Такахаси Наоко (english)

Такахаси НаокоAs promised yesterday, I willwrite short bio on Naoko Takahashi, perhaps the fastest women s marathon runnerat the present time. What I wrote is not very well organized, but I presume itis not totally incoherent. Naoko Takahashi was born on May 6, 1972 in Gifu prefecture, usedto run for Recruit, now runs for Sekisui Chemical, coached by

Yoshio Koide whoalso coached Yuko Arimori to Olympic Silver medal 1992 and Olympic Bronzemedal 1996 , and Hiromi Suzuki to the World Championships gold 1997 . Graduatedfrom Osaka Gakuin University. While at university most running 800m and 1500mbut never won the national college championships. She was not recruited byRecruit rather she wanted to be coached

by Koide and so she went to Koide andasked to be coached. You can see the parallel in her case and Yuko Arimori scase who also was not recruited by Recruit but rather, she asked to be coachedby Koide. She was only mediore runner in 1995 with best of 16 13.12 in the5000m, she improve dramatically in 1996 with best of 15 37.51 in the 5000m and31 48.23 in the 10000m.

She made her marathon debut in Osaka in 1997 reasonfor not so impressive debut in the marathon probably attributed to the factthat when she went to high altitude training at Albuquerque, she could not domuch long run due to very cold weather and injury so she could not prepareherself properly for her debut marathon . Was 13th at the 5000m in the WorldChampionships in Athens. Her second marathon was in

Nagoya marathon near herhome town Gifu is north of Nagoya last march. In this race she set the NR of2 25 48 after running 16 06 for 30Km to 35Km and 16 21 from 35Km to 40Km only1 46 11 at 30Km . For her third she went out hard from the start and won theAsian Games convincingly by running 5th fastest marathon 2 21 47 of all timeunder oppressive condition of temperature above 30C for later part of the race. In her interview in

Track amp FieldMagazine of Japan , she talks about various things. Among them she confess thather favorite pastime is eating. She would eat 40 pieces of Sushi at all you caneat sushi bar. She one time ate 2Kg steak, and own 50 books on subject ofrestaurant guides. She also love to go cycling around Sakura, Chiba where shenow lives.

In general she like to tour around places which she started to dowhile she was a college student in Osaka she would go and run in new placesaround Osaka . While growing up, big 3 games for her was the Olympic games, theWorld Championships and the Asian Games now that she won the Asian Games, onedown two to go , so she did not want to pass up the chance to run in the

AsianGames, although possibility of running at Tokyo Ladies marathon was there forwhile. She started running in Junior High school she started as an 800mrunner, was 2nd best in the Gifu prefecture when she was 8th grade. When shewas 9th grade she was running mostly 200m but was very slow. In high school,she returned to running 800m.

She recall that she was not running that muchwhen she was in high school, about 4Km a day. Even with such a light training,she was able to make a high school championships but did not qualify for thefinal. In college, she was mostly running 1500m, and 3000m. After graduatingfrom college, some Corporate team try to recruit her, but since her high schoolcoach recommend that if she want to be the best, she should be coached byYoshio

Koide. By the time of her graduation, she was ambitious enough, so sheasked coach Koide to coach her. He initially said NO. But she wasnot about to give up she asked be trained together with the Recruit team onher own expense and he would say OK He would later arranged for thereimbursement of expense and permited her to join the team. She is known among her friends as Q-chan. The originof her nick-name is little hard to explain to non-