japan running news

Cold rain couldn't hold back the fast times at Saturday's Hakone Ekiden Yosenkai half marathon, the qualifying race for January's Hakone Ekiden university men's championships and the first major elite-level road race held in Japan during the coronavirus era. Held on a 2.6 km loop around an airbase runway in western Tokyo's Tachikawa suburb, 46 university teams from the greater Tokyo area fielded teams of 10 to 12 runners at the Yosenkai, with each team's 10 fast men scoring and the 10 fastest teams joining the top 10 from this year's Hakone Ekiden to make up the field for next year's Hakone. Temperatures at the start were 12˚C, and with the rain letting up just before the gun conditions were actually pretty good through the first half of the race. Last year's runner-up Vincent Raimoi (Kokushikan Univ.) took an all-Kenyan lead quartet out hard on sub-60 pace, going through 5 km in 14:05 and 10 km in 28:14 before slowing as the rain returned in the ...

Damn, has it already been a week? Time goes by so fast. Times at the Hakone Ekiden this year were fast too. Eight guys broke course records on four of the five stages on Day One , and another five broke the records on three of the five stages on Day Two . Two of the three stages that didn't have new records were just seconds off. Four teams broke the Day One course record, two broke the overall course record, and one broke the Day Two record. This all mirrored what happened a day earlier at the New Year Ekiden , where eight men broke the records on four of the seven stages, at least one other missed by seconds, the top two teams broke the official overall course record and two more broke the record for the actual current version of the course. And not just records. Some of them were historic, epoch-making marks. None more so than Tokyo Kokusai University 's Vincent Yegon , who busted the greatest performance in Hakone history, a 59:25 course record for the 21.4 km Thi...

Takushoku University teammates Joseph Razini Lemeteki and Akira Akasaki dominated the 2019 Ageo City Half Marathon , alternating the lead throughout almost the entire race to go 1-2 in school record times. With invitations to the 2019 United Airlines NYC Half up for grabs to the top two Japanese collegiate finishers in the unofficial intramural tryout for Japan's most prestigious race, the 2020 Hakone Ekiden, things went out very conservatively by Ageo standards at just 3:00/km for the first 2 km. Not content with that, Akasaki, 3rd on his stage at both the Izumo Ekiden in October and the National University Ekiden earlier this month, picked up the race and carried it until 15 km. From 3 km to 8 km Akasaki split 14:33, pace for 1:01:24, condensing the pack behind him down to eight. After the 10 km turnaround Akasaki's teammate Lemeteki made a bold move to gain contact with the lead group, and when he did it shaved things down to seven serious contenders. The front...

The first Nittai University Time Trials meet of the season and the National Corporate Track and Field Championships delivered most of the weekend's pre-Doha World Championships action on the track. At Nittai, Australian Melissa Duncan (Shiseido) and Minami Yamanouchi (Kyocera) tuned up for Doha with a head-to-head race over 3000 m, Duncan taking it by 0.40 in a sprint finish with a 9:05.45. The men's 10000 m was reasonably quick, with newcomer Razini Lemeteki (Takushoku Univ.) running a PB of almost two minutes to lead the top three under 28 minutes in 27:51.91. But the most interesting result came in the women's 5000 m A-heat, where amateur club runners Haruka Yamaguchi (AC Kita) and Shiho Kaneshige (GRlab Kanto) went 1-2 in another sprint finish, outkicking 2016 Gold Coast Marathon winner Misato Horie (Noritz), 2:23 marathoner Mao Kiyota (Suzuki Hamamatsu AC) and every other corporate leaguer in the field to do it. Yamaguchi, who ran a PB of 2:33:09 last we...

Kenyan Razini Lemeteki (Takushoku Univ.) and relative unknown Nanami Aoki (Iwatani Sangyo) took the top spots in hot and sunny conditions at the Shibetsu Half Marathon in Hokkaido. With Kenta Murayama (Asahi Kasei) doing early frontrunning in the men's race only to fade to a 20th-place finish in 1:06:40 Lemeteki had little competition for the win in 1:03:25. 2017 Shibetsu winner  Tsubasa Hayakawa (Toyota) was the top Japanese man at 2nd in 1:03:42, beating MGC Race Olympic marathon trials qualifiers Daichi Kamino (New Balance) and Naoki Okamoto (Chugoku Denryoku) - by 4 seconds and 11 seconds. Other MGC Race qualifiers Masato Imai (Toyota Jidoshokki), Yuji Iwata (MHPS) and Ryo Kiname (MHPS) all struggled, none of them breaking 66 minutes. Aoki won the women's race easily in 1:15:12 by almost a minute over Mai Nagaoka (Sysmex). MGC Race qualifiers Reia Iwade (Under Armour) and Keiko Nogami (Juhachi Ginko) were listed to start but apparently did not run. 33rd S...