japan running news

The last big women's race of championship ekiden season, the Kitakyushu Women's Invitational Ekiden saw 8 corporate teams square off against 19 of the top high school teams in the country over a 27.2 km race. For corporate leaguers that was divided into 5 legs, with the final leg, 10.4 km, split into two legs for the high school teams. Kairi Ikeno put National High School Ekiden 8th-placer Suma Gakuen H.S. out front on the 5.3 km First Stage, missing the CR by 2 seconds in 16:51. Only 17th at the Queens Ekiden corporate national championships, Kyocera was 5 seconds out front by the end of the 3.8 km Second Stage, but that didn't last long when Yume Yabutani ran a 12:35 CR on the 3.9 km Third Stage to put National High School Ekiden runner-up Osaka Kunei Joshi Gakuin H.S. in the overall lead by 23 seconds. That lead stayed exactly the same over the 3.8 km Fourth Stage, while from behind Denso , which had failed to qualify for the Queens Ekiden, closed to 15 seconds b...

The Osaka team took its 5th national title Sunday at the 9-stage, 42.195 km National Women's Ekiden in Kyoto over Hyogo and Nagano . Nagano's Haruna Tabata opened a 5-second lead on the 6.0 km First Stage, the first time a high schooler had won the opening leg since Ririka Hironaka in 2019. With that momentum Nagano held the lead through the first 6 stages. But a change came on the 4.0 km Seventh Stage. Starting 19 seconds back in 3rd, Osaka's Rio Kawamura put in a brilliant run to overtake both Hyogo and Nagano, handing off with a 16-second lead by the end of the stage. Hyogo went past Osaka on the 3.0 km Eighth Stage to take the top position for the first time, but with only a 5-second gap at the start of the 10.0 km Ninth Stage it came down to a battle between Hyogo anchor Rio Einaga and Osaka's Ayu Henmi . After catching up Henmi stayed locked to Einaga throughout the stage before kicking just past 1 km to go and running away to break the finish line tape in ...

The Nagano Higashi H.S. girls pulled off a perfect repetition of their start-to-finish win at last year's National High School Ekiden , taking the lead on the first leg again this time and never letting go. Opening runner Nami Kawakami won the 6.0 km First Stage by 2 seconds in 19:06, 2nd runner Haruna Tabata extended it to 12 seconds, and 3rd runner Airi Mashiba added another 30 seconds to the lead with a massive 9:06 CR for the 3.0 km leg, beating every Kenyan on the stage and everyone who had run it before. Nagano Higashi's last 2 runners Yui Honda and Rena Imai both lost some ground, but with both of them still running the 3rd-fastest times on their stages there wasn't really any risk of anyone catching them. Imai brought Nagano Higashi home in 1:06:30 for the 21.0975 km course, just missing the overall CR by 4 seconds but still a dominant performance from an all-Japanese lineup. 3rd last year, Osaka Kunei Joshi Gakuin H.S. got off to a slow start but spend the ...