japan running news

In a lot of ways this was one of the more interesting races in National Men's Ekiden history. 2 of the country's current top high schoolers, Fukushima 's Yota Mashiko and Hyogo 's Haruki Niizuma , made sure the race got off right with a CR-pace attack from the beginning. Everyone went with them, but it quickly shook down to the 2 of them and Miyagi 's Hiroto Suzuki , a relatively unknown factor. Niizuma was fresh back from running last weekend's World XC Championships in Florida and showed the fatigue from that race and the travel, dropping off just before 5 km on the 7.0 km opening stage. Mashiko and Suzuki hit it in 13:37, a head-to-head battle between runners from the top 2 teams at December's National High School Ekiden . Mashiko, who ran the fastest-ever Japanese time on the opening leg for winner Gakuho Ishikawa H.S. there, had better credentials than Suzuki, 3rd on the third leg for runner-up Sendai Ikuei H.S. and opened up with 1 km to go. But ...

photo © 2025 Victah Sailer/PhotoRun, all rights reserved Last weekend's Sydney Marathon featured one breakthrough performance that was kind of low in the mix. Running his first marathon outside Japan, 25-year-old Masato Arao negative split a 2:07:42 PB, moving up fast over the last 10 km to pass Eliud Kipchoge and finish 6th. With the Sydney course estimated to be about 2 minutes slow with tough hills in the early going, that meant Arao's run was about equal in quality to all-time Japanese #5, the only better marathon by a Japanese man outside Japan being Yohei Ikeda 's 2:05:12 for 6th in Berlin last fall. It was a pretty amazing breakthrough for someone who never made his college team's starting varsity lineup and a year ago was working full-time in his hometown and running for fun. Born and raised way up north in Yamagata, Arao showed a bit of promise at Sakata Minami H.S. , running the First Stage at the National High School Ekiden his first year in 2016 and maki...

  In his debut at the Ome 30 km Road Race Sunday in western Tokyo, Masato Arao (ND Software) won in 1:30:50. En route he split 15:04, 30:10, 45:46 and 1:01:14 while running in the lead pack, but breaking away on a hilly section of the course he was alone by the time he hit 25 km in 1:16:00. Unthreatened the rest of the way, he soloed the last 5 km to take the win. Arao went to Sakata Minami H.S. in Yamagata and Toyo University . After graduating he moved back to Yamagata and started working full-time while continuing to run races as an amateur. In September he ran a PB of 1:02:53 for 2nd at the Ichinoseki International Half Marathon. That attracted the interest of the ND Software corporate team, which he joined on Jan. 1 this year. He ran the anchor stage for the Yamagata team at the National Men's Ekiden on Jan. 19. In 2nd was his ND Software teammate Taiki Suzuki in 1:31:53. Ryo Kuchimachi (Subaru) was 3rd in 1:32:14. Moe Shimizu (Mitsui Sumitomo Kaijo) won the women's ...

It's hard to beat the numbers, and with a whole team of current students at 2024 National High School Ekiden winner Saku Chosei H.S. , Saku Chosei alumni, and junior high schoolers bound to go there, 3-time National Men's Ekiden defending champ Nagano had enough of them to score a record 4th-straight win Sunday in Hiroshima. Saku Chosei's Yamato Hamaguchi got it off with a 19:33 win on the 7.0 km opening leg just 2 seconds off the CR, and even though second and third runners Taisei Masuda and Hiroto Yoshioka underperformed enough for Nagano to fall to 7th, a new 23:32 CR by Saku Chosei's Tetsu Sasaki on the 8.5 km Fifth Stage put them back out in front and far enough away that nobody could catch them. Anchor Taishi Ito brought Nagano home for the win in 2:16:55, 5 seconds under the overall CR for the 48.0 km race that Nagano set last year. Chiba spent the first half of the race back in the middle of the field of 47 teams from each of Japan's prefectures, but...

  The Chugoku Denryoku  men's corporate team has announced that team member Naoki Okamoto , 40, will retire in January. Born in May, 1984, Okamoto went to Tohaku J.H.S.  and Yura Ikuei H.S.  before enrolling at Meiji University . His 2nd year at Meiji he helped it make it through the Hakone Ekiden qualifying race for the first time in 14 years and ran Hakone at the end of that season in 2005. He went on to run it his 3rd and 4th years too, placing 6th on the First Stage and 9th on the highly competitive Second Stage. After graduating in 2007 he joined Chugoku Denryoku. He was a regular on its team at the New Year Ekiden, winning the Fifth Stage in 2010. But where he really made his name was the National Men's Ekiden, held every January in Hiroshima where Chugoku Denryoku is based. Running it 19 times, he passed a total of 134 competitors in his career there and came to be recognized as one of the event's icons. He also won its Seventh Stage in 2009. In the marathon, ...

Running with three returning members of last year's course record-breaking team, Nagano pulled off another CR to win its 3rd-straight National Men's Ekiden title Sunday in Hiroshima thanks in large part to a stellar run from anchor Mebuki Suzuki from Komazawa University . Last year's opening leg 3rd-placer Ryuto Kawahara of Nagasaki got things started with a 2:44 opening km on the 7.0 km First Stage, then let 2023 National High School Ekiden First Stage winner Sota Orita of Hyogo take over. Orita did most of the work through the middle part of the stage, then with 1.5 km to go Kawahara attacked and pulled away to break the 19:39 CR set by Sonata Nagashima last year by 8 seconds. It was one of those runs that makes the National Men's Ekiden great, with someone from a high school that isn't good enough to make Nationals taking down one of the big stars whose team did. In a four-way sprint for 2nd Nagano's Yamato Hamaguchi was 4th and Orita 5th, both one s...

Championship ekiden season wraps up Sunday with its last two big events. In Kitakyushu, the 35th Kitakyushu Women's Invitational Ekiden brings together top high school, college and corporate league teams to race a short 27.2 km in five stages, with the longest leg split in two for the high school teams. University teams are absent this time except for one select team made up of women from the area, while the corporate league division has nine teams and the high school division 22 plus another select team. 2023 Queens Ekiden national champion Sekisui Kagaku is the top seed, its entry roster including members of its national title-winning lineup, Yuma Yamamoto , Rina Sasaki and Chikako Mori . Its closest competition is Queens 8th-placer Iwatani Sangyo , which has five of its six runners from the national championships entered including Kaede Kawamura , winner of the anchor stage at last weekend's National Women's Ekiden . 2023 National High School Ekiden winner Kamimura ...

On Jan. 11 Asahi Kuroda , winner of the highly competitive Second Stage for overall champion Aoyama Gakuin University at the 100th Hakone Ekiden on Jan. 2, announced that his next race will be the Jan. 21 National Men's Ekiden in Hiroshima. At the seven-stage, 48.0 km race he said he hopes to be on a stage adjacent to the one his younger brother Zen Kuroda of Tamano Mitsunan H.S. runs so that they can hand off the tasuki together. Two stages at the National Men's Ekiden are for collegiate and corporate league runners, three are reserved for high schoolers, and two for junior high school athletes. Representing Okayama prefecture, the older Kuroda brother is scheduled to run the 8.5 km Third Stage, with the younger brother, who will enter the Aoyama Gakuin team in April, is set to run the 5.0 km Fourth Stage. "This will be the first time we've run an ekiden together since I was in my third year of high school and he was in his first," said Asahi. "I'm ...

There's a first time for everything. In the last major ekiden of the season, 37-year-old Yuichiro Ueno , head coach of the Rikkyo University team that ran the Hakone Ekiden three weeks ago, anchored the Nagano prefecture team to a second-straight course record win at the 28th National Men's Ekiden in Hiroshima. Nagano's Soma Nagahara got things off to a solid start, going one-on-one with favorite Sonata Nagashima of Hyogo on the 7.0 km 1st leg, both going under the old stage CR with Nagashima 1st in 19:39 and Nagahara only 2 seconds back. Over the next two stages Nagano dropped to 4th 20 seconds off the lead, but a pair of new CR from 4th and 5th runners and Saku Chosei H.S. teammates Shunpei Yamaguchi and Hiroto Yoshioka put the team 37 seconds ahead. 6th runner Riku Kobayashi extended that to 49 seconds, giving Ueno a margin of error of just over 3 sec/km on the 13.0 km anchor stage. Ueno first ran the National Men's Ekiden 20 years ago, passing 17 people on...

The JAAF has announced that due to the rapid increase in coronavirus infections in Hiroshima, the National Men's Ekiden scheduled to take place there on Jan. 23 has been canceled. It is the second year in a row for the event to be canceled because of the pandemic. The National Men's Ekiden starts and finishes at Hiroshima's Peace Park, with teams from each of Japan's 47 prefectures made up of 7 athletes ranging from junior high school students to top pros covering a 48.0 km course through the city and neighboring Hatsukaichi. Including coaches and team staff, roughly 600 people from across the country had been scheduled to take part. Athletes entered this year represented the best of multiple generations, including 6 members of the Tokyo Olympic team , 9 members of Aoyama Gakuin University 's 2022 Hakone Ekiden champion team, and many of the top people from December's National High School Ekiden . But since the start of the new year COVID-19 infections have s...