“My life is getting shorter,” says Naomasa Kimura over a fried pork cutlet rice bowl drizzled in a sweet and savory sauce. “It’s too much. I promised my wife this is the last time I try…It’s a touchy subject.” The 41-year-old inventory manager at a tractor company in Osaka is sitting at a cramped restaurant table with five other men eating the same dish in the lush, wooded town of Komagane in the valley splitting Japan’s Southern and Central Alps.
It’s a cool, damp June evening, and cheery garden gnomes are perched on a windowsill holding tools and politely observing the conversation. Most of the men are rail-thin with muscular legs, and several are wearing T-shirts from 100-mile races. They’ve each run a sub-3:20 marathon in the past year (most sub-3:00), a feat that satisfies one of the many prerequisites to even be invited to tomorrow’s Athlete Selection Event, a two-day qualifier for the biennial Trans Japan Alps Race (TJAR) in August. The encyclopedic rabbit hole of entry requirements and necessary physical achievements is so demanding and convoluted that qualifying for one of the 30 spots in the actual race might be more impressive, and dangerous, than finishing it.
Roughly 70 applicants submitted documentation of their attempts to meet the requirements, which among many other things, included camping at least 10 nights above 6,562 feet (2,000 meters) and completing a race with an event time cutoff of 25 hours or more in less than 60 percent of that time. With 60 available spots, 59 runners gained entry to the two-day trial and were informed one month in advance.
Those who qualify for the TJAR then get to race 256 miles south from the Sea of Japan to the Pacific Ocean, crossing three prefectures and three mountain ranges with 88,600 feet of elevation gain and descent. That’s the equivalent of running up and down 12,388-foot Mt. Fuji from sea level seven times within eight consecutive days, entirely self-supported, and in August—the muggiest time of year at the peak of Japan’s typhoon season. Just to cross the finish line is considered a badge of honor, so no racers, even first-place winners, receive prize money or trophies. The reward is gaining entry into the exclusive clique of finishers.
“This training is taking a toll on me physically,” Kimura says as the others crammed in around him shake their heads and chuckle. One of them, Yusuke Hayashida from Tokyo, pulls up Kimura’s Strava profile on his phone and passes it around. Everyone’s eyeballs bulge and they all let out different tones of “Ooooo!” in exaggerated amazement. Since March, he’s done a 100K training run every weekend, sometimes squeezing in a 50K before work and a marathon on his lunch break. He’s racked up nearly 230,000 feet of elevation gain in the first half of 2022 alone, which he says is low because he’d been training on flat land so much for marathons.
Someone suggests that perhaps Kimura has a shot at dethroning Shogo Mochizuki, known to all as the King for finishing the race five times and winning four consecutively while setting the course record in 2016 with a time of 4 days, 23 hours, 52 minutes. (To better challenge himself in 2018, he voluntarily carried all of his own food without resupplying in towns along the way and still finished seventh.)
“Nooooo,” says Kimura, shocked and embarrassed that the question was even raised. “He is the King. He can’t be beat. He is legend for us.”
The Athlete Selection Event begins the next morning—a dark and rainy 2:30 a.m.—with the gear check. Officials in orange vests with clipboards inspect the contents of each runner’s pack, splayed out across a labeled tarp like a game of Twister. The 27-item mandatory gear list includes two headlamps with spare batteries, a compass, a mountain insurance card, a tent shelter (can’t be a bivy sack), a basic first aid kit, a gas stove and lighter with a minimum 300ml pot, rubber caps for trekking pole tips, an emergency locator beacon, and two wag bags (portable toilet kits). To reach this event, runners also presented evidence of their completion of an advanced lifesaving course, a doctor’s certificate of health including bloodwork, and a letter of consent from their spouse or a close relative, among other documents. Once they successfully complete the morning’s gear and paperwork check, their cell phones are taped and stapled inside a plastic case, and the runners are given non-waterproof paper maps of the area, which they’ll use to orienteer the 49-mile course by compass.
The mood is somber and hushed. Most of the runners have been preparing for years and to blow this opportunity would be crushing.
Roaming amongst the crowd is Paul Deckret, a 42-year-old American expat from Oklahoma who established permanent residency in Japan after arriving in 2003 to teach English. “Preparing to enter this race is all I dream and think about,” Deckret told me from across a short table, sitting on the floor of a steamy Japanese barbeque in March of 2021.
Until recently, he worked for the tourism board in the ski resort town of Hakuba while pursuing his mountain guide certifications and building a family with his wife, who is Japanese, and newborn son. Now with his certifications in hand, and Japan’s borders reopened to tourists, Deckret runs a guiding outfit, and also freelances for other tour operators. “I earn money to essentially train,” he says.
Since 2017, he’s been poring over dictionary-thick books filled with past race reports including gear lists, training regimens, and detailed diaries of lessons learned by runners on each section of the course. Deckret is sitting this year out with a herniated disc in his back after shoveling 5.5 feet of snow off the roof of his 140-year-old house in January. He is in attendance as a supporter and superfan. He’s visibly giddy to be in the presence of his heroes.
Deckret has climbed Japan’s 100 tallest peaks and won ultras, including the Bunsuirei 80K—an unofficial TJAR feeder event that helps him meet the standards for the selection event. Deckret is a strong athlete, but not the fastest runner, which is why the TJAR appeals to him. “I love to plan the shit out of things,” he says. That means timing optimal sleep breaks, pacing for each section, and calculating the calories he’ll carry. “I can do it better than plenty of world-class, sponsored athletes...but honestly, the pressure of the selection process scares me to death. It’s like the organizing committee is totally fucking with people.”
For Deckret and many other contestants, the greatest appeal lies in the prospect of getting inside this elite club of mountain running legends. Japanese culture, while polite and welcoming, is filled with tight-knit groups and high bars for acceptance. It can take years, especially for gaijin (non-Japanese), to assimilate into communities in Japan, where the culture emphasizes a respect for boundaries. Typically, if a Japanese friend is going to hang out with school friends or tennis buddies, you may not get invited if you’re not part of their established group even if they all like you. Once his herniated disc has healed, Deckret could be the first gaijin Definitely, he chuckles. There are some who dont have friends outside of this.
Deckret has befriended committee members and several finishers of the race, going for group runs and even joining them on an overnight New Year’s hike. But because he hasn’t completed the race, he’s only occasionally invited to their get-togethers.
It must be so cool to have those guys saying that about you, Deckret says, under the rain cover of a white tent, race director and four-time finisher Hiroshi Iijima reads rules into a microphone about where runners can fill up water and how to follow the provided map. “Run on any road you want to, but please obey all traffic laws,” he says. (In the 2018 race, one runner was cutting it very close to the 192-hour cutoff, but as he ran through the city of Shizouka toward the finish line, he had to wait for every traffic light to turn green or he would be disqualified. “It was very stressful,” he recalls. He made it with two minutes to spare.)
After the prerace meeting, runners study the map like high school students cramming outside an exam room. The first day’s 29-mile run leaves town to reach an uphill slog to a trailhead, rolls through dense, humid forest, then descends to a rocky campground. Amid the 11,500 feet of climbing and 7,770 feet of drop, the runners must find and record five checkpoints, including one with an emergency first aid simulation, en route to the campground where they’ll spend the night. At the campground, runners present their maps to the race committee showing the exact location of the five official checkpoints marked within 4mm on the map, or 100 meters in represented distance. Then, runners must go from standing upright with their full backpacks on to completely assembling their tent and zipping themselves inside in under four minutes, after which the shelter’s structural integrity is tested with a force-resistance device. Several renowned Japanese runners have aced all other requirements but failed this shelter test multiple times and never made it into the race.
The second day of the selection event follows with 20 miles of grueling mountain and road running (5,400 feet up and 9,100 down), immediately after which exhausted runners are given a written test—offered only in Japanese—about weather and emergencies.
The King is hunched over a table, a white Casio watch on his wrist and turquoise KT tape on both knees, tracing the route with his finger. Standing alone nearby is a small, teenage-looking man clad head-to-toe in The North Face gear. This is 40-year-old Takashi Doi, a sponsored runner who took second at the 103-mile Ultra-Trail Mt. Fuji in April and was on pace to shatter the King’s TJAR course record the previous year when the race was canceled on day two due to more than 12 hours of sustained 56mph winds (the pandemic had postponed 2020’s race to 2021). Both are firefighters who work in mountain rescue.
After a group photo at the starting line, the runners squint into the rising sun, and at 5:15 a.m. the gun sounds. They take off weaving through Komagane’s main streets, their minimalist backpacks bulging with tightly configured accoutrements. Along the road out of town, green fields of rice paddies glow in the warm morning light.
At 6:20 a.m. a handful of fervent fans gather on a bridge spanning the Tenryū River, the start of the long climb up to 5,528-foot Mt. Tokura. A 15mph wind is cutting across the valley and with it appears Takashi Doi, clutching his map in one hand, leading the front pack of eight. The fans clap and cheer and wave their hands with ferocious encouragement. Almost all the runners wave back at every spectator, sometimes with both hands, and often with a wide smile.
“I’m very tired,” says one runner in English, grinning big as he passes. Several throw what they call the “guts pose”—your classic bicep flex—for the cameras, before trudging up the incline.
As the paved road winds into the first mountain section, the challenge of an unmarked course becomes very real as runners try to follow their paper maps while determining their location based on landmarks and terrain features. Doi overshoots a shrouded trailhead with the King and Yuichi Konno—the 2008, 2010, and 2016 runner-up—in tow. They run uphill for almost a quarter mile before doubling back, finding a faint path into the woods, and deploying their trekking poles for the ascent.
The next runners get an assist from a 68-year-old superfan with gold teeth named Tsuda following the event on his silver scooter. Tsuda’s perma-grin sparkles as he stands at the turn, pointing it out to a few runners sweating in the 80-degree sun, until Deckret scolds him for breaking the no-support rule.
On the other side of Mt. Tokura, at a small table on the valley floor, 43-year-old Kosuke Kaito is manning the first checkpoint that runners must mark on their maps. A furniture maker in the historic mountain city of Takayama, Kosuke won the race in 2018 when the King ran self-supported, and is sitting this year out as an orange-vested volunteer. “You do it once and you turn into a junkie,” he says. “Like a drug, you build tolerance and need more of that thrill that you get at the end of the competition. The harder it is, the more high you get.”
At 8:55 a.m. Tsuda scoots up and onto the sidewalk, dismounting just in time to honor each runner by clapping and shouting, “Hooray!” The King, having moved into first place, bows in appreciation and crosses another bridge to start the next climb up 9,949-foot Mt. Senjo under a shaded canopy of larch trees.
he cries, horror washing over his pale face. It snapped toward the 6,496-foot Choegoya Hut, the event’s campground, just before 3 p.m. Runners are expected soon, and the 10 committee members are discussing how many pulls on the force measurement device to give each shelter in the tent test. The consensus is one firm tug in all four directions at 6.6 pounds (3 kg) of resistance.
Thunder cracks overhead right as the King strolls into camp, well ahead of the other runners. Several groupies follow, their phones and DSLRs trained on his every step. “I fell in love with him in the 2014 race,” says 76-year-old Kozo Okushima, wearing a hat autographed by Mochizuki in that same year. “He gives his all and is a genuine, good person. Not pretentious and always humble.”
“Is it time for Mochizuki to pass the torch?” I ask. “Never,” he says, shaking his head with conviction. “Everyone looks up to him. It’s important for him to be here. Many are here because of him.”
The King checks in, struts over to the flat gravel area, listens as a committee member reads the tent-assembly instructions before starting the stopwatch, and begins assembling his 170-gram, 7D nylon tent supported by two trekking poles held under tension from the guy lines. His movements are quick, decisive, and flawless, pulling the tent fabric tight, staking out the corners, and pinning them down with the biggest rocks in sight. Without rushing, he checks the tent’s stability and crawls in with his backpack, zipping it closed in 3:07. He gets out, laughs, and massages a cramp in his side while the committee pulls on his tent with the force resistance tool. “So many people are watching,” he says. “It’s been a while since I felt this much pressure.”
His shelter holds up and he bows, thanking the committee, just as the rain starts to fall, as if the sky respectfully waited for the King to finish. “I’m not going for first place anymore,” he tells a cameraman from Japanese public broadcaster NHK. “I’ll let the young people lead the pack now that I’m 44 and everything hurts. But when I think about whether it’s time to stop because it feels different, I then think I need to keep challenging myself, even after more than 10 years of this.”
Thirty-four minutes after the King’s arrival, as a committee member tells NHK that he’s glad the weather is bad to keep it challenging for the runners, Takashi Doi arrives. The North Face runner marks his checkpoints, and prepares for the shelter test in a heavy drizzle. Just before Doi starts, someone from the crowd points out that the sternum strap on his backpack is not fully buckled—another requirement—which he quickly fixes. Doi initially fumbles with his stakes and struggles to find soft ground to hammer them into with a rock, but he still manages to zip himself inside in 2:57 as the King watches.
Another half hour later, Konno limps into camp. His face is pained with defeat even though he’s still in the top three. He’s steady in the assembly of his tent, anchoring the corners with cord tied around the biggest rocks and no stakes. His time is a comfortable 3:30, but when the force gauge comes out, something is not right. One of Konno’s trekking poles is set 10cm shorter than the other, throwing off the stability of the shelter, and when the committee member pulls against the shorter pole, it slides down as the sidewall of the tent collapses. Konno hangs his head. “I will try again in two years,” he says.
Eventually, more runners begin to trickle in, Kimura among them. Some smile but several are discouraged by their performance in the emergency first aid test. Required to tape their own ankle, many had trouble getting the wet tape to stick in the rain and ruminated on this potential failure for hours. Worse, it will be several more days before the committee confirms whether runners passed or failed the event.
The drizzle has turned to rain, the ground is getting soft, and a handful of runners have failed the tent test. Kimura starts pitching his shelter quickly, having practiced 30 or 40 times. When he pulls on a guy line to tension the long end, the thin webbing attaching it to the tent fabric suddenly rips and the tent falls flat.
“Kiretaaa!” he cries, horror washing over his pale face. “It snapped!”
In a panic, he rushes to tie the torn webbing back with a minuscule knot and rethread the cord through the loop before gently pulling it tight again. This seems to hold and he still has enough time to give it a few test pulls before crawling inside in 3:37. He looks like he’s going to cry when he gets out and watches the committee member pull against his makeshift repair, but the knot and line hold and his shelter stays upright. The crowd around him breathes a sigh of relief. “The incident made me the most flustered in my life,” he later says. “I thought it was all over.”
The rain and wind pick up as the day’s 13-hour cutoff time looms. A few runners arrive minutes late, hanging their heads and shouting apologies to their families out into the gray skies.
Packed into a space the size of two tennis courts, the more than 60 brightly colored tents look like soggy plastic bags with the runners wriggling in attempts to get comfortable for the night.
“Rain fills up in the bottom here and drops fall on your face all night,” Yusuke Hayashida says with a laugh while cooking noodles from his wet tent. “It’s not warm or relaxing and you don’t really sleep. You just black out and lose consciousness.”
Health & Injuries.
At the next morning’s 2 a.m. start, wind thrashes the treetops above the swarm of headlamps. Race director Hiroshi Iijima lines everyone up in the order they finished the day before, Mochizuki at the front, followed by Takashi Doi, who slept in his rain gear. “You had some rain and wind last night,” he says. “Doing that for five to eight days in the race wears on you. Try to train like that as much as you can.” He cautions the runners on the day’s required river and potential snow crossings, and warns them not to take dangerous shortcuts. No aid stations, pacers, or support of any kind are allowed. The runners all adjust their headlamps and proceed into the darkness with a 2.9-mile climb up 3,450 feet, then back down to a road for a 12-mile descent on pavement.
“You can’t make it through the race just by being fast,” Iijima says, once the racers have departed. “This race is completely self-supported, so if you injure yourself, you have to have the gear on you to deal with that problem. Some try to shave weight by carrying less food, clothes, or first aid kit, and they have to know what risk they’re taking in this environment.”
I ask why the entry process is so strict and the requirements so extensive. “The first thing is I don’t want them to die,” he says with a stoic face and steady, measured voice. “In the past, people have died training for this race from hypothermia and falling from cliffs while putting themselves in these harsh conditions. An athlete almost died in the race one year and someone from the mountain rescue team scolded me, so now I believe it’s important that everyone is prepared.” He even holds a training camp for runners aspiring to enter the selection event.
And while the challenge is obviously attractive to some, I ask why someone who has finished or even won the race would keep coming back. Is the obsession to be part of this exclusive club?
“Definitely,” he chuckles. “There are some who don’t have friends outside of this.”
On the committee members’ bus ride down from the campsite, we pass several of the runners spread out along the course. A younger newcomer is surprising people, well ahead of the King. “Tsuyoi,” says one of the members, meaning “strong.”
“It must be so cool to have those guys saying that about you,” Deckret says.
We arrive at the finish line at 8 a.m. Takashi Doi is already there, sitting cross-legged on the hot asphalt, taking his three-page written test. The wind is blowing a pop-up tent, along with his shade, across the parking lot, but he’s scratching his head and concentrating: calculating wind chill temperatures based on the wind speed, determining a difficult yes or no question on CPR, and answering what percentage of the human body is blood.
In post-event interviews, Doi, like his fellow competitors, dodges questions about rivalry, competition, glory, records, goals, winning, or anything that’s not self-effacing. As a regular 100-mile racer, he didn’t find the two-day event physically that hard, “however, there is the pressure that comes from knowing that you cannot make a mistake in tests like the tent setup and map reading,” he says.
Even if a runner passes all the requirements—as Doi, Kimura, and the King do on day two—when more than 30 applicants succeed, they’re all put in a convoluted lottery that favors those who previously lost the drawing. Kimura also qualified for the last race with shining colors, but lost out on the drawing and had to wait two more years. “I couldn’t believe it, but I moved forward motivated to get better,” he says.
What You Need to Know About the Barkley Marathons, in early August, Takashi Doi dethrones the King, setting a new course record by six hours, despite heavy rains, in 4 days, 17 hours, and 33 minutes. “I found that I am not immune to the effects of sleep deprivation, and the greatest challenge was getting the highest-quality sleep in the shortest amount of time,” he says. But his biggest struggle was nutrition management. “My calorie-dense, sports-specific foods spiked my blood sugar levels. That ‘insulin shock’ contributed to sluggishness. That was my one mistake.” This fatigue hit Doi hardest on the climb to the summit of Mt. Senjo, where the terrain and gradient are relatively constant, with little change in scenery.
More than 24 hours behind Doi, the King takes fourth place in a still impressive 5 days, 18 hours, and 37 minutes. “I thought about quitting three or so times,” he says. “In the past, I had goals to win and break the course record. This time I told myself excuses like, ‘I’m older now so I don’t have the same stamina,’ or ‘my body just doesn’t move like it used to.’ But that’s missing the point. Trans Japan in and of itself is a sufficient challenge, and I’m happy to have crossed the finish line.”
This year, the King says he made it a point to look up at the mountains and stars, appreciate sunrises and sunsets, talk with friends and hikers along the way, and allow himself to really enjoy the race. “Each [interaction] has the power to reset a mind and body on the verge of breaking,” he says. At the beachfront finish line, under a stormy gray sky with waves pounding into the dark sand, he reflects to the crowd, nearly all of whom are filming, “I thought that I would be able to close this chapter in peace now, and wasn’t considering running Trans Japan again, but crossing the goal line now, I almost feel like I might want to try again. If I do, please be there to cheer me on.”
Ten of the 30 racers either dropped out or did not finish within the eight-day limit, but Naomasa Kimura wasn’t among them. “It was the best experience in my life,” he says a month later while seated at his office desk, speaking quietly into his headset over Zoom. “But it was really tough.” After breaking a trekking pole early in the Northern Alps on Hayatsuki Ridge, a trail with one of the largest elevation differences in Japan, he still dropped the main pack and found himself running alone by the time he reached the Southern Alps.
His body felt fine, but somewhere on Senshio Ridge between Mt. Yokokawa and Mt. Mibu during day four, he began to experience a psychological breakdown. “Mentally, I couldn’t handle this special type of fatigue,” he says. “In order to overcome it, I cheated my brain, believing that my brain was feeling the muscle pain, not me.” Once he began to see more people and spectators, their cheers and encouragement were a boon to his spirits. On the final approach from Hatanagi Dam to Ohama Beach, Kimura was “able to run out all of my remaining power, thinking that I would never be able to run again after the finish.”
Kimura shocked the field with a second place finish in 5 days, 14 hours, and 7 minutes, four and a half hours ahead of the King.
Before the selection event, Kimura swore this was his last attempt at the Trans Japan Alps Race. “The TJAR was my everything the past three years, now my motivation is really low,” he says. “I don’t know what to do with myself all the time.”
One thing that’s helped: his newfound brotherhood. Since finishing, he has camped, barbecued, and gone out drinking with his fellow TJAR racers. “It is like friends in arms,” he says. And now that he’s inside the club, he may never be able to leave.
Scott Yorko is a freelance journalist and renaissance man at-large based in Colorado. He's typically off on some far-flung adventure in search of stories and thrills.
