to run so close to my apartment.
One lap around Jingu Gaien is a little more than three-quarters of a mile, and I like the fact that they
have distance markers in the ground. Whenever I want to run a set speed—a nine-minute-mile pace, or
eight-minute, or seven-and-a-half—I run this course. When I first started to run the Jingu Gaien
course, Toshihiko Seko was still an active runner and he used this course too. He was training hard in
preparation for the Los Angeles Olympics. A shiny gold medal was the only thing on his mind. He’d
lost the chance to go to the Moscow Olympics because of the boycott, so Los Angeles was perhaps his
last chance to win a medal. There was a kind of heroic air about him, something you could see clearly in
his eyes. Nakamura, the manager of the S&B team, was still alive and well back then, and the team had
a string of top-notch runners and was at the height of its power. The S&B team used this course every
day for training, and over time we naturally grew to know each other by sight. Once I even traveled to
Okinawa to write an article on them while they were training there.
Each of these runners would jog individually early in the morning before going to work, and then in
the afternoon the team would work out together. Back then I used to jog there before seven a.m.—
when the traffic wasn’t bad, there weren’t as many pedestrians, and the air was relatively clean—and
the S&B team members and I would often pass each other and nod a greeting. On rainy days we’d
exchange a smile, a guess-we’re-both-having-it-tough kind of smile. I remember two young runners in
particular, Taniguchi and Kanei. They were both in their late twenties, both former members of the
Waseda University track team, where they’d been standouts in the Hakone relay race. After Seko was
named manager of the S&B team, they were expected to be the two young stars of the team. They
were the caliber of runner expected to win medals at the Olympics someday, and hard training didn’t
faze them. Sadly, though, they were killed in a car accident when the team was training together in
Hokkaido in the summer. I’d seen with my own eyes the tough regimen they’d put themselves
through, and it was a real shock when I heard the news of their deaths. It hurt me to hear this, and I felt
it was a terrible waste.
We’d hardly ever spoken, and I didn’t know them personally that well. I only learned after their
deaths that they had both just gotten married. Still, as a fellow long-distance runner who’d
encountered them day after day, I felt like we somehow understood each other. Even if the skill level
varies, there are things that only runners understand and share. I truly believe that.
Even now, when I run along Jingu Gaien or Asakasa Gosho, sometimes I remember these other
runners. I’ll round a corner and feel like I should see them coming toward me, silently running, their
breath white in the morning air. And I always think this: They put up with such strenuous training, and
where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their
thoughts just vanish?
Around my home in Kanagawa I can do a completely different type of training. As I mentioned before,
near my house is a running course with lots of steep slopes. There’s also another course nearby that
takes about three hours to complete—perfect for a long run. Most of it is a flat road that parallels a
river and the sea, and there aren’t many cars and hardly any traffic lights to slow me up. The air is