Manga-loving Salaryman Superhero
Yuki Kawauchi is a mildmannered Japanese office worker who spends his spare time setting marathon records and beating the elites
his breathing loud and choppy. He sees his mother up ahead, standing at the spot on the asphalt path that marks the end of the lap. She’s looking at the stopwatch in her hand. If he beats his personal best, even by a second, practice will end and there might be a reward. An ice cream or a burger, maybe. If he’s slower, he’ll have to run around the park again. He hates those penalty runs, but at the age of seven, he doesn’t dare challenge his mother. She shouts, ‘ Three minutes 34... 35... 36,’ and each second declared propels him faster. When he finally reaches her, he collapses on the grass. Bits of twigs and dirt stick to his sweaty arms and legs as he rolls around on the ground and tries to calm his breathing. But soon his mother is shouting again: ‘ What are you doing lying down there?’ It’s time for a penalty lap.
More than 20 years later, Japanese athlete Yuki Kawauchi is still running hard. Very hard. Kawauchi, 31, races nearly every weekend, in distances that range from 5K to half marathons, ultras and the World Marathon Majors. Racing so many events is impressive, but what makes Kawauchi exceptional is how consistently fast he runs them. In 2013, he ran 11 marathons, four of which were sub- 2: 10 performances: he ran 2:08:15 and 2:08:14 ( his PB) 42 days apart in February and March, and 2:09:05 and 2:09:15 just 14 days apart in December (a world record for the shortest time span between sub-2:10s).
In 2014, he ran 13 marathons in times that ranged from 2:16:41 to 2:09:36. The figures go on: 13 marathons in 2015 (as an aside that year he also ran – and won – three half marathons over three days, running 1: 07: 23, 1: 07: 03, and 1:09:23). In 2016: nine marathons, with a best of 2: 09: 01. Last year: back up to 12, with a fastest time of 2:10:03. And so far this year (at the time of going to press) Kawauchi has run five marathons (including Boston), winning the first four and clocking a fastest time of 2:11:46. His first 26.2 of the year, the Marshf ield New Year ’ s Day Marathon in the US, was notable for him being the only finisher, in temperatures of -23C. (The fact that only three people signed up for that race does not detract from his achievement.)
So you get the idea: he’s no ordinary runner. But here’s the kicker: Kawauchi is not a full-time athlete. He’s got an office job, working 40 hours a week. He collects prize money from races but gets no sponsorships or appearance fees (as a government employee, he is forbidden from receiving income from other jobs). He has no coach or manager. The public servant doesn’t look much like a runner. By day, he’s the o ffice nerd channelling mildmannered Clark Kent, wearing glasses and working at a desk, his back ramrod straight. On weekends, though, despite a contorted expression and laboured stride, he’s blowing past his competition.
Because of this, he is an inspiration for Japan’s millions of weekend warriors. The Japanese love marathons and marathoners in part because the culture values the stoicism the race requires. ‘ Runners come across as people with perseverance,’ says Yukiya Higuchi, editor of the Japanese
monthly running magazine Courir. ‘ You can practically measure the extent of their efforts by watching their sweat drip.’ Kawauchi has garnered such a huge following because he’s dared the masses to believe a desk job isn’t a dealbreaker when it comes to achieving great things. In turn, these ordinary runners spur on the ‘citizen runner’, as Kawauchi is called. Where he was once compelled by the promise of a sweet treat, Kawauchi now performs his best for those, he says, ‘ who’ve only seen fast runners on TV’.
PUSHING HARD
Kawauchi’s running career began early. When he ran 7:30 in the 1500 metres as a six-year- old, his mother, a former secondary school middle- distance runner, was impressed. Mika Kawauchi decided to coach him, and her training programme, which lasted until the boy finished primary school, consisted of daily time trials in local parks. His task each day was to best his personal record; if he was up to 30 seconds off, he had to run an extra lap. If he was a minute off, two laps. If he was consistently slow, he would have to walk the nearly two miles home alone, although that only happened a f ew t imes. A n o bedient child, K awauchi remembers that no matter how much fun he was having playing video games with friends after school, he’d tell them, ‘ I have my running now,’ and head to the park.
Mika Kawauchi’s parenting style is not that unusual in Japan, where many mothers push children to excel. But the boy’s compliant character allowed her to enforce a gruelling regime. Every day he went as hard as he could, staggering at the finish. When the occasional passer-by remarked that it was too much to make such a young child run so hard, Mika Kawauchi retorted, ‘ This is our family’s way of raising children.’
Her approach prepared the boy mentally for the rigours of running track at school, where the training methods are intense. Kawauchi’s secondary school team practised six or seven days a week, with daily 30-minute strengthtraining in the morning, plus afternoon runs that could exceed two hours. They did speedwork three or four times a week. Going all out was expected, and stronger runners such as Kawauchi, who often pulled ahead of the group, routinely collapsed at the finish. Initially, the boy thrived, but during an 11km training run in his second year, Kawauchi felt a sharp pain above his left knee. He kept going, however, completing 10 400m sprints and 80 squats with his teammates. ‘Then I completely broke down,’ he says. He suffered shin splints and recurring bouts of i liotibial band syndrome in h is left knee. It was the start of a persistent cycle – injury followed by insuff icient recovery followed by injury – that would torment Kawauchi throughout his school years.
LOWEST POINT
Under the team’s hierarchical system, out- ofcommission runners like Kawauchi were assigned the humiliating tasks of carrying bags or fetching water for teammates. He recorded his emotional turmoil in a diary with entries like, ‘ What am I? Human scum?’ His mother, who had handed over the coaching reins to the track team, recalls giving her son his space. ‘ It seemed like he needed to get through this on his own,’ she says. ‘If he wanted to talk about it, I was there, but he didn't say much.’ Shortly before his graduation from school, another hardship struck. Kawauchi’s father – who had massaged the boy’s aching legs every night no matter how late he arrived home from work – died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of 59. Kawauchi once said, ‘ He only saw me at my lowest point.’
Perhaps because of his injury history, Kawauchi was never a standout in secondary school, and no university recruited him. Instead, he went to Gakushuin University in Tokyo – a school known not for athletics but for educating Japan’s nobility – and joined its track team.
If Kawauchi’s mother started the engine of his running career, his college coach shifted him into high gear. Seiichi Tsuda adjusted the young runner’s habit of kicking his right foot out upon landing, a move that was burdening his left side, and encouraged him to keep a steady pace so he wouldn’t collapse upon finishing. The drive conditioned from childhood was still there, so Tsuda would tell his restive protege, ‘ Let’s try to enjoy our training.’ To Kawauchi’s surprise, his coach scheduled speedwork just twice a week. Gradually, the young man learned to scale back his do- or- die approach to intervals and chill out if he felt a strain coming on. The tempered approach paid off; within months, h is PB of 15: 07 for 5000m fell to 14: 38. Kawauchi had finally learned how to balance his training and heed his body. ‘ I felt like I was in paradise,’ he says.
In his senior year, Kawauchi ran his first marathon, the 2009 Beppu- Oita Mainichi Marathon in southern Japan, in 2: 19: 26. The fol lowing month, he ran the Tokyo International Marathon in 2:18:18, finishing 19th. Finally, he had found his calling.
Around this time, Kawauchi made another important discovery. For years, he had been running for others – his mother, his coach – obedient to their bidding and afraid that if he stopped heeding them, he would lose everything he had worked for. But one day, he overheard another student saying how much he liked to run. ‘I suddenly realised that I wasn’t running because I was afraid, but because I liked to run,’ says Kawauchi. ‘ It was like I woke up. And after that, my times just kept getting better.’
Kawauchi catapulted onto the elite stage and into the public consciousness at the 2011 Tokyo Marathon. At mile 24, as he overtook the only other Japanese runner ahead of him, an excited broadcaster raved about the surge of the ‘star citizen runner’. Kawauchi finished third, in 2:08:37. To date, he has run 80 marathons, winning 34 of them and securing a podium place in a further 17. And that’s before you get to the 5K road races, the cross- country events, the ultramarathons and the Ekiden ( long- distance relay) races and countless other events he also competes in to ensure that his race schedule contains something most weeks of the year. He holds the world record for the most marathons under 2:20 (79 at the time of going to press) and plans to raise that figure to 100 by the time the Tokyo Olympic Marathon comes around in 2020. ‘ He almost always has the fastest final split,’ says Brett Larner, who has known Kawauchi since 2006 and runs the website Japan Running News. ‘ He’s really tough. No matter what the circumstances, he can really grind it out, just putting everything into that last 1.2 miles.’
Tsuda, too, credits Kawauchi’s sheer force of will. ‘It’s not talent, but mental s trength,’ he says. ‘ When things get tough, he pulls forward.’ Tsuda, who volunteered to coach Kawauchi after graduation, attributes the young man’s drive to his close relationship with his mother. He views the mother and son as ‘monozygotic’, and says that Kawauchi, despite his declarations of fun, still runs ‘ for his mother’s attention and a fear of being left behind’.
Nowhere was the drive, the mental fortitude – and, yes, perhaps the spectre of his mother – more evident than at Boston in April, where the conditions were too brutal for most of the elite athletes to handle. The wind- chill temperature was -8˚C, there was a storm coming in off the Atlantic and a strong headwind made its presence felt all the way along the straight west-to-east point-to-point route. As the African runners faded one by one, Kawauchi kept tabs on the leader and defending champion Geoffrey Kirui, who surged several times but eventually faded badly in the final stages. Kawauchi took the lead with two miles to go and ended up winning by over two minutes, such was the strength of his finish.
His time of 2: 15: 58 was the slowest winning time at Boston since 1976, but time was irrelevant in a race in which 23 elites failed to finish and a full-time nurse, Sarah Sellers, finished second in the women’s race.
‘ I think there is probably not a single person in Boston who thought I would win this,’ said Kawauchi modestly in a postrace interview. ‘ I’ve always run well in cold weather, so I think the conditions were instrumental in being able to win.’
MAN OF ROUTINE
Kawauchi lives in a two- story suburban home with his mother and one of his two younger brothers in Saitama Prefecture, about 34 miles north of Tokyo. Since college, he’s worked for the Saitama Prefectural government, assigned to the 1pm to 9pm shift at a night secondary school. He answers phones, enters data, and collects tuition and meal payments. As a government employee, he gets about 25 days off and uses most of them for racing and travelling.
Straitlaced and serious, Kawauchi spends most of his spare time running. Four mornings a week, he’ll log 11 or 12 miles over two hours in a park near his house. At night, he’ll strength- train in his room with homemade equipment, using an old bike tube as an exercise band and a 15kg weight, the bar from which he hangs his retired running shoes. He does speedwork on Wednesdays and uses the weekend to make up some mileage, sometimes with epic mountain trail sessions for between three and seven hours. More often, he races. Kawauchi targets monthly ‘main’ races before which he’ll run events of varying distances in preparation. While most elite runners would cave under such a load, Kawauchi
thrives, viewing his packed schedule as a way to fulfil his dream of a ‘marathon pilgrimage’ throughout Japan and the world. ‘ It looks hard to others, but for me it’s just so much fun,’ he says, although his face betrays little in the way of excitement or pleasure. His manner is simply matter-of-fact; he knows exactly what he wants and that hard work is required to get there.
He rarely drinks alcohol, because he worries it might affect his racing. The night before a race, he likes to eat Japanese-style curry, thick sauce over white rice, and he’s obsessive about getting exactly seven and a half hours of sleep. As for his recovery regime, it’s not nearly as involved as one would expect, given his level of effort. If he’s in Japan, he’ll relax and rest by alternating between hot- and cold-water baths fed by hot springs.
LONE WOLF
With just a small circle of friends, mostly fellow runners, Kawauchi is something of a loner, preferring to sing by himself in karaoke rooms, belting out – sometimes several times in a row – the seven-minute-long song Silent Jealousy by the Japanese rock band X Japan. He also owns, by his estimate, the largest collection of running- related manga (Japanese comics and graphic novels). The heroic feats of the characters may be unrealistic, ‘but they wind me up’, says Kawauchi.
What really gets him going, however, is reflected in his favorite motto: ‘genjyo daha’ or ‘destroying the status quo’. That sentiment refers to repeatedly conquering a staggering race schedule and to defying the country’s running establishment, which is dominated by a rigid system of corporate sponsorships. Japanese businesses traditionally recruit runners straight out of school and provide them with in- house coaching. In exchange for full- t ime employment, athletes compete with their company names emblazoned on their kit. ( In honour of his employer, Kawauchi’s racing singlet reads Saitama Prefecture, but he receives no funding from them, says Larner.) ‘ I want to change the conventions of Japan’s running world,’ Kawauchi has said.
With the exception of a small group of elites who have ventured outside the system (such as 2012 Olympian Arata Fujiwara, who courts both corporate and individual donors to support his efforts), nearly all of Japan’s top runners compete for corporate teams that often train twice a day at company facilities, and log around 620 miles a month (nearly double what Kawauchi averages). Kawauchi’s extraordinary success hasn’t gone down terribly well with many such runners, because it prompts the office number crunchers to question the need to finance the training of corporate athletes: here’s a full-time employee doing it all alone who is just as good as them, and often better. In showing his countrymen there are ways to race successfully outside the tightly controlled corporate system, Kawauchi has been a pioneer; Larner calls him ‘ the rebel government clerk’.
‘In the past, if you said a citizen runner would aim for the Olympics, people would have said, “What are you talking about?”’ says Toshihiro Endo, a sports reporter for Japan’s Nippon Television AX- ON. ‘ But now, it’s no longer a dream.’
And for that, the Japanese public loves Kawauchi. Spectators line up at races to shake his hand, often saying, ‘Thank you for giving us citizen runners the courage.’ There’s even a comedian, Takashi Emu, who specialises in imitating Kawauchi, showing up at marathons sporting a similar fringed hairstyle and offering handshakes to those who can’t get to the real deal.
RACING AHEAD
As to what the future holds, Kawauchi is unsure. After the boost in Boston he is considering finally turning pro in 2019, not to chase money, he says, but because ‘I haven’t improved my personal best time in five years. I need to change something about my environment.’ But whether he sticks or twists on such a big question, one thing is for sure: he has no plans to stop doing things his way ( he warmed up for Boston by running a half marathon a week beforehand, dressed as a panda. He finished second, in a time of 1: 10: 03). ‘ I hope to run in races all over Japan and around the world, no matter how old I get, until I die,’ he says. On his bucket list is the Paris Marathon: ‘I want to see the Arc de Triomphe and Eiffel Tower. One of my favorite manga characters runs the Paris Marathon.’
And of his metamorphosis f rom obedient son and student to star of Japanese distance running, Kawauchi says, ‘ If I was told to turn right, I’d turn right. If I was told to turn left, I’d turn left, striving for perfection in every way.’ Now on his own and bolstered by legions of fans – not to mention the Boston win – he feels empowered and exhilarated. ‘ I had suppressed my emotions ever since I was a kid. I was the serious, good boy.’ With a shy laugh, he adds, ‘ Now I’m having a blast.’