The first of Japan's selection races for next year's World Half Marathon Championships, the Sanyo Ladies Road Race saw a pack of seven including last year's winner Honami Maeda (Tenmaya), 2:21 marathoner Yuka Ando (Wacoal), the U.K.'s Charlotte Purdue , Canadian national record holder Rachel Cliff and others stay together until almost 15 km before Purdue put the pedal down. Maeda, winner of September's MGC Race 2020 Olympic marathon trials, tried to stay with her, but Purdue had the win in her, taking first in 1:08:45, the fastest time of her career on a record-legal course. Maeda was next in 1:09:08, bettering her PB from her win last year by 4 seconds. Moving up from a 2nd-place finish in the 10 km in Sanyo last year, her teammate Sara Miyake (Tenmaya) was 3rd in 1:09:23 to give Tenmaya a good chance of having two women on the Worlds team. Ando was the only other woman under 70 minutes at 1:09:38. Cliff, who broke the Canadian marathon NR in Nagoya in Ma...
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