Three weeks earlier than the sternest bodily problem of my life, I used to be exterior the Lululemon flagship retailer in Tokyo. A workforce operating 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 purchasing, on an eddy of workforce spirit, for shorts in conventional FT pink.
Subsequent door, from the gross sales hatch of the Oscar Wilde doughnut store, the scent 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 can be operating 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 aspect, some weight has been misplaced, some posture gained. I now get pleasure from a weekly tryst with a Balanced Physique Allegro Pilates Reformer machine. I’ve, based on my new smartwatch, taken extra train in three months than the World Well being Group recommends for a full yr. Leandra, my disembodied operating coach on Fitbit, bubbles that I’m wonderful only for exhibiting up. Aww.
However, I’m nonetheless sluggish, sweet-toothed, and have not often 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 operating thrusts the person into a private battle with time, terrain and twinges. An ekiden makes the runner a part of a sequence and threatens them with publicity because the weakest hyperlink. Difficult, when you have already got a robust hunch that hyperlink is you.
I knew, effectively earlier than all this began, what an ekiden was. How might I not? Japan’s cherished tackle long-distance operating is as deeply rooted in its residence territory as inexperienced tea and Gundam. A really positive 2015 e-book, Adharanand Finn’s The Manner of the Runner, units out the cultural shoe prints that ekiden has embedded in Japanese society. The e-book is as highly effective and perceptive an perception into Japanese tradition as any you might 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 obligation 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 operating into the teamiest of workforce sports activities.
It does so in a method 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 workforce down or be the one chargeable for shedding general momentum. One runner retires, the entire workforce is out. If golf, based on the outdated saying, is an effective stroll, spoiled, then ekiden is a tough take a look at, 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 not often 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 massive distances between runners, there isn’t 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 workforce expectations and of particular person accountability for and to the entire. As a vessel of hope and worry, 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 workforce’s runners have at hand over their tasuki inside a set time after the chief. Miss the margin by seconds, and a distinct colored (and visibly othering) new tasuki should be taken on.
The ekiden as a style is conveniently malleable. Relying on who’s organising the race, the place it’s taking place and who’s operating in it, the overall 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 yr 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 prime universities. The 2-day race includes groups of 10 runners, with 5 relaying between Tokyo and Hakone on someday, and 5 operating again the next day, a distance of round 108km every method.
Hakone Ekiden, which has been run since 1920, additionally has a good declare to being the primary competitors in trendy sports activities historical past to know that the drama of sport seethes away at a distance from the motion itself. A long time 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 scholar 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 worry of letting their workforce down.
For some years now, Anna Dingley has needed to carry all this depth and poo to the UK. I first met her in 2008 when she was in Japan working in a three way partnership between the London Purpose market and the Tokyo Inventory Change. She is massive on constructing hyperlinks between Japan and the UK. She additionally grew to become 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 indicate me a completely shaped plan for an ekiden alongside the Thames Path in June. She wanted sponsorship, however no person 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 beneath the possession of Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun (aka “Nikkei”).
For all of the flawed 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 those that 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 must discover a KPI. After all somebody like this might 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 workforce and an enormous celeb in Japan.
The one snag was this. As some form of twisted reward for making the introductions, I used to be advised I might be operating within the joint FT-Nikkei workforce. The UK Ekiden, which can contain 20 groups from universities, corporations and operating 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 workforce. Worse, our workforce can be populated with gazelles and captained by a chief business officer whose operating rule of thumb is that, inside purpose and past the age of 40, a 10km distance needs to be accomplished in as many minutes as you’re years outdated. I did a take a look at run in March to determine how far off that deranged goal I used to be. Three months shouldn’t be 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 referred to as “coaching”, I plodded many common 5 kms and 10 kms across the palace. Sadly, I all the time modified and took a bathe at a “runners’ station” the place, upon handing again your locker key, workers 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 associates that organises itself by way of a WhatsApp group chat referred to as “Weekend Croissant Membership”. Its pursuits are outlined by routes that finish in at a butter-glutted French bakery, and its members embody a enterprise proprietor who would slightly be biking, a fund supervisor who runs to amass credit score in an imaginary marketplace for claret offsets and a college English instructor 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. All the pieces 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 shortage of progress grew to become extra psychologically onerous, and the worry of letting the aspect down started to prey. My workforce, bedecked in our specifically made FT-Nikkei operating vests, can be humiliated, and it could be all my fault.
It was then {that a} revelation struck me. I had been ekidening all of it flawed. The mandatory psychological leap, in a sport designed by Japanese for Japanese, is to not give attention to the consequence however on the method. For it’s course of, in the end, that issues most. As long as you possibly can inform your self actually that you simply tried your greatest 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 operating and 100km biking, culminating in a run, one week earlier than the large day, with a youthful, lither companion. He compelled me right into a tempo that introduced me to the tip 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
Comply with @FTMag to search out out about our newest tales first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Artwork wherever you pay attention
