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“Our True Rival Is Women’s Golf” — Coach Hara Susumu Challenges the Insularity of Japan’s Women’s Long-Distance Running

The Sydney Olympics, September 2000. The moment Takahashi Naoko crossed the finish line, all of Japan erupted. The broadcast drew an average viewership of 40.6%※1 — nearly half the country watching a live race in the early morning hours. Four years later at Athens, Noguchi Mizuki claimed another gold medal. Japanese women’s marathon was, without question, at the top of the world.

That was more than twenty years ago. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Suzuki Yuka finished sixth※2 — the podium felt out of reach, and the old excitement never returned. Beneath the surface, a set of numbers tells the story of a clock that simply stopped. This article unpacks the structural reasons why the thick-sole revolution never reached women’s athletics, and what the success of women’s golf reveals about the one ingredient that was missing: openness.

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The Stopped Clock — A National Record Frozen for 19 Years

The women’s marathon national record set by Noguchi Mizuki at the 2005 Berlin Marathon — 2 hours, 19 minutes, and 12 seconds — stood untouched until January 2024, when Maeda Honami ran 2:18:59 at the Osaka International Women’s Marathon. For 19 unbroken years, the record never moved※3.

And it wasn’t just the marathon. National high school records in the 5,000m and 10,000m went largely unimproved for over two decades. The participation numbers are equally alarming. Japan’s estimated running population fell to 7.58 million in 2024 — a roughly 28% drop from the 2020 peak of 10.55 million. Most striking is the collapse among young women: participation among women in their twenties plunged from 15.8% in 2020 to just 4.9% in 2024, falling to less than one-third in only four years※4.

Coach Hara Susumu described the situation bluntly: “Records aren’t improving. Participation is down 40%. If this continues, coaching jobs will disappear, teams will disappear, and the competitions themselves will shrink.”※5 The numbers back up every word.

Why the Thick-Sole Revolution Never Reached Women

Around 2017, Nike’s carbon-plated thick-soled shoes began reshaping the world of distance running. In 2018, Shitara Yuta broke Japan’s men’s marathon national record for the first time in 16 years. The following year Osako Suguru improved it further, and by 2021 Suzuki Kengo became the first Japanese man to break 2:04. Three years of record-breaking for the men.

For women, the national record didn’t move until 2024 — six years behind the men’s surge. The same shoes were available. So why the gap? Several structural problems converged at once.

Problem One: The Gender Gap in Coaching

At the Queens Ekiden (All Japan Corporate Women’s Ekiden Championship) and at the national high school women’s ekiden, female head coaches are extremely rare. The overwhelming majority of female distance runners in Japan have trained under male coaches. Maximizing the benefit of carbon-plated shoes requires a transition to forefoot running — a biomechanical shift that demands a deep understanding of the female body, including bone structure, the menstrual cycle, and stress fracture risk. Without that understanding, transforming training methodology becomes very difficult.

Tamahiya’s head coach Taketomi Yutaka, who guided Maeda Honami to her record, acknowledged that in the early period after the transition to thick-soled shoes, the athletes were essentially “fighting with their shoes.” Only after they finally felt at home in them did the record become possible.

Problem Two: Shoe Sponsor Constraints

Corporate teams in Japan’s jitsugyo-dan (corporate athletics) system typically sign all-inclusive sponsorship contracts that cover footwear. When Nike’s thick soles proved overwhelmingly superior, some athletes contracted to Asics or Mizuno were quietly racing in Nikes with logos covered. Female athletes receive less individual investment than their male counterparts and have fewer options to negotiate directly with brands — meaning many were stuck in team contracts while the technology passed them by.

Problem Three: Rigid Transfer Rules

In the corporate athletics system, a player cannot move to another team without the current team’s blessing — a so-called “amicable departure.” In practice, that blessing rarely came. Athletes who didn’t fit their team’s approach faced a binary choice: stay or retire. For many, latent talent was buried under that constraint.

Research suggests that carbon-plated shoes improve running economy by approximately 5.7% in men versus 4.2% in women※6 — a real but modest difference. That alone cannot explain a six-year lag. What women’s athletics critically lacked was the organizational openness needed to absorb and benefit from technological change.

Iwade Reia and the Reality of the System

No one embodied this structural reality more directly than Iwade Reia, a Japanese representative who competed on the world stage.

In 2017, Iwade left her corporate team to join sportswear maker Dome. In August 2020, she declared herself a fully independent professional runner — signing a sponsorship contract with Adidas in January 2021 and choosing to compete as a professional.

The reality was brutal. “My income went to zero,” she said. To fund training camps, she raised over one million yen through crowdfunding※7, held paid group running sessions roughly six times a month, and pursued YouTube as a platform to attract sponsors. It was a grinding existence.

It is worth noting that no official sanctions were imposed on Iwade by the athletics federation. The problem was more structural: the major competition circuits simply require athletes to belong to a corporate team. That is not a punishment — it is just an eligibility rule. But the rule itself effectively eliminates the professional runner as a viable career path.

“I want to become a new model for the next generation — to show that it’s possible to run professionally as a woman,” she had said. In 2022, she joined Denso and returned to the corporate system. The road of independence was still far too steep.

Meanwhile, in women’s golf, turning professional is celebrated as proof of talent. The asymmetry between the two worlds sits at the root of athletics’ stagnation.

What Women’s Golf Proved

Women’s golf has traveled the opposite road — and the contrast is illuminating.

At a press conference marking the launch of his new women’s ekiden team, Coach Hara put it directly:

“Golf tournaments happen every single week now. Back in 2003, it wasn’t even close to a major sport. But now there are 37 tournaments a year, and average prize money per event has doubled. The spark was Miyazato Ai, who was 18 at the time, and then Yokomine Sakura. Those two ignited a cycle — more tournaments, more prize money, a more glamorous world.”※5

In 2003, Miyazato Ai won as a high school student shortly after turning professional. The following year, Yokomine Sakura emerged as a rival. Young stars drew media attention, sponsors followed, and tournament numbers and prize pools expanded. It was a virtuous cycle — one that created the soil from which Shibuno Hinako’s breakthrough and Inami Mone’s Olympic silver medal later grew.

How the JLPGA Changed the Rules

Women’s golf’s success cannot be separated from a history of rule changes.

The JLPGA once required seeded players to compete in at least 60% of domestic tournaments in a season, and players without international tour registration could participate in overseas events just once per year. In practice, this made it nearly impossible for Japan’s top players to build careers abroad.

The turning point came in 2021, when Saigo Yuka — just 19 years old and in only her second professional season — won the U.S. Women’s Open. The JLPGA responded by relaxing its international tour registration policy and introducing a framework where internationally registered players need only appear in 20% of domestic events instead of 60%※8. Athletes could now base themselves overseas without the double burden of maintaining full domestic participation.

Hataoka Nasa effectively bypassed the domestic tour almost entirely, joining the LPGA as soon as she turned professional. Furue Ayaka followed in 2022. The old model — years of domestic apprenticeship before going global — is dissolving. Talent can now aim at the world from day one.

The underlying philosophy: empower players to succeed, and the whole ecosystem rises. That is the lesson women’s athletics has yet to internalize.

Hara’s Move — Bringing Outside Logic into a Closed World

Seeing all of this as “deeply critical,” Coach Hara launched the Aoyama Gakuin University Women’s Ekiden Team on April 1, 2026, with a public press conference on April 4※9.

In his own words: “We want to study the mechanisms that made women’s golf so vibrant, and build a structure where women can shine — where they can run as themselves. If we do that, records will improve and participation will grow.”

“Our true rival is women’s golf” is not a slogan. It is a declaration of intent: the goal is not to beat other universities, but to open up women’s distance running the way golf opened itself — making it attractive, legitimate, and alive.

What Is Actually New

The team’s concept: “beauty, freshness, and strength.” The on-the-ground coach is Hashimoto Ryo — an Aoyama Gakuin alumnus with a personal best of 2:09:12, a top-five finish at the MGC (Marathon Grand Championship), and status as an Olympic alternate. A young elite.

The most significant innovation is mixed-gender training. From morning sessions to training camps, the men’s and women’s squads train together on the same program. This has almost no precedent in Japanese university athletics. Daily exposure to the competitive environment of the top men’s program should sharpen the women’s athletes in ways that women-only training cannot. Breaking the convention that “women train only with women” will draw criticism. But if that convention is one of the reasons records stagnated, then breaking it is where change begins.

On the women’s health side, Wacoal’s CW-X brand is providing scientific support. The inaugural class consists of two athletes: Ashida Waka (Ritsumeikan Uji High School) and Ikeno Eri (Suma Gakuen High School). Their first stated target: entry and victory at the All Japan University Women’s Ekiden in Sendai in 2027.

Reading It Through a Management Lens

Stepping back, this story is far larger than the founding of one university athletics club.

When a closed organization or industry needs transformation, successful change agents tend to follow a recognizable pattern. Coach Hara is running the playbook.

  • Make the crisis visible: “Participation down 40%, record frozen for 19 years” — confronting people with the numbers
  • Benchmark outside the industry: Not a rival university, but women’s golf — an external success story used as the mirror
  • Change the structure, not just the surface: Training setup, gender of coaching staff, corporate partnerships — reformed as a system, not piecemeal
  • Challenge the founding assumptions: “Women practice only with women” — putting a question mark on the premise itself

The same dynamics play out inside companies. Insiders steeped in industry convention rarely drive transformation. It takes someone carrying the logic of the outside to turn a crisis into a doorway.

One additional note: as Iwade Reia’s story makes clear, individual courage alone cannot change structure. Building an environment where professional female runners can actually sustain careers requires the athletics federation, corporate teams, universities, and equipment makers to all move together. Whether Coach Hara’s initiative becomes one of the catalysts for that broader movement is the question to watch.

For a deeper look at Coach Hara’s philosophy of change:

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Autumn 2027, Sendai — the city of trees. If Aoyama Gakuin’s women’s uniform appears at the starting line, it will be more than one team’s milestone. It may be the moment the clock, stopped for over twenty years, finally starts moving again. Coach Hara’s challenge has only just begun.

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