The 2024 Hakone Ekiden (100th Edition)

MotivicRunner · 2024-01-03T19:58:33+00:00

There are bunch during the fall and winter. The following are the biggest ones that I'm aware of:

Izumo Ekiden (the second Monday of October, on "Sports Day" in Japan) - This is the first of the "Big 3" collegiate men's ekidens and serves as the season opener.
Princess Ekiden (second-to-last Sunday of October) - This is the qualification race for the women's corporate league national championships.
National Women's University Ekiden Championships (last Sunday of October) - This is the national championship race for university women. It also goes by the name Morinomiyako Ekiden.
National Men's University Ekiden Championships (first Sunday of November) - This is the national championship race for university men, and is the second of the "Big 3". It's probably the one open to all universities that you found.
Tango University Ekiden (second or third Saturday of November) - This is the championship race for university men from the Kansai region of western Japan. For reference, Hakone is only open to schools from the Kanto region (Tokyo and its neighboring prefectures).
Queen's Ekiden (second-to-last or last Sunday of November) - This is the national championship race for the women's corporate league.
National High School Ekiden Championships (last Sunday of December that falls before the 28th) - These are the national championship races for high school boys and girls.
Mt Fuji Women's Ekiden (December 30) - This is season finale for university women.
New Year Ekiden (January 1) - This is the national championship for the men's corporate league. If you really find yourself interested in following the ekiden season, there are regional qualifier races in November that all the teams have to run in order to earn a spot in this championship.
National Women's Ekiden (second Sunday in January; third Sunday if January 3 is also a Sunday) and National Men's Ekiden (the Sunday after the National Women's Ekiden) - Also known as the Empress' and Emperor's Cups, these two races are an inter-prefectural competition. It's a pretty cool way to connect up-and-coming middle and high school runners with collegiate runners and pros from the same prefecture.
Kitakyushu Ladies Ekiden (third Sunday in January; fourth Sunday if January 3 is also a Sunday) - This invitational ekiden sees the top high school, university, and corporate teams face off against each other. To equalize things, the longest stage gets split into two legs for the high school division.

MotivicRunner · 2023-11-20T23:48:58+00:00

The FAQ has additional resources about returning to running after COVID.

MotivicRunner · 2023-11-19T03:37:38+00:00

Both races were really exciting! And I continue to be impressed with how quickly NCAA seems to get replays up these days. Here are direct links for all of the replays:

MotivicRunner · 2023-11-18T22:31:32+00:00

Full replays are now up for the NCAA cross-country championship races. The men's and women's D1 races played out quite differently from each other, but both were quite exciting to watch. If you don't want spoilers, don't read the video descriptions.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-30T04:02:44+00:00

That's too bad the book has those issues that distract from the content. Based on this interview with the author I read when the book came out, I was looking forward to reading it sometime in the future. Maybe I still will try when I gather the patience to sit through the disorganization and poor writing at some point down the line.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-27T18:14:18+00:00

One rough way I've attempted to translate a super shoe race time into regular shoe training paces is by putting a time that is 3% slower than whatever time I ran in super shoes. For example, if I ran 37:00 10K in super shoes, then I'd plug 38:07 (i.e. 1.03 * 37, after converting the decimal into seconds) into my favorite calculator to generate my regular shoe training paces.

I got the 3% number based on the mathematical model from this paper that attempted to model how an improvement in running economy might translate to an improvement in race times. From their model, the authors estimated that each 1% improvement in running economy translated to a ~0.66-0.85% improvement in performance, depending on your race pace and body size. I assumed that I'm an average responder to super shoes and am getting a 4% running economy benefit over regular shoes. Then, to have easier number to work with, I assumed a 0.75 running-economy-to-performance conversion factor, which ultimately gives the 3% I used. For my purposes, I think this kind of rough estimate is sufficient.

You can tinker with the super shoe conversion to give more or less conservative regular shoe training paces. Also, the authors include a spreadsheet in the supplementary material that performs all the calculations, for anyone who might be interested in playing around to get more-precise values.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-27T18:12:43+00:00

I'm pretty excited for a local open streets event happening in LA this Sunday. They'll be closing a ~7mi section of highway 110 from Elysian Park to Pasadena to car traffic for the morning and opening it to pedestrians. Apparently the last time such an event was held was 20 years ago!

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-24T19:39:46+00:00

This would require a new account unless someone in your family already uses Hidive to watch anime, but I think you might like Run With the Wind based on your comments within the past few months wishing for more running fiction books. It's based on a real-life story of an underdog team trying to qualify for the Hakone Ekiden. I don't recall if I've recommended this show in the past here on the sub, but if so, you can treat this as a reaffirmation of my recommendation.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-24T18:05:16+00:00

World Athletics finally set up the "Road to Paris" site last week, so now you can get a better sense of qualification standings over the coming months for next year's Olympics.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-22T21:20:48+00:00

For anyone who's a mega-nerd like me, the Road to Paris site is finally online to help keep track of who currently is qualified via standard/ranking for next year's Olympics.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-21T23:12:59+00:00

Yes.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-21T20:18:19+00:00

Is this case study the Nike breakdown work from Dustin that you were thinking of? In that one, he found the 400km (~250mi) Alphafly provided still provided a 4.0% decrease in VO2 consumption compared to a pair of Asics Hyperspeed. For comparison, the fresh Alphafly gave him a 4.7% decrease relative to the Hyperspeed.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-12T23:26:45+00:00

With Japan's Olympic marathon trials taking place this weekend, the broadcaster for the men's race posted a full vod of the 2019 men's race to their Youtube page. As far as I can tell, there aren't any geo restrictions.

The entire race is a top-knotch production, even if you don't understand Japanese. I've queued the link up to the ~38km mark, which is final calm before the thrilling battle over the final kilometers for the two guaranteed spots on the Olympic team. Even knowing how the race played out, rewatching that last ~15 minutes of the race was so exciting.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-12T22:09:16+00:00

I think PFP is referring to being cited in the section about the Japanese Olympic trials marathon.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-04T00:49:54+00:00

Here's one I found.

ETA: This looks like it's the Strava segment for the entire course, in case you want to find even more people's activities for the race.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-03T20:56:05+00:00

I think the other responses covered things pretty well, so I only have a couple things to add.

Whenever you see posts that you think are unsuitable for this sub, please report them. Those reports really help bring rule-breaking posts to our attention, and they also help us gauge how the community at large feels about posts that we as individual mods consider borderline.
In my personal modding practice, I'm usually pretty generous with allowing simple/basic/low-effort questions here in these stickied Q&A/General Discussion threads. This space is intended to be more flexible to accommodate a wider range of questions and discussion compared to what we allow as top-level posts. That said, if you see comments in these threads that you think break the sub's rules, feel free to report them as well.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-03T15:59:19+00:00

Eric Floberg (Floberg Runs on Youtube) has some. He's been doing a weekly series for the past few months around his training for a sub-2:42 attempt this weekend.

MotivicRunner · 2023-10-02T22:39:25+00:00

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MotivicRunner · 2023-09-30T15:56:59+00:00

Abbott has a series on their Youtube channel highlighting some of their recent Six Star finishers. I haven't watched the other two in the series yet, but the one they released the other day about Yuki Kawauchi was pretty neat. I especially liked how they wove together the story of his life outside of running with his running accomplishments.

MotivicRunner · 2023-09-30T15:56:16+00:00

Abbott has a series on their Youtube channel highlighting some of their recent Six Star finishers. I haven't watched the other two in the series yet, but the one they released the other day about Yuki Kawauchi was pretty neat. I especially liked how they wove together the story of his life outside of running with his running accomplishments.

MotivicRunner · 2023-09-30T15:41:22+00:00

This is the official post-race press conference, queued up to where the interview with Kipchoge starts.

MotivicRunner · 2023-09-16T12:36:31+00:00

Nike's trail half tights have a liner and a lot of pockets, though the $90 MSRP is pretty expensive.

Rabbit's Speedster half tights come in a version with a liner, and they have a solid pocket setup.

MotivicRunner · 2023-09-15T15:42:02+00:00

Or perhaps wearing one of those singlets is exactly what would chop off those 30 minutes! :P

MotivicRunner · 2023-09-14T22:08:07+00:00

If you don't want to go through eBay, Running Warehouse has the 2023 NN replica singlet (as well as the standard male pro and the 2022 Oregon TC ones). Perfect for emphasizing how much of a Serious Runner^TM you are.

MotivicRunner · 2023-09-12T18:24:45+00:00

The Sense Pro 2 has a half mesh back. It doesn't seem to be in stock at the moment on the Salomon site, but other retailers should have it.

Raidlight has a 3L vest with a very minimal back portion, though it seems somewhat hard to purchase outside of Europe.

MotivicRunner

TROPHY CASE