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Day One results and report After a record-breaking first day , 2015-2018 Hakone Ekiden champion Aoyama Gakuin University held off last year's winner Tokai University to take the overall title in course record time. AGU started the return trip to Tokyo with a 3:22 lead over Tokai, enough for Tokai head coach Hayashi Morozumi to express pessimism about his team's chances of making up such a big deficit over Day Two's five stages totaling 109.6 km. Not that they didn't try. On the day's first stage, the brutal 20.8 km Sixth Stage featuring a steep climb early on and then over 800 m of descent, mostly in the middle 10 km, two-time 1500 m national champion Ryoji Tatezawa broke the course record by 40 seconds to cut over a minute off AGU's lead. Tokai's next two runners Sakito Matsuzaki and Yohei Komatsu cut further into AGU's margin of error, but at the start of the day's longest stage, the 23.1 km Ninth Stage, Tokai was still exactly 2 minu...

Day Two results 2020 is the 100th anniversary of Japan's biggest sports event, the Hakone Ekiden . Originally conceived of in large part by Japan's first Olympic marathoner Shiso Kanakuri as a way to develop Olympic marathon talent, this year's Hakone comes at the very start of the year the Olympics return to Tokyo. It also comes at the end of a season that saw four former Hakone stage winners take the top four spots at the 2020 Olympic marathon trials, validating Kanakuri's vision a century removed. But he could never have imagined the kind of race the kids would deliver. Right from the gun the tone was set, with three-time First Stage winner Kazuya Nishiyama of last year's Day One winner Toyo University taking it out right on course record pace and the entire field going with it. The sheer aggression of the tone never changed over the entire five-stage, 107.5 km day, both big names and unknowns hitting it hard every stage. Minor school runner Rei Yonemit...

Strong over the second half, it came down to an untried rookie just promoted up from the B-team to seal up the old-school Asahi Kasei team's fourth-straight New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championships title. Asahi Kasei was always there, 2nd on the opening stage thanks to a good run from leading man Keijiro Mogi , Kenyan Abraham Kapsis Kipyatich moving them up to 1st on the Second Stage in his final run with the team, and Sixth Stage specialist Hiroshi Ichida holding the lead on the Third Stage. It wasn't until the Fourth Stage, at 22.4 km the longest of the day, that Asahi Kasei lost any ground, with 2019's fastest Japanese half marathoner Minato Oishi (Toyota) running down third man Hiroshi's twin brother Takashi Ichida and opening a gap of 12 seconds. On paper that should have been enough for Toyota, the favorite to end Asahi Kasei's domination, to pull it off, with Olympic marathon trials runner-up Yuma Hattori and the #2 and #3 half ma...

The Mount Fuji Women's Ekiden , the National University Women's Ekiden Championships Invitational, took place Dec. 30 in Shizuoka. 22 universities from across the country and two select teams competed for the national title in the midst of cold rain, with Nagoya's  Meijo University  covering the seven-stage, 43.4 km course in 2:23:09 to win for the second year in a row. After a slow start that saw it sitting 3rd halfway through the race, Meijo's fourth runner Yuma Yamamoto ran a course record 13:55 for her 4.4 km stage to cut the defending champs' deficit way down. Meijo's next runner, 2019 World University Championships half marathon silver medalist Rika Kaseda , ran the fastest time for the race's longest stage to move the team up from 3rd to 1st. Sixth runner Narumi Kobayashi likewise won her stage on time to give Meijo a lead it kept all the way through the uphill anchor stage. Meijo's win was both its second-straight and second ever and foll...

Australian Andrew Buchanan took over a minute and a half off his PB to win the third running of Tokyo's Year-End Half Marathon Dec. 29 in the western suburb of Tachikawa. Conceived of as a race targeting university and corporate league men whose teams had missed out on qualifying for the New Year and Hakone Ekidens and for amateurs to get the chance to run alongside them, the Year-End Half Marathon covers four rolling laps of Showa Kinen Park, the same site used for the Hakone Ekiden Qualifier half marathon and National University Men's Half Marathon. Buchanan ran as part of a lead group of five near 1:03-flat pace, with the group shaking down to four by 15 km. As Buchanan started to push over the final lap longtime leader Koga Matsuo (Josai Univ.) dropped off, leaving Shingo Moriyama (Yamanashi Gakuin Univ.) and Taiyo Iwasaki (Jobu Univ.) to compete for the win. Neither was up to the task, Buchanan kicking away for the win in 1:02:50 good enough to make him the four...

Championship ekiden week is here, four days of road relay action spread across five days from Dec. 30 to Jan. 3, all broadcast live to millions of fans across the nation. Last year Nagoya's Meijo University beat five-time champ Ritsumeikan University to win the Mount Fuji Women's Ekiden , the National University Women's Ekiden Championships invitational, in course record time. This season Meijo looked pretty well unbeatable at the mid-season Morinomiyako Ekiden , beating runner-up Daito Bunka University by over two and a half minutes and Ritsumeikan by more than three over Morinomiyako's six-stage, 38.1 km course. Mount Fuji's is more demanding, seven hilly stages totaling 43.4 km through the foothills of Mount Fuji. Last year Meijo, Daito Bunka and Ritsumeikan finished within two and a half minutes of each other, and with Meijo looking even better this season it'll be hard for either of its main rival teams, or any others, to close that gap up. Watch th...