The Long Game
Long before World War II, before the rending of the world order and its uneasy rapprochement; long before some now-dusty academic coined the term “sport diplomacy” and the Olympics became big business; and long, long before carbon-plated shoes and precision carbohydrate fueling, a Japanese man started what would later come to be known as the longest marathon in Olympic history.
His name was Shizo Kanakuri and in 1912 he and one other athlete – a 100- and 200-meter sprinter named Yahiko Mishima – constituted the entirety of the first-ever Japanese team to compete in the modern Olympics. The Games were being hosted by Sweden’s capital city Stockholm, and the men undertook a three-week journey, first by ship and then by train, to arrive at their destination. It sounds like the start of a runner’s joke – have you heard the one about the sprinter and the marathoner on the Trans-Siberian Railway? – but it ends with the unexpected germination of the marathon seed in the bedrock of a country that would come to embrace, revere, rely upon and, ultimately, dominate the 26.2-mile event.
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Sunday, July 14th, 1912 dawned hot and sticky in Stockholm. Some reports placed race day temperatures near 90 degrees. Sixty-eight men toed the startline of the Olympics’ longest footrace. Only half finished. One died. And one went missing: Shizo Kanakuri.
Possibly undone by the heat or the arduous journey, perhaps overtrained or undertrained, Kanakuri exited the course at the 16-mile mark and stumbled into a garden party hosted by a family along the race route. He asked for a glass of water; they gave him raspberry juice, a cinnamon roll, clean clothes and a bed. He availed himself of the offerings and then quietly made his way home to Japan.
Kanakuri had done battle with the marathon. And that day the marathon had won. He’d failed to make it the distance. But in his shortcoming he’d found what so many of us find in the marathon: a measuring stick for self-improvement. Not just for him, but for an entire citizenry.
In the days after the 1912 Olympic marathon, Kanakuri wrote in his journal, “My heart is aching with regret…It was the most significant day of my life. But failure teaches success…To wipe off this shame, I will work with all my strength to brush up my marathon skills and raise the prestige of our country.”
Kanakuri did just that: he threw himself into running, becoming the self-assigned stone in the pond of a country’s burgeoning fascination with the sport. Not only did he compete in two more Olympic marathons – in Antwerp in 1920 and Paris in 1924 – but he’s also credited with launching the popular Ekiden relay races, the most prestigious of which now attracts a greater viewership per capita than the Superbowl. Kanakuri taught and coached; he organized and advocated; he recruited women into sports programs and devised ways for the blind to train. So effective was his running evangelism that he earned the title “Father of the Marathon” in Japan.
More than a half-century after his own ill-fated Olympic marathon in Stockholm, with two world wars having erupted in the interregnum, Kanakuri led a delegation of Japanese athletes to Boston, Massachusetts to compete in the world’s oldest annual marathon. The year was 1965 and his men took five of the six top spots, including a clean sweep of the podium.
The only feat more stunning than that year’s dominance of the Boston Marathon was the fact that the Japanese returned to Boston the next year with a completely new team – and did it again.
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The Japanese supremacy on display at the 1965 and 1966 Boston Marathons was the culmination of two decades of nation-rebuilding on the footing of sport. World War II had left whole cities – and the nation’s confidence – in ashes. More broadly, the world order had been scrambled and shot through with mistrust.
The arena of sport, however, with its clear rules of engagement and imprimatur or fair play, offered an opportunity to forge internal resilience anew while also serving up a roadmap to rejoin the global community. The Japanese excelled at baseball, but with its emphasis on hard work and perseverance, no event better suited the national character than the marathon. So Japan placed a bet on its runners – a long-term unhedged bet – to bridge the distance back to its international cohort.
Kanakuri had sown the seeds of a running boom in Japan long before Bill Bowerman ever thought to take his wife’s waffle iron out to the garage. In the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese prefectures were encouraging schoolchildren to run for physical fitness and organized teams of university students were routinely logging 100-mile weeks. In a country the size of Montana, the appetite for long distance was Alaska-sized.
Then – and now – it is not unusual for Japanese marathoners to log upwards of 1200 kilometers a month on the back of three daily runs, seven days a week. Long runs can reach 60k and bi-weekly speed sessions look like typos: “3 x 10k” or “2 x 20k time trial.” Brendan Reilly, a Boulder, Colorado-based agent who has organized stateside training camps for over 3,500 international athletes, says the Japanese marathoners pursue “one of the highest mileage and frankly craziest training regimens you’ll ever encounter.” As a 30-year student of elite international running culture – his athletes have won 15 Olympic and World Championship medals in the marathon – Reilly explains it this way: “The very nature of long-distance running resonates with the Japanese spirit. Endurance, perseverance, and the will to never-give-up-no-matter-how-damn-uncomfortable-it-gets are core Japanese values.”
Yet despite an outsized work ethic and detailed preparation, by the middle of the 20th century the Japanese runners were at risk of becoming players without a stage. The 1940 and 1944 Olympics had been canceled because of WWII and neither Germany nor Japan was invited to compete in London in 1948. It wasn’t until 1951, when the Boston Athletic Association issued an invitation to Japan to send a team to vie for the Boston Marathon title, that Japanese athletes were finally re-introduced to the global athletic community.
The man who wrote the book on the Boston Marathon, longtime Greater Boston Track Club coach and 2:19 marathon man Tom Derderian, points to that moment as a potent reminder of how sport and politics intersect. In a recent conversation on the topic he explained, “The Boston Marathon reflects the history, the sociology and the economics of its particular eras – and its social prejudices and misconceptions as well. We can't ignore World War II. It was a horrific thing. Japan was the enemy. And then the US dropped the nuclear bomb on Japan. Two of them. So how does the marathon reconcile countries after the horrors of World War? That's a great tribute to the power of sport.”
Boston crowns its winners with laurel wreaths, but in 1951 it may as well have been an olive branch they handed to winner Shigeki Tanaka. From that day forward the Boston Marathon held for Japan a vaunted place in the pantheon of major marathons. They routinely sent teams to vie for the title and ran away with victories again in 1953 and 1955.
The success of the Japanese teams in Boston – as well as the surging popularity of newly-launched domestic races like the Lake Biwa Marathon (1946) and the Beppu-Oita Marathon (1952) – continued to fuel the nation’s enthusiasm for the marathon. If Japan had come to the event for a post-war morale boost, its citizens were staying for the myriad victory celebrations.
In the run-up to the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo – an event a quarter-century in the making after Tokyo’s plans to host the 1940 Games were annulled – Japan had groomed a promising team of distance-running talent, two of whom appeared wholly capable of medaling in the marathon on home soil. One was a soldier, one a civilian. Each would eventually win an Olympic medal in the marathon: one in Tokyo and one in Mexico City. But one wouldn’t live to see his 28th birthday. The other, Kenji Kimihara, would go on to have one of the longest and most celebrated marathon careers in Japanese history, punctuated by his come-from-behind victory at the 1966 Boston Marathon.
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Most people think of the marathon as a distance problem. They grapple with how to prepare the body to traverse 26.2 miles. But anyone who has taken the marathon as a teacher knows that it’s not the distance that confounds you. It’s the time. Run enough marathons with enough ambition and you will find yourself reckoning with time. The distance solves itself provided you can keep putting one foot in front of the other; the clock – and the calendar – are the crueler adversaries.
Kenji Kimihara defied time – the minutes and seconds, as well as the years – logging consistently fast marathons over an impressively long career. He raced in three Olympic marathons and claimed top honors at four Beppu-Oita Marathons, two Lake Biwa Marathons, two Asian Games marathons and the Boston Marathon.
Though his fastest 26.2-mile attempt was a 2:13:34 run in 1967, he notched a sub-2:20 marathon every year of the decade between 1963 and 1973. And while his 4:53:14 2016 Boston Marathon may have been his slowest on record, the fact that he raced it on the 50th anniversary of his 1966 victory drops a fitting exclamation point on what was already a sterling career.
Kimihara started running competitively at the age of 14. By the time he was 20 he was showing national promise. At the age of 23 he and several teammates traveled to New Zealand for their first international training camp under the tutelage of the famed Arthur Lydiard. Among his training partners on that trip was a first lieutenant in the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces – Kokichi Tsuburaya – the man who would go on to win the bronze medal in the marathon in Tokyo the following year. “It was a brilliant achievement,” the now 81-year old Kimihara stated in a recent interview.
On paper, Kimihara might have been the better bet to win Japan’s first Olympic marathon medal; he had more major marathon experience and a faster marathon PR than his teammate. But the Japanese military had campaigned extensively to promote Tsuburaya as a new type of soldier-athlete. When he stormed into the Olympic stadium in the silver medal position with only 400m to go, the crowd roared with delight. Time was not on Tsuburaya’s side, though. Not that day and not in the days to come. Halfway around the track he was overtaken by a British runner and ended up finishing third. Kimihara came seventh.
Tsuburaya never recovered from what he felt was his public and national humiliation. He later died by suicide in his military dorm room. Kimihara parlayed his seventh into a second — and a silver medal — at the next Olympics. And he added the title of Boston Marathon champion to boot.
Sport favors the optimists among us, the problem-solvers, the ones who believe their best race is ahead of them and that the current rough patch is only temporary. Nowhere is this more true than in the life of a marathoner, who must at once be a meticulous minder of minutes and also a time amnesiac. Become too attached to a single moment — a memory, a result, a mid-race feeling – and time will cement itself around your feet.
Kenji Kimihara must have carried this optimist’s posture into his sole attempt at the Boston Marathon. According to the morning edition of The Boston Globe on Wednesday, April 20th 1966: “With only a little more than two miles remaining at Coolidge Corner, Kimihara looked weary and defeated as a relatively distant fourth behind three of his compatriots.” It was his first trip to the United States, just a month after his wedding, the cheers from the crowd echoing in his ears even today; and so, he explains: “I was careful not to fail.”
With a kilometer to go, Kimihara remembers, “I was strong again…and I thought maybe I could win.” On a cool, sunny, windless day – the kind of day a hopeful marathoner hopes for – and having been gapped by over 50 meters, Kimihara doubled down on his effort, reeled in his teammates, and surged to victory. The four Japanese runners went 1-2-3-4 in a stunning reprisal of their countrymen’s efforts the year before. The win was an honor on par with his silver medal from the 1968 Olympics, Kimihara shared recently. “I am very proud of it,” he said.
Two hundred thousand spectators watched the 70th iteration of what the New York Times called “the world’s most famous footrace.” One in particular brought a student’s eye to the marathoners’ classroom: 19-year old Amby Burfoot. Suffering a stress fracture that prevented him from running that spring, he’d gone out to the course to cheer on the 415 athletes attempting the journey from Hopkinton to Boston. (Ed.: Burfoot would have his day on the course two years hence.)
On a recent run along the quiet backroads of his Connecticut hometown, Burfoot and the aforementioned Reilly discussed their recollections of that race. Above all, Burfoot remembers the formidable presence of the Japanese team: the trim and tight-knit quartet, the crisp white uniforms emblazoned with the rising sun, the impenetrable silence in which they were shrouded. The men were unmistakable representatives of a nation and a tradition – Japan’s marathon tradition. They were practitioners in the art of the long game.
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One year after Kenji Kimihara’s Boston Marathon victory, 75-year old Shizo Kanakuri – father to six, grandfather to ten and Japan’s “Father of the Marathon” – was invited back to Stockholm to finish what he’d started in 1912. Kanakuri returned to Sweden, jogged across a makeshift finish line to much fanfare and was awarded an official time of 54 years, eight months, six days, five hours, 32 minutes and 20 seconds.
It’s the longest marathon in Olympic history – and a fitting coda to a country’s epic story about the importance of making brave and steady progress towards the finish line, even if you can’t see it quite yet.
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This story appeared in Volume 04, Issue 04 of METER magazine.