Performance
Living and training with Japanese runners shows corporate teams, ekiden, discipline, and a distinct running culture.
When towns and companies hire runners onto teams and pay them salaries like ordinary staff, running becomes a job rather than a sacrifice. That lets many people train full-time who elsewhere would have had to quit for paid work, and the author ties this arrangement to Japan being the one country still competing with East Africa in distance running.
A long-distance relay that the whole country watches, with the biggest races rivalling the most-watched sporting events anywhere, creates demand for a great many good runners rather than a few stars. The result is extraordinary depth: in one modest student race, the runner who finished 100th ran a time that would have ranked eighth in Britain for the whole year.
Corporate teams can afford to pay runners because the relay races they compete in draw huge television audiences, which makes a team worth sponsoring. Public attention, sponsors and athletes' careers depend on one another, and together they keep large numbers of runners in the sport.
Two nations can both produce top distance runners while running their training cultures on opposite terms: one open and welcoming to outsiders, the other closed and guarded. Training systems carry social values as well as methods, so the way a culture treats visitors shapes how easily its knowledge can spread.