Yuki Kawauchi Is Distance Running’s Elite Oddball – The New York Times

KUKI, Japan — Even from two blocks away the stride was familiar — muscular, insistent, arms low and wide — and the runner could be only one person, Yuki Kawauchi, improbable winner of the 2018 Boston Marathon, hamburger connoisseur and fastest man in a panda costume.

Already that morning, he had put in 12½ easy miles, looping through a city park while elderly men and women clacked their mallets in a croquet-like sport called gateball. A short time later, Kawauchi was off running again down an asphalt path, wearing a dress shirt, slacks and brown leather shoes. Work started in a few minutes. His office was less than a mile from home. He could time it just right.

Each stride on his thick thighs is a defiance of athletic convention, a challenge of cultural norms and verification that the serious can accommodate the whimsical in world-class distance running.

Kawauchi will compete in the Chicago Marathon on Sunday, and he will be a cult favorite, regardless of the outcome, a tether between world-class performers and weekend warriors as they run 26.2 miles on the same course. Citizen Runner is Kawauchi’s nickname. Even the exertion that wrenches his face in each race suggests a commoner’s labor.

Most of the world’s top marathon runners are full-time athletes who race two marathons a year, one in the spring, another in the fall. Chicago will be Kawauchi’s ninth marathon of 2018. As August faded into September, he ran two in eight days. He has also run two ultramarathons.

Kawauchi, 31, works 40 hours a week in the administrative office of Kuki High School in his hometown, just north of Tokyo. As a government employee, he can keep his race winnings ($150,000 for Boston) and bonus money but is not permitted to accept corporate sponsorships, including a potentially lucrative shoe contract.

That will change next April, when Kawauchi plans to quit his job and devote himself completely to running. For now, he follows a singular, audacious plan.

He trains with homemade weightlifting equipment, a steel bar with old running shoes duct-taped to the ends. A bicycle inner tube suffices as resistance training for his legs. He prepares his own sports drink. It is no high-tech concoction, but a mixture of water, orange juice, lemon juice, salt and honey, devised by a local school dietitian.

While in Chicago, Kawauchi is sure to do two things besides run. He will eat three heaping plates of Japanese-style curry the night before the race. And at some point, he will eat a hamburger.

He worked at McDonald’s while obtaining a political science degree at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. (“I could make a cheeseburger in 28 seconds.”) Now, he photographs each burger eaten on his travels and makes a note in his journal. If he ever writes a book about marathon running, he may include a guide to gourmet burgers around the world, he said with a laugh through an interpreter.

“We all know a local runner, and he runs two marathons a month and he runs them in four hours, or four and a half hours, because he just loves the activity,” said Carey Pinkowski, the race director of the Chicago Marathon. “Yuki fits that profile, but he runs a lot faster. And he works full time and sometimes wears a panda suit.”

On March 25, three weeks before the Boston Marathon, Kawauchi ran a half marathon here in a panda costume. At the same race in 2016, he set an unofficial world record of 1 hour 6 minutes 42 seconds for a half marathon he ran in a business suit, combining elite performance and performance art.

“I want to entertain people a bit,” he said.

Such impishness exists alongside a deep commitment to uniqueness — to doing something others are not, and to being one of the world’s top marathon runners. Kawauchi cannot match the best with speed. His fastest time is nearly seven minutes slower than the world record of 2 hours 1 minute 39 seconds, set recently by Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya. What distinguishes Kawauchi is the stunning breadth and resilience of his talent.

He has run 26 marathons under 2:12 and an astonishing 81 marathons under 2:20, both records. In a six-week stretch early in 2013, he ran the two fastest races of his career — 2:08:14 and 2:08:15. When Kawauchi did not qualify for the 2012 London Olympics, he shaved his head in atonement.

How does he recover to run so fast, so often? There is no simple explanation. Kawauchi has a greater capacity to consume oxygen than most elite Japanese runners, scientists said. He also possesses a version of a gene linked to sports performance that is more often associated with sprinters than with endurance runners. Even in his chromosomes, he is unconventional.

Given a chance by almost no one, he won the Boston Marathon — the oldest and most prestigious of the world’s annual marathons — in frigid temperatures, relentless wind and horizontal rain.

Distance running is a consuming passion in Japan. Relay races, called ekidens, can extend more than 130 miles and draw vast audiences, along the course and on television. Japanese corporations fund many top runners. Coaches often have a reputation for being strict, sometimes to the point of bullying. In mid-September, a prominent university coach was fired over accusations that he kicked his runners’ legs, grabbed them and threatened to run over them as he trailed in a car during workouts.

Kawauchi’s mother, Mika, a middle-distance runner and his first coach, made him run extra laps when he did not meet daily time requirements in elementary school. In high school, he broke down with shin splints and sore knees from overtraining. Dispirited, left to carry bags and water for his teammates, he told Runner’s World magazine that he wrote in his diary, “What am I? Human scum?”

In college, Kawauchi found his passion for the marathon, but he also felt constricted by the orthodoxy of training. To relieve stress, he sometimes went to a karaoke club and sang alone in a room for hours.

He has adamantly avoided Japan’s corporate running system. He coaches himself, with guidance from his unofficial agent, Brett Larner, a Canadian journalist who has lived in Japan for two decades and operates the website Japan Running News.

“If you do everything on your own and have a big success, it’s your success, not the coach’s success,” Kawauchi said. “I’m my own responsibility.”

As the Boston Marathon approached on April 16, so did a storm that would make race day miserable. Kawauchi was elated. He excelled in cold and wet races. In late December, he had traveled to Boston to train on the marathon course. On New Year’s Day, he ran in a tiny marathon in Marshfield, Mass., a coastal town where the temperature was 1 degree Fahrenheit at the start. His eyebrows froze and his ears did not feel thawed for days, but he was the only one of the three entrants to finish, running in 2:18:59, his 76th marathon under 2:20.

Afterward, as usual, Kawauchi burnished his autographs with the word “breakthrough.” It would come soon enough in Boston.

At 5 feet 9 inches, his weight varying between 137 and 143 pounds, Kawauchi is strong on a downhill, when racing essentially becomes a controlled fall and the best marathoners brake the least as they descend.

While Boston is best known for Heartbreak Hill, that is not always the most challenging part of the course. The decisive moments often come later, on what might be called Heartbreak Downhill, much of the final five miles, where the thighs scream in agony.

Kawauchi also possesses an enormous capacity to utilize oxygen, according to a measurement of endurance known as VO2 max. His peak level — 82 milliliters of oxygen used in one minute per kilogram of body weight — is similar to that of the world’s top endurance runners, according to Masaaki Sugita, chairman of the science committee of the Japanese Athletics Federation.

Mikael Mattsson, a Swedish researcher who is leading a Stanford study of international endurance athletes, said it’s “almost impossible” to find Japanese endurance athletes with a VO2 max above 75.

On average, top Japanese runners compensate for lower VO2 max levels with high running economy or efficiency, meaning they need less oxygen to race at a given speed. Kawauchi’s running economy is unremarkable, Sugita said.

“Roughly,” Mattson said, “it’s comparing a Ferrari and a Prius. You can either have high power or you can have high efficiency.”

Upon arriving in Boston before the marathon, Kawauchi ran the final half of the course — twice. “I don’t know that I’ve ever met another athlete more prepared than Yuki,” said Mary Kate Shea, the elite athlete recruiter for the marathon.

Still, almost no one expected Kawauchi to win. In the field were Geoffrey Kirui of Kenya, the 2017 Boston champion, and Galen Rupp of the United States, the 2016 Olympic bronze medalist and the winner of the 2017 Chicago Marathon.

But just before the start, Larner, his agent, told him, “This is the day you were born for.”

The temperature was in the 40s, with wind gusting to 35 miles an hour and pelting rain. Still, Kawauchi dressed lightly in his lucky singlet, shorts, elastic arm warmers, a cap and sunglasses with clear lenses. To shake up what he figured would be a cautious start, he ran the first mile downhill in an aggressive 4 minutes 37 seconds.

And he kept making strategic attacks. Rupp, the Olympic bronze medalist, fell away and dropped out. Kirui surged into a big lead, then ran out of gas, his windbreaker seeming to provide the drag of a parachute.

As Kawauchi made his decisive move with little more than a mile remaining, Kirui was running among some of the top women, who had started a half-hour ahead of the men’s field. Kawauchi wasn’t sure that he had taken the lead. He still wasn’t sure until a race official pointed him toward the tape and another congratulated him after he crossed the finish line.

Seemingly startled, Kawauchi took off his cap and glasses and screamed, “I did it!”

He had won in 2:15:58, defeating Kirui by more than two minutes.

Back home in Kuki, Kawauchi’s mother, Mika, and one of his two brothers, Yoshiki, 27, also a runner, watched the end of the race on a computer and were stunned. “What? What is he doing?” she said.

At a post-race party at the Red Lantern restaurant in Boston, Desi Linden of the United States, the women’s winner, drank Champagne from a sneaker. Kawauchi danced and played Jenga. And, needing a quiet place, he went into the bathroom and phoned the principal of Kuki High School. The formal news conference for the winners would not be held until the next morning. It would require a change of his flight home.

“Sorry, but I won the Boston Marathon,” Kawauchi told his boss. “Is it possible to have another day off?”

Six days after Boston, Kawauchi ran a half marathon. In fact, in the two months after his surprise and defining victory, he ran six half marathons (13.1 miles apiece), one standard marathon (26.2) miles and two ultramarathons, one 44 miles, the other 31 — a race schedule no other elite marathoners would dare attempt. They are left in wonder at Kawauchi’s durability.

“I can’t imagine going to work the next day,” said Meb Keflezighi of the United States, who won the 2014 Boston Marathon, the 2009 New York City Marathon and a silver medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics. “I can’t walk normal for four or five days. I’m walking downstairs backward. I feel like I’m 80 years old. And he’s going to work and going for a run.”

Many factors affect performance, including training, nutrition, psychology and genetics. Kawauchi possesses a variant of the widely studied ACTN3 gene — the so-called speed gene. But his version, known as 577RR, is more closely associated with fast-twitch muscle fibers and the explosive power of 100-meter sprinters than with the endurance of marathon runners.

“It could be that he’s done well despite having the wrong genotype for endurance runners,” said Yannis Pitsiladis, a professor of sport and exercise science at the University of Brighton in England and a leading researcher on the effect of genes on sports performance.

Yet some recent studies have found provisional evidence that the ACTN3 gene may affect performance beyond speed. According to Noriyuki Fuku, a researcher at Juntendo University in Chiba, Japan, who has studied Kawauchi’s DNA, the potential benefits to Kawauchi’s version of the gene could limit muscle damage during training, enhance recovery, reduce the risk of injury and increase muscle stiffness in his legs, giving him a springiness that could enhance his running efficiency.

Asked if he had studied another athlete with such recovery powers, Fuku said: “In Japan, not really. It’s really surprising, something else.”

Genes are only one factor, though. Kawauchi has been building a base of running endurance since the age of 6. Because he works, he trains once a day, not twice, as most elite marathoners do. He averages about 375 miles a month, while runners in the Japanese corporate-sponsored system average more than 600 miles.

Top runners train to race. Kawauchi often races to train, using half marathons and lesser marathons to help him prepare for more important ones.

Kawauchi tries to sleep at least seven and a half hours a night. And he incorporates ultralong runs into his training to build stamina. He has been known to jog the distance of a marathon three times in a week and to run 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, along a river to his home in seven and a half hours.

Will Kawauchi will run faster when he quits his job and becomes a full-time runner next April? Will more training miles leave him hurt more often, and less resilient in recovery? It remains to be seen.

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics are approaching, but ever the contrarian, Kawauchi said he was not interested. He has struggled running in heat and humidity. It would be a waste, he said, to prepare for the brutal conditions expected in August in Tokyo.

“The Olympics aren’t the only destination an athlete should go for,” Kawauchi said.

He has broader ambitions: To run another personal best in the marathon. To win a medal at the 2021 world track and field championships in Eugene, Ore., where the weather figures to be more accommodating. To run as many marathons in as many countries as possible. Unbound by a civil servant’s job, he will be free to go off and see the world as he pleases.

As a boy, Kawauchi loved to thumb through atlases and read train schedules. But when he began to run, his world turned inward. He said he thought of little but trying to follow his coach’s plan perfectly. Now he makes his own plan, longs to try new things, see new places.

“He’s a clever runner,” said Sugita, the chief scientist of Japan’s track and field federation. “He thinks for himself.”