japan running news

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 ...

Civil servant runner Yuki Kawauchi (30, Saitama Pref. Gov't) ran the 12.1 km Third Stage at the 6-stage, 42.195 km Saitama Ekiden Sunday in Kumagaya, Saitama. Delivering a fast run, he passed 44 people en route to the handoff. "That was a lot of fun," he said afterward with a sweaty smile. Starting far back from the lead, Kawauchi mowed down runners all three division as he moved up through the field. HIs time of 36:54 ranked him 4th on his stage, where Ageo City Half Marathon course record setter Simon Kariuki (Nihon Yakka Univ.) took a minute and a half off his own record with a new mark of 34:34. Wearing clear sunglasses to block the headwind, Kawauchi said, "All I was thinking about was moving forward and pulling the team's position up all by myself." Last weekend Kawauchi was beaten by high schooler Ryu Hashimoto (Tokyo Nogyo Daisan H.S.) in finishing 6th on the opening stage at the Okumusashi Ekiden . He didn't win his stage either then o...

A team of recent graduates of Cambridge University made the trip to the mountains of southwestern Saitama to race the 64th running of the Okumusashi Ekiden  in colder than usual weather on Jan. 28. After hearing about the top-level Izumo Ekiden from Harvard and Yale athletes who had run as part of Izumo's Ivy League Select Team, Cambridge runners Josh Carr , Matt Leach and Alex Short wanted to experience a Japanese ekiden themselves. Pulling together a team of six runners and three alternates, they settled on Okumusashi as the best option in competitive level and timing. With a 28:45.48 best for 10000 m from Stanford last year Leach led off on the 9.9 km First Stage, facing an unusually deep field including 2018 National Men's Ekiden champion Saitama Prefecture 's lead runner Ryu Hashimoto (Tokyo Nogyo Daisan H.S.),  28:17.11 man Yuki Muta and London World Championships marathon 9th placer Yuki Kawauchi . Kenyan Titus Wambua (Musashino Univ.) led in the early g...

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/local/saitama/news/20160208-OYTNT50000.html translated and edited by Brett Larner 105 teams competed in four different divisions at the 83rd Saitama Ekiden on Feb. 7.  Saitama Sakae H.S. , the overall winner at last weekend's Okumusashi Ekiden , ran the six-stage, 42.195 km men's course in 2:10:14, faster than any of the corporate or university teams in the race, to seal a fourth-straight high school division win.  Following up its Hakone Ekiden debut last month, Tokyo International University was close behind in 2:10:20 to win the general division, with the Saitama T&F Assoc. team winning the local team division.  The Saitama Sakae H.S. girls ran 1:12:59 for the five-stage, 20.5 km women's race to win for the third year in a row. The Saitama Sakae boys' opening runner Takahisa Mitsui and third runner Ryoji Tatezawa both scored overall stage wins, Tatezawa outran marathoner Yuki Kawauchi (Saitama Pref. Gov't) by 31 seconds ov...

by Brett Larner Championship ekiden season has come and gone, but Sunday saw high-level action at two popular and long-running ekidens at opposite ends of Japan.  In western Japan, course record-setting 2015 National High School Ekiden champion Sera H.S. of Hiroshima definitively took the win at the 79th Chugoku Yamaguchi Ekiden , beating Mazda , Chugoku Denryoku , JFE Steel , Chudenko and other corporate team competition with ease.  Sera third-year Paul Kamais opened a lead of over two minutes with a course record 42:04 for the 15.1 km First Stage, and from there Sera never lost the top position.  Mazda came the closest, closing to within 3 seconds by the end of the Fourth Stage, but a Fifth Stage win by Sera's Taiju Nakashima put them back out front with a margin that Sera's remaining two runners held onto until the end.  Sera covered the seven-stage, 84.4 km course in 4:07:29, the best-ever by a high school team, with Mazda ending up nearly two minutes back ...

by Brett Larner video highlights courtesy of race broadcaster NHK Hiroshima's Sera H.S. delivered on the promise of its #1 ranking at the 65th National High School Boys Ekiden Championships, running away on the third of the 42.195 km race's seven stages and never looking back.  Sera got off to a slightly shaky start as its top Japanese runner Shiki Shinsako finished only 6th on the First Stage, 11 seconds behind Fuminori Shimo of #5-ranked Iga Hakuho H.S. who ran 29:39 to win the 10.0 km stage off a slow 15:10 first half.  Sera stayed at 6th on the 3.0 km Second Stage, but Kenyan ringer Paul Kamais did his duty on the 8.1075 km Third Stage, easily taking the lead and running a superb 22:58 just shy of the 22:40 course record set 10 years ago by the late great Samuel Wanjiru of Sendai Ikuei H.S. When Kamais was done Sera had gone from 18 seconds behind to a 51-second lead.  Its remaining runners could have played it safe, but both fourth runner Taiji Nakashi...

http://www.jiji.com/jc/zc?k=201307/2013073100713&g=spo http://www.saitama-np.co.jp/news/2013/07/31/08.html translated and edited by Brett Larner On the second day of the National High School Track and Field Championships, July 31 at Oita's Oita Bank Dome, Yoshihide Kiryu  (Rakunan H.S.) won the boys' 100 m in a meet record time of 10.19 s +0.1m/s.  In the heats he ran 10.50 s and in the semi-finals 10.32 s, winning both before the final where he took 0.05 s off the old meet record set nineteen years ago.  Kiryu also anchored Rakunan's 4x100 m relay team to win their semi-final in 40.50 s, sending them on to the final on Aug. 1. On the girls' side, London Olympian Anna Doi  (Saitama Sakae H.S.) won the 100 m final in 11.70 m. Like Kiryu anchoring her school's 4x100 m relay, Doi led Saitama Sakae to win their July 30 opening round heat in 45.23 s, a new high school national record.  First leg runner Emiri Hatsumi  was first out of the blocks and im...