17/4/22, 9:44 Mariko Yugeta, the 63-year-old limbering up to run a sub-three-hour marathon | Japan | The Guardian

Japan
Mariko Yugeta, the 63-year-old limbering up to run a
sub-three-hour marathon
The Japanese runner finds age no barrier and may even
challenge the world record she already holds in Monday’s
Boston marathon

Justin McCurry in Tokyo

Sun 17 Apr 2022 05.12 BST

A
niggling knee injury and just one full day to recover from a 13-hour flight
across as many time zones are mere inconveniences for Mariko Yugeta as
she prepares to compete in the Boston marathon, and beat her own world
record again.

The Japanese runner will line up in Monday’s race alongside women half her age, and
they will do well to keep up.

Less than a month before her 64th birthday, the PE teacher from Saitama, near Tokyo,
is a long-distance running phenomenon. In 2019, she became the first woman over 60

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17/4/22, 9:44 Mariko Yugeta, the 63-year-old limbering up to run a sub-three-hour marathon | Japan | The Guardian

to complete a marathon in under three hours – and is still the only athlete to achieve
that milestone. In January, aged 62, she beat her own world record for 60- to 64-year-
olds with a time of 2hr 52min 13sec at the Osaka international women’s marathon.

“My knee is not in the best condition and I would say that I’m about 80% at the
moment, but I’m still aiming for the two-hour, 50-minute range,” Yugeta tells the
Guardian on the eve of her trip to the US.

Yugeta, who teaches full-time at Kawagoe girls’ high school, has defied sporting logic
since she ran her first competitive marathon in 1982, aged 24. Her time of 3:09.21 was
markedly slower than those she has logged in recent years. “It was far harder than I’d
imagined,” says Yugeta, who had been a middle-distance national champion in her
student days.

Japan’s Mariko Yugeta competing in the Nagoya women’s marathon. Photograph: Mariko Yugeta

She had to put her quest to break three hours on hold to focus on raising her four
children. “I wanted to run more, but looking after my children meant I had very little
time to myself. I jogged when I took them to play in the park and with the pupils at my
school, but it wasn’t the kind of preparation you need for a marathon.”

It wasn’t until she was in her 50s, with her youngest son by then in his mid-teens, that
Yugeta began to realise her potential. She joined evening training sessions with a club

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in Tokyo, often returning home late at night. “The pace was hard and I felt myself
getting faster.”

Then in 2017, aged 58, she finally broke the three-hour barrier at the Osaka
international marathon. Two years later, she became the first woman in her 60s to run
a sub-three-hour race, finishing the Shimonoseki Kaikyo marathon in 2:59.15 – three
minutes and 35 seconds faster than the previous record set by French runner Claudine
Marchadier in 2007.

‘Middle-age should be a time to recommit’

Yugeta is not alone among Japanese athletes to be competing years after most of their
peers have retired.

Earlier this month, the evergreen Kazuyoshi Miura played for an hour in a Japan
Football League match at the age of 55, while this weekend, the 52-year-old keirin
cyclist Keiji Kojima, who rode in the 1992 Olympics, competed in a prestigious meet
against riders young enough to be his sons. The adventurer Kenichi Horie, 83, is
currently attempting to become the oldest person to sail solo nonstop across the
Pacific.

“Age shouldn’t be a barrier,” Yugeta says, citing British runner Joyce Smith’s victory in
the 1980 Tokyo international women’s marathon at the age of 43 as a pivotal moment.
“Middle-age should be a time to recommit to your sport, not to think about taking it
easy or giving it up,” says Yugeta, who clocks up an average of 25km (15 miles) a day in
all weathers, and makes occasional 2,400-metre ascents to the fifth station of Mount
Fuji.

“People in that age group are usually at their busiest with work and family, and that
can take a toll on your mental wellbeing and your body. But as soon as I break into a
sweat when I run, that’s the moment when I feel mentally refreshed.”

Her training and fitness regime involves nothing that would

surprise athletes decades her junior: a diet rich in protein, plenty of sleep, and an
irrepressible determination that has seen her through dips in form and bouts of
sciatica, tendinitis and jogger’s heel. Her reward for training is a recuperative soak in a
sento public bath.

With 114 marathons under her belt, Yugeta says she has no intention of slowing down.
Her statement of intent for Boston came last month, when she won in the 60+ category
at the Tokyo marathon, then shaved six minutes off that time to break three hours yet
again in Nagoya less than a week later.
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On Sunday she is due to meet her running hero, Joan Benoit Samuelson. Yugeta, while
pregnant with her first child, had watched on TV as Samuelson took gold in the
women’s marathon at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

On Monday morning, Yugeta will line up in Boston for her final competitive 26.2 miles
as a 63-year-old. While her sore knee could put her dream of breaking the 2:50 barrier
on hold, a new world record is not out of the question.

“I will definitely break three hours again,” she says, adding that retirement is not in her
plans. “I’ll keep running for as long as I can. There are official records for the over-70
age group, and I’d love to have a go at breaking those.”

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