japan running news

Paris Olympics marathon team alternate Ai Hosoda and Tokyo Olympics marathon trials winner Shogo Nakamura both announced their retirements recently, but with the fiscal year ending in March there have been a raft of other retirements hitting the Japanese news in the last couple of weeks. Some of them: Former women-only marathon NR holder Mao Ichiyama , 28, announced that she is retiring and leaving the Shiseido corporate team after a couple of dull seasons following her making the Paris Olympics team. Ichiyama's husband Kengo Suzuki , the former men's marathon NR holder, left the Fujitsu corporate team last fall to go it solo. Kento Otsu , 34, announced he is quitting the Chuo Hatsujo team to retire and take a position on the Rikkyo University coaching staff after next month's Tokyo Marathon. Otsu helped Toyo University take the overall win at the 2012 and 2014 Hakone Ekidens, winning his stages in both races and named MVP of the 2014 Hakone for his role in helping...

  Today's Nobeoka Nishi Nippon Marathon was in one of the few places in the country not hit by heavy snow, but even though it was windier than ideal with a strong tailwind 1st half and headwind 2nd half people ran well. After a 1:04:31 fast half the men dropped as slow as 16:03 into the wind between 25 and 30 km, but when the pacers dropped a group of 6 broke free from the pack and got the race back on track with a 15:25 split through 35 km. Even though he only had a 2:15:11 PB  Kazuto Kawabata  was the only one who could sustain that over the next 5 km, and he kept rolling on to win in a new PB of 2:10:27. Amateur Shusei Ohashi  dropped a 2:11:01 PB for 2nd, just holding off the debuting Shoki Yamaguchi  from Soka University  who was 3rd in 2:11:02. 6 of the top 10 ran PBs, the other 4 all running the marathon for the first time and everyone under 2:12:30. Back in 13th, the talented Kenta Murayama  from the local  Asahi Kasei  corporate tea...

The Nobeoka Nishi Nippon Marathon is the most overlooked part of Japan's late winter marathon season, far from the nearest airports in the Asahi Kasei corporate team's remote hometown of Nobeoka, Miyazaki. Traditionally it's a race for people debuting or at the end of their career, but with Beppu-Oita, Osaka and Tokyo all catering to way faster times it's also now the best choice in the season for people looking for a race where they can run 2:09-2:11. New Zealand's Caden Shields found that out last year when he came to what ended up being a 2:09:43 race won by Jin Yuasa and finished 5th in a 2:11:35 PB. This time around Nobeoka counts toward qualification for the L.A. Olympic trials marathon in the fall of 2027, already the only thing anybody in the system here cares about, so pacing up front will be aimed to hit the sub-2:09 criterion for the winner to qualify. The field is the usual mix of people on both ends of the career spectrum, 2:08 PB runners Daiji Kaw...

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...

The Ohtawara Marathon and 10 km took place Nov. 23 at DI Stadium in Ohtawara, Tochigi. 2803 people started the marathon at 10:00 a.m., with 2354 people finishing for a finisher rate of 84.0%. The race has a cutoff time of 4 hours, and all participants are able to use special drink tables. Most years there is a headwind blowing from the mountains of Nasu in the 2nd half of the race, but this year there was almost no wind and cloudy skies. Itto Otawa , a 23-year-old Tochigi local, won the men's marathon in a 2:13:04 course record. Otawa ran this year's Hakone Ekiden for Senshu University , placing 15th on the Ninth Stage. After graduating in March he was hired by the Shimotsuke Newspaper in Tochigi, where he works as a reporter. In August he ran a PB of 2:16:29 at the Hokkaido Marathon. "At work I'm mainly in charge of the Nikko beat," Otawa said. "My goal in Ohtawara this time was to break the course record. I've run a PB every time so far in the marathon...

Since the start of JRN's collegiate development program in 2012, a partnership between the New York Road Runners and the Ageo City Half Marathon that brings two of the top male university half marathoners in the country to the United Airlines NYC Half every year, a total of 25 athletes have made the trip. For most of them it's been their first time racing outside Japan. 10 of the 25 have been from Komazawa University , including 4 of the 5 fastest times and 4 of the 5 best placings. Kenta Murayama 's 1:00:57 for 5th in 2017 leads both lists and still stands as the fastest half marathon ever run by a Japanese man on U.S. soil. This year two more Komazawa runners are in New York as numbers 24 and 25, Yudai Kiyama and Hibiki Murakami . At Ageo last November Kiyama and Murakami ran PBs of 1:01:59 and 1:02:04 for 2nd and 4th overall to pick up invites to the NYC Half. A 3rd-year, Kiyama was a national-level 1500 m runner in high school. At Komazawa he struggled to make its ...

With just over 2 weeks to go the Feb. 2 Beppu-Oita Mainichi Marathon has finally announced its elite field. It looks pretty good at the front end at first glance, but #1-ranked Vincent Kipchumba hasn't finished a marathon since his 2:04:28 best in London 4 years ago and has only run one race, a 29:05 10 km in 2023. #2-ranked Kiyoto Hirabayashi of Koku Gakuin University , winner in Osaka last year in a collegiate and debut record 2:06:18, is very unlikely to actually start, and #3-ranked Yohanes Ghebregergis likewise hasn't run a marathon since his 2:06:28 best in 2021 and only a single half marathon, 1:02:15 last spring, since then. So, that leaves a pretty tasty matchup between 2021 Tokyo Olympics alternate Shohei Otsuka , 2:06:57, last year's winner Derese Workneh , 2:07:58 in his Beppu-Oita victory, and Tesfahun Akalnew , 2:07:59. Another 5 people are at the 2:08 level, and then there are a truckload of 1:01 half marathoners taking a shot at the marathon distance. Ru...

We're deep into championship ekiden season. Over the last two weekends the six regions making up the corporate leagues held their qualifying races for the Jan. 1 New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championships. The New Year Ekiden is one of the only national-level championship ekidens that doesn't give its podium finishers auto-qualifying spots for the next year, meaning every team has to run the regional races every November. It's not hard to see how that eats into the fall marathon season and how doing it the same way they do for all the other big ekidens, including the corporate women's national championships later this month, and having the top teams auto-qualify, would open up the fall schedule and improve Japan's performances in men's marathoning. But it is what it is right now. In place of an auto-qualifying spot for podium finishers, the national corporate federation redistributes the wealth of qualifying slots available in each region based ...

It seems like there's action on the track at Yokohama's Nittai University almost every weekend these days, with a special one-day edition of the Nittai University Time Trials series added on Saturday mostly focused on people tuning up for the Dec. 25 National High School Ekiden and Dec. 30 National University Women's Ekiden. But this weekend the main action is on the roads, with three major races in the deep south. First up is the 53rd Hofu Yomiuri Marathon in Yamamguchi at the southwestern tip of Honshu. With the news last year that the Fukuoka International Marathon was ending after 75 years , Hofu was very eager to snap up its traditional date on the first Sunday of December, two weeks earlier than Hofu's usual date. When news broke in the spring that Fukuoka was coming back on its usual date that meant two races of about the same level on the same day. Starting at 10:40 a.m., Hofu has an all-domestic field fronted by 7 men who ran their PBs at the Miracle at Lak...

Tokyo's newest elite-level road race happened Sunday on the course used for Japan's 2020 Olympic marathon trials and the 2020 Paralympic Games marathon, with the first edition of the Tokyo Legacy Half Marathon bringing 15,000 to the streets. Kenyan Vincent Kipkemoi outran Japan-based world all-time #4 Alexander Mutiso for the win 1:00:10 to 1:00:29, with 3rd and 4th-placers Benard Kimeli and Vincent Raimoi also getting under 61 minutes despite the tough uphill finish. With prize money running 8 deep Kenyans took the top 8 spots. Winning a three-way sprint finish on the track for 9th and top Japanese honors was Kenta Murayama , outkicking marathoners Daisuke Uekado and Yusuke Nishiyama by 1 second in 1:02:14. In the women's race, unknown Caroline Nyaga outran 2022 National Corporate Half Marathon champ Dolphine Omare Nyaboke for the win, breaking her PB by over a minute and a half in 1:08:23. Nyaboke was 2nd in 1:09:46. On the climb back up to the stadium 2022 Hokka...

The list of entries has been updated with withdrawals announced Feb. 25. So it looks like the Osaka Marathon is going to happen. The Osaka International Women's Marathon and mass-participation Osaka Half Marathon just happened the weekend before last, and even as most of the spring's Japanese road races continue to cancel, with less than three weeks to go they've announced the elite fields for the mass-participation Osaka Marathon on Feb. 27.  On the men's side, Osaka is taking the place of the historic Lake Biwa Mainichi Marathon on the calendar. There are a few Japan-based internationals, but with the borders still mostly closed it's another super-deep domestic field. Beppu-Oita just happened yesterday and Tokyo looks like it's also likely to happen, but even so the entry list has ten current 2:07 guys, eight at the 2:08 level, four at 2:09, eight at 2:10, and seven at 2:11. And one guy debuting with a 1:30:38 best for 30km, two debuting sub-61 half marat...

Despite Osaka being named to a preliminary state of emergency as Japan goes deeper into its omicron wave, this weekend's Osaka International Women's Marathon and Osaka Half Marathon are going ahead on their traditional public road courses. Osaka Women's is Japan's last remaining purely elite marathon, and with the mass-participation Osaka Marathon moving to the last weekend of February this year and targeting WA platinum label status the writing has to be on the wall for its future. It just doesn't seem sustainable to have this race four weeks before the start of a three-week run of platinum label races, one in the same city, one in Tokyo and one in Nagoya. But for this year, at least, Osaka Women's clearly has the support up top in the local government to keep moving, and that counts for something. Like the 2021 race, despite its name it's a Japanese-only field with male pacers, kind of inevitably on the first point given Japan's ongoing border fortif...

Kento Kikutani  (Toyota Boshoku) added a bit of drama to the Vienna City Marathon even before the disqualification of its original winner. 9th at February's record-breaking Lake Biwa Marathon in a PB of 2:07:26, Kikutani was the only one of the four Japanese men in Vienna to go with the lead pack. He stayed with them well into the second half before dropping off, but as the lead quartet slowed to set up for the last kick he came back, just making contact with the back of the group before the move came. Kikutani went into fourth, but with less than 2 km to go he suddenly stopped, walked, and then appeared to stretch out a cramp of other issue.  He dropped back to 5th by the time he made it across the line in 2:10:37, still good enough for the fastest time by a Japanese man overseas since Kenta Murayama 's 2:08:56 at the 2019 Berlin Marathon. It was a promising start to the post-Tokyo 2020 continuum. When initial winner Derara Hurisa  (Ethiopia) was disqualified for ...

Strong over the second half, it came down to an untried rookie just promoted up from the B-team to seal up the old-school Asahi Kasei team's fourth-straight New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championships title. Asahi Kasei was always there, 2nd on the opening stage thanks to a good run from leading man Keijiro Mogi , Kenyan Abraham Kapsis Kipyatich moving them up to 1st on the Second Stage in his final run with the team, and Sixth Stage specialist Hiroshi Ichida holding the lead on the Third Stage. It wasn't until the Fourth Stage, at 22.4 km the longest of the day, that Asahi Kasei lost any ground, with 2019's fastest Japanese half marathoner Minato Oishi (Toyota) running down third man Hiroshi's twin brother Takashi Ichida and opening a gap of 12 seconds. On paper that should have been enough for Toyota, the favorite to end Asahi Kasei's domination, to pull it off, with Olympic marathon trials runner-up Yuma Hattori and the #2 and #3 half ma...