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...

The first two regional qualifying races for the Jan. 1 New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championships happened Monday in the two most competitive regions, the Tokyo-area East Japan region and Fukuoka-centered Kyushu region. The New Year Ekiden is pretty much the only major ekiden that doesn't have a seeded podium that guarantees top-placing teams a place at the follow year's race, meaning even the best of the best have to go through the formalities of a regional qualifier and all the disruption it brings to whatever fall racing schedule Japan's top corporate men might be trying to put together. 12 places were available in the East Japan race and 9 in Kyushu, and in honor of the New Year Ekiden's 70th anniversary one more slot was available in both regions to the next team to finish if they made it to the line within 10 minutes of the last regular qualifier. Logisteed took the top spot in East Japan thanks in a big way to a brilliant run on the race's lo...

A native of Shimabara, Nagasaki, Ryota Kondo , 25, visited Nagasaki City Hall ahead of September's Tokyo World Championships where he will represent Japan in the marathon. At February's Osaka Marathon Kondo set a debut marathon national record of 2:05:39, finishing 2nd overall and in the top Japanese spot to earn himself a place on the Japanese national team for the World Championships. "I like to go hiking in Oehara, or up the steep slopes in Nagayo and Nameshi," he told city officials. "Climbing steep hills strengthens my legs and hips." At the Tokyo World Championships the men's marathon will start at 8:00 a.m. on September 15. The race is likely to happen in lingering late-summer heat. "I tend to be pretty positive about things," Kondo said. "I think the hot conditions will prevent a lot of other athletes from performing up to their full ability. The way I see it, when things get tough it's an opportunity." Kondo is the third ...

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 ...

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 Mar. 16 the Mitsubishi Juko corporate team announced that 2014 Incheon Asian Games men's marathon silver medalist Kohei Matsumura , 34, has retired. Last year he became part of the team's coaching staff while continuing to compete as an athlete, but he will now shift focus to coaching full-time. His final race was last month's Lake Biwa Mainichi Marathon , where he was 156th in 2:18:44. Head coach Jun Kuroki  commented, "He was the first athlete on our team to make a national team and the first to go sub-2:10 in the marathon. I hope he will help shape our next generation of marathoners and help them to become even stronger."  A native of Takatsuki, Osaka, he was captain of Yamanashi Gakuin University's ekiden team, running the Hakone Ekiden's First Stage his 3rd and 4th years. He joined Mitsubishi Juko after graduating. At the 2014 Tokyo Marathon he ran his PB of 2:08:09. Later the same year he won the silver medal in the matathon at the Incheon Asia...

Ekiden week rolls on with the first major race of 2021 worldwide, the Jan. 1 New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championships. Asahi Kasei  is going for a fifth-straight national title, something they've managed twice before with six-packs of wins in 1978-1983 and 1990-1995. And really, who's going to stop them?  In September Asahi Kasei took delivery of the world's largest low-pressure altitude training facility so that they didn't have to deal with traveling to get to altitude, and just look at the results. At the National Championships earlier this month they had five guys under 28 minutes for 10000 m including a 27:18.75 national record from rookie Akira Aizawa , and a sixth man, Shuho Dairokuno , across the line in 28:01.29. And both of their Kenyan runners Robert Mwei  and Benuel Mogeni  are sub-28. And they have other guys like Hiroshi Ichida  who aren't quite up to that level but always deliver come ekiden day.  Asahi Kasei broke the New Y...