Originally, scheduled for Dec. 6 before being rescheduled to Feb. 28, then cut back to a 25 km race, the Shonan International Marathon has announced that it has been forced to cancel the event in the face of rising coronavirus numbers throughout Japan. One of Japan's largest marathons with 16,821 finishers in its last edition, Shonan is also one of the few large races put on by a private company instead of a local government. Along with rescheduling and cutting back in distance, they had planned to implement other coronavirus countermeasures like eliminating water tables and drastically small wave starts over a long period of time, but in their announcement of the event's final cancelation the organizers cited the currently increasing numbers of infected in Japan's ongoing third wave and the fact that the situation is worse than it had been on Aug. 28. Despite the disappointing news, organizers voiced optimism that the countermeasures they had developed would be of use t...
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