Three weeks earlier than the sternest bodily problem of my life, I used to be exterior the Lululemon flagship retailer in Tokyo. A group working shirt, emblazoned with company logos and freighted with an expectation of sweat and velocity, was ready for me again at Monetary Instances HQ in London. I used to be procuring, on an eddy of group spirit, for shorts in conventional FT pink.
Subsequent door, from the gross sales hatch of the Oscar Wilde doughnut store, the odor was extraordinary, as was the temptation. ¥10,800 (practically £55) is a preposterous value for a pair of shorts; ¥420 is a steal for a sugar-dusted pistachio cream. On June 24, I shall be working within the FT Nikkei UK ekiden, a long-distance relay race alongside 72 miles of the Thames between Oxford and Windsor. How’s the coaching going, you ask? Deliciously.
My five-month highway to the beginning line has been wiggly and revelatory. On the plus facet, some weight has been misplaced, some posture gained. I now take pleasure in a weekly tryst with a Balanced Physique Allegro Pilates Reformer machine. I’ve, in line with my new smartwatch, taken extra train in three months than the World Well being Group recommends for a full 12 months. Leandra, my disembodied working coach on Fitbit, bubbles that I’m wonderful only for displaying up. Aww.
However, I’m nonetheless sluggish, sweet-toothed, and have hardly ever been so consumed with psychological anguish. I got here to this race with tenacious Covid-19, underlying bronchial asthma and a roaring ache the place limber extensibility ought to ideally be. However these are cringing, unworthy excuses. Usually, long- distance working thrusts the person into a private battle with time, terrain and twinges. An ekiden makes the runner a part of a series and threatens them with publicity because the weakest hyperlink. Difficult, when you have already got a powerful hunch that hyperlink is you.
I knew, properly earlier than all this began, what an ekiden was. How may I not? Japan’s cherished tackle long-distance working is as deeply rooted in its dwelling territory as inexperienced tea and Gundam. A really high quality 2015 ebook, Adharanand Finn’s The Method of the Runner, units out the cultural shoe prints that ekiden has embedded in Japanese society. The ebook is as highly effective and perceptive an perception into Japanese tradition as any you possibly can discover.
The game of ekiden, which emerged in Japan over a century in the past, performed on the idea of the outdated courier networks (eki = station and den = convey), with every runner masking vital distances earlier than passing the responsibility on to the following. The thought of relays is hardly distinctive to Japan. However what fitted neatly into the nation’s cradle-to-grave, group-centric organisational credo was turning the person sport of long-distance working into the teamiest of group sports activities.
It does so in a approach that messes with the psychology of incentive. The necessity to win is there, in fact, however it’s overwhelmed by the necessity to not let everybody within the group down or be the one liable for dropping general momentum. One runner retires, the entire group is out. If golf, in line with the outdated saying, is an effective stroll, spoiled, then ekiden is a tough check, with baggage.
The comparatively small variety of groups in every ekiden signifies that, over the course of the race, the sphere is thinned. There’s hardly ever a lot probability (as in different long-distance runs) to take tempo from a frontrunner earlier than making a break for management oneself. There’s the lonely feeling in an ekiden of being the hunter, and the hunted. However typically, given the big distances between runners, there is no such thing as a visible clue as to which one at present defines you.
On the coronary heart of the ekiden is the tasuki — a colored sash handed between runners at every station. The sash is imbued with the load of group expectations and of particular person duty for and to the entire. As a vessel of hope and concern, the tasuki is totemic; its passing between runners is a sacrament. And critically, it’s across the tasuki that the best drama and jeopardy lies. At each station, every group’s runners have handy over their tasuki inside a set time after the chief. Miss the margin by seconds, and a distinct colored (and visibly othering) new tasuki have to be taken on.
The ekiden as a style is conveniently malleable. Relying on who’s organising the race, the place it’s occurring and who’s working in it, the whole distance is variable, as are the distances between stations, the variety of groups and the variety of members in every. With flexibility has come ubiquity. Ekiden races starting from 12km to 1,064km abound throughout Japan, with colleges, golf equipment, corporations and cities organising occasions 12 months spherical.
Towering over all these is the Hakone Ekiden, an occasion held yearly on January 2 and three, televised to the nation and contested between the elite athletes of 21 of Japan’s high universities. The 2-day race includes groups of 10 runners, with 5 relaying between Tokyo and Hakone on in the future, and 5 working again the next day, a distance of round 108km every approach.
Hakone Ekiden, which has been run since 1920, additionally has a good declare to being the primary competitors in fashionable sports activities historical past to grasp that the drama of sport seethes away at a distance from the motion itself. Many years earlier than Drive to Survive, Welcome to Wrexham and the entire addictive circus of sports-adjacent actuality TV, Hakone Ekiden was spawning an off-track emotional feeding frenzy, gorging on the personalities of the coed runners, their coaches and households. Japanese TV is aware of its viewers and the way to attract out their tears, sympathy and affinities. And the place, inevitably, are the tastiest morsels of drama to be discovered? Slap bang within the particular person’s concern of letting their group down.
For some years now, Anna Dingley has needed to deliver all this depth and champagne to the UK. I first met her in 2008 when she was in Japan working in a three way partnership between the London Goal market and the Tokyo Inventory Change. She is massive on constructing hyperlinks between Japan and the UK. She additionally turned an ekiden addict and this continued lengthy after she resettled in Britain. I ran into her once more in January within the transit lounge of Helsinki airport, the place she used the two-hour layover to point out me a totally fashioned plan for an ekiden alongside the Thames Path in June. She wanted sponsorship, however no one in London or Tokyo was biting. Did I do know anybody?
I did. Some years earlier than, I had been at dinner in Tokyo with the FT’s chief government John Ridding, a former journalist who has spent the previous eight and a half years steering the FT below the possession of Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun (aka “Nikkei”).
For all of the mistaken causes, one among his tales caught in my head: the revelation that, every time he runs the circuit round Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, he counts the variety of runners he has overtaken on one hand, and people who have overtaken him on the opposite. It was memorable not just for its adherence to the conventions of double-entry bookkeeping, however for being uncompromisingly CEO-ish in its have to discover a KPI. After all somebody like this could need the FT and Nikkei to collectively sponsor an ekiden. And so it proved. Since then different sponsors have piled in, together with the sportswear maker Mizuno, and the occasion has been endorsed by Susumu Hara, the coach of the persistently victorious Aoyama Gakuin College ekiden group and an enormous celeb in Japan.
The one snag was this. As some kind of twisted reward for making the introductions, I used to be advised I might be working within the joint FT-Nikkei group. The UK Ekiden, which can contain 20 groups from universities, corporations and working golf equipment, will divide the route into 10 segments, giving me an 11.1km stretch and, crucially, a run that ends at a key cut-off level for the group. Worse, our group could be populated with gazelles and captained by a chief business officer whose working rule of thumb is that, inside purpose and past the age of 40, a 10km distance must be accomplished in as many minutes as you might be years outdated. I did a check run in March to determine how far off that deranged goal I used to be. Three months isn’t lengthy for a bon vivant with a desk job to shave a 10km tempo down by 13 minutes.
Within the preliminary weeks of what I optimistically known as “coaching”, I plodded many common 5 kms and 10 kms across the palace. Sadly, I at all times modified and took a bathe at a “runners’ station” the place, upon handing again your locker key, employees current you with a chilly can of Asahi Dry Crystal. Or “lager” as it’s higher recognized.
Sundays had been for longer runs with a gang of mates that organises itself through a WhatsApp group chat known as “Weekend Croissant Membership”. Its pursuits are outlined by routes that finish in at a butter-glutted French bakery, and its members embrace a enterprise proprietor who would fairly be biking, a fund supervisor who runs to amass credit score in an imaginary marketplace for claret offsets and a faculty English trainer who sees each kilometre as an opportunity to debate Philip Larkin and on-line relationship.
This was enjoyable, however proof I used to be not constructed for the rigours of ekiden. Every part ached, creaked or wheezed. I used to be nonetheless tubby, nonetheless spending my days in an workplace the place biscuits mysteriously seem within the pantry, nonetheless simply lured to a post-work pint and nonetheless making solely modest increments of enchancment on my time. Because the race loomed, the dearth of progress turned extra psychologically onerous, and the concern of letting the facet down started to prey. My group, bedecked in our specifically made FT-Nikkei working vests, could be humiliated, and it could be all my fault.
It was then {that a} revelation struck me. I had been ekidening all of it mistaken. The mandatory psychological leap, in a sport designed by Japanese for Japanese, is to not concentrate on the outcome however on the method. For it’s course of, finally, that issues most. As long as you may inform your self truthfully that you just tried your finest within the run-up, Japan has a hidden clause that liberates you from the result of that effort.
So the previous eight weeks have been dedicated to that job of self-persuasion, a trigger which, coincidentally, can flip you into a greater runner. Interval coaching, Pilates, a (practically whole) booze moratorium. Sufficient to permit me to reply, when requested how coaching goes, that I’m a zealot. I set myself a weekly purpose of 40km working and 100km biking, culminating in a run, one week earlier than the massive day, with a youthful, lither companion. He pressured me right into a tempo that introduced me to the top of 10km at a time six minutes off my age, and to a state the place I imagine I’ve mastered ekiden: the Japanese artwork of letting everybody down gracefully. Want me luck.
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Asia enterprise editor
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