Kayoko Fukushi sets Japanese national junior record at the 10,000m

Kayoko Fukushi sets Japanese national junior record at the 10,000m
K Ken Nakamura for the IAAF
1 October 2001 - The 49th annual Japanese corporate team track & field championships were held in Kanazawa on the final weekend of September.   The best performance of the weekend was by Kayoko Fukushi, who was fourth at the 5000m in the World Junior Championships in 2000.  In Kanazawa, Fukushi won both the 5000m and the 10,000m on consecutive days, the latter race with a new national junior record. 

It was the second serious 10,000m of her career.  Earlier, Fukushi was fourth with 32:34.74 in the district corporate team track and field championships in May.

 In Kanazawa, on Saturday, Fukushi stayed in the pack which was running around 3:10 to 3:15 for the each thousand metres.  Then at 7000m, Fukushi surged into the front, and ran the eighth Km in 3:04 reports Tatsuo Terada.  She broke away from the pack, which included Harumi Hiroyama who was fourth at the 10,000m in Sevilla.  Fukushi continued to push the pace and covered the final 3000m of the race in 9:09.8 and finished with the new national junior record of 31:42.05, thus breaking the record held by Masako Chiba.  The previous junior 10,000m record, 31:43.7, was set by Masako Chiba in 1995.  A year later Chiba was fifth in the Atlanta Olympic Games.  Another year later, Chiba won a bronze medal in Athens.  It is hoped that Fukushi will follow a similar path.  “I am stunned with my time.  I went at the 7000m because I felt good at the time.  I did not have any pre-race plan to surge at 7000m,” said Fukushi.  A day later she also won the 5000m with 15:15.56, thus completing a double. 

Kayoko Fukushi started running in high school after playing softball in junior high school.  In the high school track team, she was an only woman distance runner, so she mostly trained alone.  As a consequences she never really trained hard in high school.  However, she did make steady progress and by her senior year, after winning district championships, Fukushi competed in the national inter-high school track and field championships at both 800m and 3000m.  She finished distant twelfth in the 3000m. 

After graduating from high school, Fukushi joined Wacoal track team and her training load increased; good results followed.  In the spring of 2000, only a few months after she joined the team, Fukushi recorded personal bests for the 3000m (9:14.71) and 5000m (16:08.26).  After a month of altitude training in Boulder, Fukushi made further improvement.  She won the 3000m at the national junior championships and thus won the spot on the World Junior Championships team.  Because the Wacoal team had an important ekiden race in November, the decision to send her to the World Junior Championships was a hard one for Tadayuki Nagayama, her coach.  But at the end, he decided to send Fukushi to the World Junior Championships, because Nagayama thought that in the long run, the international experience would benefit her.  Just before leaving for Santiago, she twice improved her 5000m personal best, first to 15:35.80 and then to 15:29.70, later in the national championships when she finished third in her national championships debut. 

“I am not afraid of staying with better runners.  I think my strength is an ability to hang in with the faster runners,” Fukushi told Track & Field Magazine of Japan.  In Santiago, Chile, after leading the race several times, Fukushi who said, “I want a medal.  There is a huge difference between third and fourth,” surged hard at 4000m.  At the end Fukushi was outkicked by three Africans and finished fourth. 

Fukushi continued her steady improvement in 2001.  In January’s Inter-Prefectural Ekiden, Fukushi ran the stage one for her native Aomori.  She stayed with Yuko Kawakami when the later surged hard, and actually outkicked the national 10,000m record holder.  After finishing second in the national championships at 5000m in June, she recorded 15:10.23 for the 5000m in Heusden in July, thus becoming the third fastest Japanese of all-time.  Finally, on the final weekend of September, Fukushi completed the 5000m/10,000m double at the Japanese corporate team track and field championships.   

Several World Class athletes also competed in the championships.  Koji Murofushi won the Hammer throw with 80.61m, a meet record, thus completing his almost undefeated season; his only loss came at Edmonton.  Zakayo Ngatho of Kenya who runs for Konica track team won the men’s 5000m in 13:09.31, a meet record.  Nobuharu Asahara won the 100m in 10.20, while Kaori Sakagami whose goal was to run 11.3 won the women’s counterpart in 11.42.  After winning his final race of the season, Asahara looked back the season and said, “It was a good season for me.  I recorded a personal best (10.02 at the Bislett Games), and ran many GP races in Europe.”