Why is the Japanese marathon so powerful, and why is the record in international competitions mediocre?

The finalists for the Japan Marathon Trials (MGC) for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games were announced at the end of May.

A total of 67 men and 29 women qualified, nearly double the 34 men and 15 women in the MGC Tokyo Olympics, and this is even when the men's threshold is higher than in the previous edition.

Comparison of the US-Japan marathon

Below is a list of the finalists listed on the Japan Running News website, in order of achievement.

Man:

Woman:

It can be seen that as many as 65 of the 67 men on the list have run 2:10 in the past two years; all 29 women have run 2:30.

At the top of the men's list was Japanese record holder Kengo Suzuki's 2:05:28, 2 minutes and 2 seconds faster than the new Chinese record.

The men's top ten results also exceeded China's new national record of 2:07:30.

The women's first is Nitagi Nittani, who won 2:19:24 in Houston, USA, in January and set the second-best time in Japan's history.

That was only 12 seconds slower than Mizuho Noguchi's 2005 Japanese record in Berlin and 15 seconds faster than the Chinese record.

Of the women's entries, 14 surpassed Zhang Deshun's March run in Nagoya at 2:24:05, the fastest time in China's tenth and 11th years.

Such a strong strength makes other marathon countries outside Africa sigh to themselves.

Letsrun, a well-known American running website, commented that according to MGC standards, only about 12 male runners in the United States can be shortlisted. We are also out of reach.

Speak with data:

It wasn't until 2019 that two Chinese runners broke 2:10 after many years: at the Berlin Marathon, Dong Guojian and Peng Jianhua ran 2:08:28 and 2:09:57 respectively.

For the next two years, no one in China ran 2 hours and 11 minutes. Last year, there was only one person: Dong Guojian in Chicago at 2:08:53.

This year is the largest number of people in China 2:10, with a total of 5 people breaking through this mark so far.

• Wuxi Marathon: He Jie 2:07:30, Yang Shaohui 2:07:49, Feng Beiyou 2:09:21;
• Seoul Marathon: Dong Guojian 2:09:29, Peng Jianhua 2:09:59.

But that's less than one-eighth the number in Japan (42), though it's already one and a half times more than two in the U.S. (where five broke 2:10 last year).

Let's look at the cumulative number of countries in 2:10:

• Japan 184;
• 26 in the United States, equivalent to only 7% of Japan;
• The Chinese population of 8 (the aforementioned five, plus Ren Longyun, Han Gang and Hu Gangjun) is exactly one-23 times the size of Japan, although the population is more than ten times that of Japan.

Japan has also set five men's marathon world bests – from 2:27:49 in 1935 to 2:09:05 in 1978 for his older brother Somoto (below: he and his twin brother Somopu both won the Northern Malaysia Championship).

The woman also broke the world record: 2:20 World No. 1 and 2000 Sydney Olympic champion Naoko Takahashi (2001 Berlin 2:19:46).

It's not a black face either, why is the Japanese marathon so strong?

The power of a large amount of exercise?

One conventional wisdom is that this is due to Japan's high-volume training method, where professional athletes can run up to 300 kilometers a week, averaging more than one full horse per day!

Alex Hutchinson, a well-known running researcher, wrote on the Runnersworld website in 2016:

There is a common theme in Japanese training methods: large running volumes. Elite runners can be up to 320 kilometers per week and more than 1,000 kilometers per month.

Hiroko Arimori, a two-time Olympic medalist, once recalled that during the preparations for the Olympics, she used to practice two 20km timed runs a day - one in the morning and one in the afternoon; Run another 50km the next day!

But their recovery runs are as relaxed as possible, sometimes as slow as walking, with the aim of honing the fatigue tolerance of the legs and feet.

It is not enough to stand hard work, Japanese athletes also have to endure hardships.

Before the 2007 World Championships in Osaka, a Japanese coach asked marathon team members to get up at 4 a.m. every day for breakfast, and so on for 20 days!

However, there are others who disagree, such as Brett Larner, editor-in-chief of the Japan Running News.

Born in Canada, Rana was a member of the U.S. Wesleyan University cross-country team and completed his first Boston Marathon at the age of 19. In 1997, he went to Japan for graduate school and has since settled there.

Around the 2007 World Championships in Osaka, at the suggestion of his Japanese wife, he founded this authoritative website in English dedicated to reporting news of Japanese lap running. He (pictured below) is also an international agent for famous Japanese runners such as Yuki Kawauchi.

In a 2018 interview with online magazine Citiusmag, Rana pointed out that there are actually various marathon training methods and ideas in Japan, especially the younger generation of coaches.

Yuta Shiraku, who broke the Japanese record in Tokyo in the same year with a 2:06:11 scene, once said on a guest TV show with his coach that running a lot was an old-school (outdated) practice.

He is heavy on mass and never covers a long distance of more than 30 kilometers. One of his secrets is quite unique: run 25 to 30 kilometers three days before the race!

For the reasons why the Japanese marathon is strong, Rana makes several points:

History: As early as 1912, Japan sent Jinsu 43 to participate in the Stockholm Olympic Games; After returning to Japan, he founded competitions such as Hakone Ekiden.

Popularity: Long-distance running is as popular in Japan as baseball and American football in the United States. Fueled by live television, the marathon enjoys a prestigious status.

Ekiden: Japanese people have been participating in this kind of road relay race since junior high school and even lower. Its main attack distance is half-horse (the distance of each stick of a large stagecoach) rather than a full horse, but with a deep half-horse talent pool, it is not difficult for some of them to succeed in transforming into a full horse.

Treatment: The industrial group system provides stable salaries and bonuses for its members, so that the top players can become professional players with no worries after graduating from high school or college.

The Way of a Marathon

A more systematic and thorough study of the success of the Japanese marathon is Adharanand Finn, a former sports journalist for the British newspaper The Guardian.

Finn is also a trail runner and has completed long-distance cross-country races such as UTMB.

His 2012 book Running with the Kenyans won the Sunday Times Sports Book of the Year Award and won him the British Sports Book Award for Best New Author.

After the book's success, he was suggested to go to Ethiopia and write a book about the country's runners, but he refused: Isn't it similar to the story of Kenyans? If you want to write yourself, write something completely different.

He recalled his first visit to Japan and witnessed the pomp and circumstance of the Ekiden and set out to collect materials. The more material he dug up, the more fascinated he became with long-distance running in Japan.

He stumbled upon a Japanese half-horse championship and a British half-horse championship that happened to be held on the same day, and the former's 100th place was enough to win the British national championship!

He immediately realized: Japan's long-distance running is against the sky! It's worth writing about.

After a year of in-depth research across Japan, he wrote The Way of the Runner: A Journey Into the Fabled World of Japanese Running.

Finn believes that the success of the Japanese marathon is mainly due to the following reasons:

First, the continuation of history: Japan's marathon fever began after the war, that is, in the forties and fifties of the last century, much earlier than the 1970s to the early 1980s in the West, and the late 1980s and early 1990s in East Africa.

In the fifties and sixties, Japan dominated the global marathon. 10 of the top 11 world bests in 1965 and 15 of the top 17 in 1966 were set by Japanese athletes.

Second, Yichuan gathered popularity. One of the most famous Hakone Ekiden is Japan's biggest sporting event every year, like the Super Bowl in the United States. The whole country came to a halt, and everyone sat down to watch the live broadcast and talk about it.

Most of the contestants were above and beyond. In the race I watched live, in the first 10 kilometers of the 22km stage, more than half of the runners ran faster than their 10,000-meter PB; Many of the results have exceeded national records.

Arguably for most Japanese athletes, being part of the Hakone championship team is more important than winning an Olympic medal.

Third, the East Olympic Games boost. Becoming the host country of the 2020 Olympic Games also greatly boosted Japan's marathon performance.

Both the country's athletics association and the Olympic Committee have exerted great pressure, requiring all industrial groups to put the marathon first, and issue a huge prize of 100 million yuan for breaking the marathon record. These measures have changed dramatically in recent years.

(Author's note: The Japanese marathon also suffered a trough before.) In 2016, Yuki Kawauchi won the title of Japan's fastest of the year with the gold coast runner-up time of 2:09:01)

Fourth, running can make a living. Part of the reason for Japan's marathon talent is the presence of industrial groups. There are about 60 such professional teams in the country, 30 each for men and women; Each team has about 20 full-time athletes, so the total number is about 1200.

In college, if you show your running talent, even if it's not enough to make a living in Europe or the United States, it's enough to get you a job in Japan.

5. Athletes have a good life. Industrial team members are also paid employees of enterprises, most of whom enjoy lifetime employment, and switch to white-collar jobs after their sports careers.

They have a sense of belonging and pride in the team. Top athletes are well paid and as popular as American NBA stars – and within a few steps down the street, someone will come and ask for an autograph.

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Why are international competitions mediocre?

If the Japanese marathon is so powerful, why does the country's runners seem to have mediocre performance in international competitions and are not highly visible?

In this regard, Fen also expressed his views, and the author summarized the following three points:

First of all, due to the importance and popularity of various competitions in their home countries, coupled with the many troubles of language, food and jet lag that they face when competing abroad, Japanese athletes do not care as much about international competitions as their counterparts in other countries.

Secondly, they almost never follow the first group in the competition, because the Kenyans and Ethiopians rush super fast from the start, as if they are about to beat the world record (although many will fall behind or even withdraw from the competition), so the Japanese players are rare to see in the live footage.

They usually start conservatively, but also because running too fast in front is risky – as a passer, if you run behind you and collapse, it can ruin the team's results.

Third, there are actually many Japanese players who participate in competitions like London and Boston, but they usually rank outside the third or fourth place, so few people pay attention.

In fact, they have also won major competitions, such as the women's marathon at the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Games. The most recent was Yuki Kawaguchi's 2018 Poma Laurels.

(Author's note: That year, Hattori Yuma won the Fukuoka Marathon, and Daisaki won the third place in Shibama)

In response to the above statements of European and American observers, the author would like to add a little.

The overall level of Japanese marathons is strong, which should also be related to the national character of the Japanese: most of them are reserved and introverted by nature, stoic and persistent, and they are good at studying and striving for perfection.

Therefore, various Chinese "arts" are often sublimated into "Dao" after being introduced to Japan, such as tea/flower/book/kendo. These personality traits are quite in line with the spirit of the marathon.

As for the Japanese marathon's statement that "civil war insiders, foreign war laymen", in fact, it mainly stems from a misunderstanding.

First of all, it is necessary to clarify one point: the strength of Japan's marathon is mainly relative to non-African countries such as the United States and China. In absolute power, it is still no match for East Africa's two superpowers.

Here are the number of Japanese runners in the World Men's Marathon Top 100 in the past five years.

• 2018: 7; The highest ranking is 22nd, 2:05:50;
• 2019: 1 person; The highest ranking is 94th in Rakuyuta, 2:07:50;
• In 2020: 18; The highest ranking is 13th, 2:05:29;
• In 2021: 11; Highest ranking Kengo Suzuki 23rd, 2:04:56;
• In 2022: 2 people; The highest ranking Kengo Suzuki is 34th, 2:05:28.

It can be seen that except for 2020, when global competitions were canceled due to the ravages of the new crown pneumonia, only about 10 people in Japan can be shortlisted for the world's top 100 list.

The country's first place of the year, the highest can only rank twenty or thirty in the world, at least two or three minutes slower than the world best.

So while Japanese runners have almost maximized the potential of the yellow race to run marathons, it is difficult to expect them to sweep the East African Army and win the top competition.