugata winning in 31:42.28 and Caroline Kariba 3rd in 3...

Entry lists are out for Japan's National Championships at the end of the month in Niigata. Top three there with the standard or inside their event quota is the primary way for people who haven't yet to score places on the Paris Olympics team, and it's notable that three people with the standard, Abdul Hakim Sani Brown in the men's 100 m, Ryuji Miura in the men's 3000 mSC, and Shunsuke Izumiya in the men's 400 mH, are giving Nationals a miss. One effect of their absence is that it improves the chances that other people are going to make the Paris quota on points, especially in the 100 m and steeple where Sani Brown and Miura are the only ones with the standard and likely to still be that way post-Nationals. Whether that's intentional only they can say, but it's interesting that one outcome of the World Athletics world rankings system is that in a way it encourages top talent to skip their National Championships to help out their teammates. But the mos...

Lots of big meets coming up, and entry lists are promising some top Japanese talent at three of the first major ones. On Mar. 7 the JAAF announced a team of 12 men and 12 women for the Mar. 30 Belgrade World Cross Country Championships , with senior men's 10 km 3rd-placer Yuta Bando (Fujitsu) the only one of the top-placing athletes at last month's National Cross Country Championships to pass on running Worlds. There hasn't been any announcement of withdrawals by the JAAF, but as of this writing the official entry lists on the Worlds site list only 5 men and 7 women. All four people on the mixed relay team are there including the Louisiana State University -bound Yuya Sawada (Hamamatsu Shiritsu H.S.) and 1500 m NR holder Nozomi Tanaka (New Balance), but senior men's national champ Tomonori Yamaguchi (Waseda Univ.), the entire U20 men's team, and all but U20 women's 4th-placer Chiseno Ikeda (Ritsumeikan Uji H.S.) are missing. It has to be wrong, right? The...

  After three days of athletics competition at the Hangzhou Asian Games Japan has yet to score gold, but its haul of silver and bronze medals more than doubled over the course of the two days. Men's 400 m NR holder Kentaro Sato took silver Saturday, starting slow as Fuga Sato did the leading in the first half of the race, then reeling in the competition over the last 120 m. Asian record holder Yousef Ahmed Masrahi of Saudi Arabia got away from him, just, winning gold in 45.55 with Sato in 45.57. Bahraini Abbas Yusuf Ali knocked Fuga Sato off the podium with a PB 45.65, Fuga 4th in 45.70. It took til Sunday night for the next medal to land, with Ryoma Aoki and Seiya Sunada going 2-3 in the men's 3000 m steeplechase. Favorite Avinash Mukund Sable of India took it out fast with a 2:40.97 first 1000 m, too fast to sustain but enough to set put him far out front for most of the race. Sable led at 2000 m with 5:27.48 before starting to fade, giving Aoki hope as he closed har...

  The biggest international championships outside the Olympics are underway in Hangzhou, China, with 12,500 athletes from 45 countries representing 60% of the world’s population competing across 61 sports at the 19th Asian Games . Athletics runs Sept. 29 to Oct. 5, and while official event entry lists haven’t been released yet JRN has pieced them together from the national team entry lists in the events where Japanese athletes will be competing. Additions and corrections welcome, and we’ll update the lists below as official entry and start lists are released. Complete meet schedule and results here .  4 Japanese athletes and one relay team arrive in Hangzhou ranked #1 in their events. The gold medalist at July’s Asian Championships, NR holder Sumire Hata leads the women’s long jump field at 6.97 m, with a 21 cm margin over India’s Shaili Singh and another 11 cm over China’s Shiqi Xiong and Sri Lanka’s Lakshini Sandaradura . Kentaro Sato is the fastest in the men’s 400 m f...

We'd like to give you preview and streaming info for the Asian Athletics Championships starting tomorrow in Bangkok, Thailand, but there's not a lot to go on. Streaming should be here under the "Live" tab , but as the JAAF site notes , "There's a chance a link to streaming might be released right before the start. If one is announced, we'll let you know." 42 countries are set to compete, but no overall entry lists have been made public anywhere we've looked. The Asian Athletics Association site isn't very helpful either, its top story being the federation bureaucrats' "Gala and Awards Celebration for the 50th Anniversary of Asian Athletics Association" and almost nothing about its championships apart from a statistics PDF that starts off with a long autobiography by an AAA exec. The meet schedule is up and it has links to event start lists, but nothing has been added there yet. So, about all we can tell you right now is about...

The JAAF has announced a team of 58 for September's rescheduled  Hangzhou Asian Games , something on a par with the Commonwealth Games but with a bigger share of the world's population. 22 women and 36 men will stretch out a long season spanning over two months from the Bangkok Asian Championships to the Budapest World Championships to Hangzhou in quest of points for next year's Paris Olympics. Women 100 m Arisa Kimishima - 11.36 200 m Arisa Kimishima - 23.17 800 m Ayano Shiomi - 2:02.57 1500 m Yume Goto - 4:09.41 5000 m Ririka Hironaka - 14:52.84 Yuma Yamamoto - 15:16.71 10000 m   Ririka Hironaka - 30:39.71 Haruka Kokai - 32:01.83 100 mH   Masumi Aoki  - 12.86 Yumi Tanaka - 12.89 400 mH   Ami Yamamoto - 56.06 Pole Vault Misaki Morota - 4.41 m Long Jump   Sumire Hata - 6.75 m Triple Jump   Mariko Morimoto - 14.16 m Javelin Throw Sae Takemoto - 62.39 m Marina Saito - 62.37 m 20 kmRW Nanako Fujii - 1:28:58 Yukiko Umeno - 1:33:38 35 kmRW Maika Yag...

The JAAF has announced a team of 78 for the Bangkok Asian Championships July 12-16 in Thailand, perfect parity with 39 women and 39 men. Out of the Japanese athletes to have already cleared the Budapest World Championships qualifying standard and be named to Japan's team for Worlds, only Shunya Takayama is scheduled to compete in Bangkok in the 110 m hurdles. 34 of the Asian Championships are currently in the quota for their event for Budapest. Another half dozen including Arisa Kimishima , Maki Saito , and Hikaru Ikehata are on the cusp of making the quota. For that half of the team, the chance to score area championships placing points for world rankings make the Asian Championships critical to their chances of representing Japan in Budapest. A bit surprisingly, no men's relay teams, one of Japan's areas of strength in recent history, are entered. Athletes in bold are currently in the Budapest World Championships quota for their listed event. Athletes in bold and un...