Nagoya Women’s Marathon finds a way

Nagoya Women’s Marathon
Sun 8 March 2020

With marathons being cancelled all over the world and Japan being one of the countries hardest hit during the build-up to the Nagoya Women’s Marathon 2020, the organisers took some innovative measures to cope with the situation.

As with the Tokyo Marathon held a week earlier Nagoya had to downsize to a race with only 114 elite athletes. Race director Tetsuya Okamura said “It was a very small race compared to other years, but I consider us lucky and blessed just to be able to hold a race under the current circumstances.”

“The winner of this year was Mao Ichiyama – we had not seen a Japanese winner in the last seven years and it was a national record in the single gender women’s marathon. Despite the rain and cold temperatures, Ichiyama made a spectacular record and secured the last spot in the women’s marathon team for the Tokyo Olympic Games.

For general participants who missed out on the event, an online marathon is being offered as a replacement since the afternoon of race day. We are offering several apps and options for runners, including Joyrun, who was a speaker at the AIMS Symposium last year. We formed a partnership with them as our official online race app. It started with interesting fates; one of them was that three members of Joyrun team were registered to our marathon this year.

“Even at this moment, all around the world, women runners are setting their goals and running toward them. We will, send our finisher T-shirt and the Tiffany pendant to all finishers. Considering the varying environments around the world because of the virus, we set the event period to last until 31 May. We will mail the finisher items to our runners from June.

“So our 2020 race is still continuing. We see many runners getting connected online and running in the city. Many women runners encourage each other and run at their locations across the country. I hear that in China participants who were registered for the Nagoya Marathon are doing the same. I feel the circle of women’s running is spreading around the world.

“We are planning on allowing all women runners in the world to take part in this movement and run starting from the end of this month. I would like runners and women to feel strong through sports, especially now in this time of crisis.”