japan running news

The important thing to ask yourself is, "What comes next?" On January 10th the organizers of the Feb. 4 Beppu-Oita Mainichi Marathon announced their field for this year's race. Among the general division entrants is Aoi Ota , the Aoyama Gakuin University 3rd-year who ran down leader Komazawa University on the Hakone Ekiden's Third Stage to play a critical role in Aoyama Gakuin's upset win. Head coach Susumu Hara has floated the possibility of Ota running 2:04 at Beppu-Oita. This was the 7th Hakone title in the last ten years for AGU, but what's strange is that not a single member of those champion teams has gone on to make a Japanese national team at the two Olympics or five World Championships that have happened since AGU's era began. One recent example is Shungo Yokota , now of the JR Higashi Corporate Team . Just before his graduation from AGU last year, Yokota was 4th overall and 2nd Japanese at the 2023 Beppu-Oita Mainichi Marathon in a collegiat...

In its 71st edition the Beppu-Oita Mainichi Marathon saw new course records in both the women's and men's races. On a cold and slightly windy day Japan-based Ethiopian Zeyituna Husan took advantage of the big crowds of amateur men at her pace, going through halfway in 1:14:44 en route in her debut to win in 2:31:41. Her time took 1:19 off the previous record set in 2018 by Hiroko Yoshitomi . Excellent pacing that saw every 5 km split through 30 km in the men's race land in the 15:01 to 15:03 range and a big pack that rolled with it set up a tough last 12 km. Djibouti's Ibrahim Hassan inched it up a notch as soon as the pacers were done, covering the next two 5 km in 14:59 each. That gave him a short lead over Kenyan Daniel Kipchumba , but Hassan almost lost it. Deeply in the zone, he didn't notice the turn into the stadium for the track finish and ran into the back of the camera truck. Kipchumba surged to take advantage of Hassan's loss, but Hassan managed t...

20 runners from  Aoyama Gakuin University  who were not among the school's 10 starting members in its course record win at last week's Hakone Ekiden ran the Hi-Tech Half Marathon Sunday in Tokyo. 3rd-year Takehiro Sekiguchi , who had been scheduled to run Hakone's 20.9 km Fourth Stage but was swapped out on race morning by head coach Susumu Hara , won in 1:02:26, the fastest time this school year by a Japanese-born college student. "I've got one year of school left," said Sekiguchi post-race. "Next season I want to build on the momentum of this win." Including Sekiguchi, a total of 5 AGU runners who had been on the team's 16-man Hakone entry list but not among its 10 starters ran the half marathon. It was a week after the main event, but the race, nicknamed the "Eleventh Stage" by the team, gave them the chance to do something with the fitness they'd built through hard training for Hakone.  Traditionally AGU has run its non-starti...

video highlights via NHK Two and a half weeks after delivering the standout performance of the 2019 Hakone Ekiden , Toyo University third-year Akira Aizawa did it again, just missing the stage record as he anchored the Fukushima team to its first-ever National Men's Ekiden title. The season-ending national championship ekiden for Japanese men, the race features teams made up of the top junior high school, high school, university, club and pro runners from each of Japan's 47 prefectures, an entertaining format that often produces the national debuts of future stars from the next two generations alongside the best of the current one. No team from the Tohoku region, Japan's northeastern area that was hit by the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, had ever won the National title before today. Fukushima started well in 4th, but over the next two stages it dropped to 12th as 3rd man Hiroki Abe , the only Japanese collegiate man to break 28 minutes for 10000 m last ye...