Three weeks before the sternest physical challenge of my life, I was outside the Lululemon flagship store in Tokyo. A team running shirt, emblazoned with corporate logos and freighted with an expectation of sweat and speed, was waiting for me back at Financial Times HQ in London. I was shopping, on an eddy of team spirit, for shorts in traditional FT pink.
Next door, from the sales hatch of the Oscar Wilde doughnut shop, the smell was extraordinary, as was the temptation. ¥10,800 (nearly £55) is a preposterous price for a pair of shorts; ¥420 is a steal for a sugar-dusted pistachio cream. On June 24, I will be running in the FT Nikkei UK ekiden, a long-distance relay race along 72 miles of the Thames between Oxford and Windsor. How’s the training going, you ask? Deliciously.
My five-month road to the starting line has been wiggly and revelatory. On the plus side, some weight has been lost, some posture gained. I now enjoy a weekly tryst with a Balanced Body Allegro Pilates Reformer machine. I have, according to my new smartwatch, taken more exercise in three months than the World Health Organization recommends for a full year. Leandra, my disembodied running coach on Fitbit, bubbles that I’m amazing just for showing up. Aww.
On the other hand, I’m still slow, sweet-toothed, and have rarely been so consumed with mental anguish. I came to this race with tenacious Covid-19, underlying asthma and a roaring pain where limber extensibility should ideally be. But these are cringing, unworthy excuses. Normally, long- distance running thrusts the individual into a personal battle with time, terrain and twinges. An ekiden makes the runner part of a chain and threatens them with exposure as the weakest link. Tricky, when you already have a strong hunch that link is you.
I knew, well before all this started, what an ekiden was. How could I not? Japan’s cherished take on long-distance running is as deeply rooted in its home territory as green tea and Gundam. A very fine 2015 book, Adharanand Finn’s The Way of the Runner, sets out the cultural shoe prints that ekiden has embedded in Japanese society. The book is as powerful and perceptive an insight into Japanese culture as any you could find.
The sport of ekiden, which emerged in Japan over a century ago, played on the concept of the old courier networks (eki = station and den = convey), with each runner covering significant distances before passing the duty on to the next. The idea of relays is hardly unique to Japan. But what fitted neatly into the country’s cradle-to-grave, group-centric organisational credo was turning the individual sport of long-distance running into the teamiest of team sports.
It does so in a way that messes with the psychology of incentive. The need to win is there, of course, but it is overwhelmed by the need not to let everyone in the team down or be the one responsible for losing overall momentum. One runner retires, the whole team is out. If golf, according to the old saying, is a good walk, spoiled, then ekiden is a hard test, with baggage.
The relatively small number of teams in each ekiden means that, over the course of the race, the field is thinned. There is rarely much chance (as in other long-distance runs) to take pace from a leader before making a break for leadership oneself. There is the lonely feeling in an ekiden of being the hunter, and the hunted. But often, given the large distances between runners, there is no visual clue as to which one currently defines you.
At the heart of the ekiden is the tasuki — a coloured sash passed between runners at each station. The sash is imbued with the weight of team expectations and of individual responsibility for and to the whole. As a vessel of hope and fear, the tasuki is totemic; its passing between runners is a sacrament. And critically, it is around the tasuki that the greatest drama and jeopardy lies. At every station, each team’s runners have to hand over their tasuki within a set time after the leader. Miss the margin by seconds, and a different coloured (and visibly othering) new tasuki must be taken on.
The ekiden as a genre is conveniently malleable. Depending on who is organising the race, where it is happening and who is running in it, the total distance is variable, as are the distances between stations, the number of teams and the number of members in each. With flexibility has come ubiquity. Ekiden races ranging from 12km to 1,064km abound across Japan, with schools, clubs, companies and towns organising events year round.
Towering over all these is the Hakone Ekiden, an event held annually on January 2 and 3, televised to the nation and contested between the elite athletes of 21 of Japan’s top universities. The two-day race involves teams of 10 runners, with five relaying between Tokyo and Hakone on one day, and five running back the following day, a distance of around 108km each way.
Hakone Ekiden, which has been run since 1920, also has a fair claim to being the first competition in modern sports history to understand that the drama of sport seethes away at a distance from the action itself. Decades before Drive to Survive, Welcome to Wrexham and the whole addictive circus of sports-adjacent reality TV, Hakone Ekiden was spawning an off-track emotional feeding frenzy, gorging on the personalities of the student runners, their coaches and families. Japanese TV knows its audience and how to draw out their tears, sympathy and affinities. And where, inevitably, are the tastiest morsels of drama to be found? Slap bang in the individual’s fear of letting their team down.
For some years now, Anna Dingley has wanted to bring all this intensity and fizz to the UK. I first met her in 2008 when she was in Japan working in a joint venture between the London Aim market and the Tokyo Stock Exchange. She is big on building links between Japan and the UK. She also became an ekiden addict and this continued long after she resettled in Britain. I bumped into her again in January in the transit lounge of Helsinki airport, where she used the two-hour layover to show me a fully formed plan for an ekiden along the Thames Path in June. She needed sponsorship, but nobody in London or Tokyo was biting. Did I know anyone?
I did. Some years before, I had been at dinner in Tokyo with the FT’s chief executive John Ridding, a former journalist who has spent the past eight and a half years steering the FT under the ownership of Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun (aka “Nikkei”).
For all the wrong reasons, one of his stories stuck in my head: the revelation that, whenever he runs the circuit around Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, he counts the number of runners he has overtaken on one hand, and those who have overtaken him on the other. It was memorable not only for its adherence to the conventions of double-entry bookkeeping, but for being uncompromisingly CEO-ish in its need to find a KPI. Of course someone like this would want the FT and Nikkei to jointly sponsor an ekiden. And so it proved. Since then other sponsors have piled in, including the sportswear maker Mizuno, and the event has been endorsed by Susumu Hara, the coach of the persistently victorious Aoyama Gakuin University ekiden team and a huge celebrity in Japan.
The only snag was this. As some sort of twisted reward for making the introductions, I was told I would be running in the joint FT-Nikkei team. The UK Ekiden, which will involve 20 teams from universities, companies and running clubs, will divide the route into 10 segments, giving me an 11.1km stretch and, crucially, a run that ends at a key cut-off point for the team. Worse, our team would be populated with gazelles and captained by a chief commercial officer whose running rule of thumb is that, within reason and beyond the age of 40, a 10km distance should be completed in as many minutes as you are years old. I did a test run in March to establish how far off that deranged target I was. Three months is not long for a bon vivant with a desk job to shave a 10km pace down by 13 minutes.
In the initial weeks of what I optimistically called “training”, I plodded many regular 5 kms and 10 kms around the palace. Unfortunately, I always changed and took a shower at a “runners’ station” where, upon handing back your locker key, staff present you with a cold can of Asahi Dry Crystal. Or “lager” as it is better known.
Sundays were for longer runs with a gang of friends that organises itself via a WhatsApp group chat called “Weekend Croissant Club”. Its interests are defined by routes that end in at a butter-glutted French bakery, and its members include a business owner who would rather be cycling, a fund manager who runs to amass credit in an imaginary market for claret offsets and a school English teacher who sees every kilometre as a chance to discuss Philip Larkin and online dating.
This was fun, but proof I was not built for the rigours of ekiden. Everything ached, creaked or wheezed. I was still tubby, still spending my days in an office where biscuits mysteriously appear in the pantry, still easily lured to a post-work pint and still making only modest increments of improvement on my time. As the race loomed, the lack of progress became more psychologically onerous, and the fear of letting the side down began to prey. My team, bedecked in our specially made FT-Nikkei running vests, would be humiliated, and it would be all my fault.
It was then that a revelation struck me. I had been ekidening it all wrong. The necessary mental leap, in a sport designed by Japanese for Japanese, is not to focus on the result but on the process. For it is process, ultimately, that matters most. So long as you can tell yourself honestly that you tried your best in the run-up, Japan has a hidden clause that liberates you from the outcome of that effort.
So the past eight weeks have been devoted to that job of self-persuasion, a cause which, coincidentally, can turn you into a better runner. Interval training, Pilates, a (nearly total) booze moratorium. Enough to allow me to respond, when asked how training is going, that I am a zealot. I set myself a weekly goal of 40km running and 100km cycling, culminating in a run, one week before the big day, with a younger, lither companion. He forced me into a pace that brought me to the end of 10km at a time six minutes off my age, and to a state where I believe I have mastered ekiden: the Japanese art of letting everyone down gracefully. Wish me luck.
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Asia business editor
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