He has no coach, no sponsor and works five days a week as a school clerk, but that won’t stop Japanese marathon runner Yuki Kawauchi from racing with the best at the world athletics championships.
Dubbed the “strongest citizen runner in history,” Kawauchi squeezes races into his weekends, traveling at home and overseas before returning to work every Monday.
In doing so the 26-year-old has become a cult hero in marathon-mad Japan. “I want to show that you can compete at the world level even if you have a job like I do,” he told a recent gathering of reporters.
Kawauchi’s unusual success story has helped fuel the nation’s ever-intensifying enthusiasm for running, which saw a spike in 2011 after the earthquake and tsunami disaster prompted many to improve their fitness in preparation for emergencies.
“I will run straight and steady, aiming for a spot in the top six,” Kawauchi said of competing in the world men’s marathon in Moscow on Saturday.
His target may sound modest. But Japanese men have been without a world-class marathon medal since Tsuyoshi Ogata brought home bronze from the 2005 world athletics championships. Japanese women have done much better, winning the 2000 and 2004 Olympic golds through Naoko Takahashi and Mizuki Noguchi while bagging five non-gold world medals since 2001.
Despite having little time to spare between his full-time administrative job at a school in Saitama, north of Tokyo, Kawauchi has run in 22 long-distance events so far this year, which is a lot compared to most elite runners.
These include six full marathons, 10 half-marathons and a 50-kilometer “ultramarathon” in June, in which he collapsed with heat stroke.
Having finished 18th in his world championship debut in 2011, he failed to qualify for last year’s London Olympics. But in March he set a personal best of 2:08:14 at the Seoul Marathon where he finished fourth.
Kawauchi, who reportedly spends a quarter of his salary on racing, has won 10 marathons since his first in 2009, completing the last nine of those victories in a year.
“He is a model for us, even if not everybody can handle so many races as he does,” said former national team runner Yuko Manabe, 34, as she coached two dozen office workers and housewives running around Tokyo’s popular Imperial Palace route on a Friday evening.
A five-kilometer ring road outside the palace’s stone walls and mossy moats in the center of Tokyo, it has become a pilgrimage for runners who swarm there by the thousands even in the sweltering summer.
“Citizen runners have finally seen in Kawauchi, who leads the life of a salaryman, the first person to represent them at the world championships,” said Jiro Hashimoto, who has published the popular monthly magazine “Runners” since 1976.
“He is enormously popular at every race he runs,” he told AFP
Five men and three women, including 2004 women’s Olympic champion Noguchi, make up Japan’s marathon squad for Moscow. All but Kawauchi belong to corporate teams — semi-professional athletes hired by companies as ordinary workers but allowed to focus on training and competing to promote brand awareness.
Kawauchi was selected thanks to his victory at the Beppu, Oita Marathon in February, in which he outpaced Kentaro Nakamoto who was sixth in the London Olympics and who will also run in Moscow.
“It will be great if I can show athletes, who cannot join corporate teams, that they have an option to get strong as citizen runners,” said Kawauchi.
“In domestic races, I strongly feel that I must not be beaten by corporate teams,” he said, adding however that rivalries are put aside when representing Japan.
“We help each other in the national team.”
Last month he sent a strong signal of intent by winning Australia’s Gold Coast Marathon, tying the course record in the process.
Awarded the top prize of 15,000 Australian dollars ($13,350), he missed out on a bonus of A$5,000 that would have been his had he broken the record instead of equalling it.
“It is more than what I earn every month,” Kawauchi said.
“I’ve realized how important one second is.”
From school runner to world champion, Japan’s marathon man has done it all
From school runner to world champion, Japan’s marathon man has done it all
Why this US cold snap feels bone-shattering when it’s not record-shattering
The brutally frigid weather that has gripped most of America for the past 11 days is not unprecedented. It just feels that way.
The first quarter of the 21st century was unusually warm by historical standards – mostly due to human-induced climate change – and so a prolonged cold spell this winter is unfamiliar to many people, especially younger Americans.
Because bone-shattering cold occurs less frequently, Americans are experiencing it more intensely now than they did in the past, several experts in weather and behavior said. But the longer the current icy blast lasts – sub-freezing temperatures are forecast to stick around in many places — the easier it should become to tolerate.
“We adapt, we get used to things. This is why your first bite of dessert is much more satisfying than your 20th bite,” Hannah Perfecto, who studies consumer behavior at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in an email. “The same is true for unpleasant experiences: Day 1 of a cold snap is much more a shock to the system than Day 20 is.”
‘Out of practice’ because of recent mild winters
Charlie Steele, a 78-year-old retired federal worker in Saugerties, New York, considers himself a lover of cold weather. In the recent past, he has gone outside in winter wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and has even walked barefoot in the snow. But this January’s deep-freeze is “much, much colder than anything I can remember,” he said.
Steele’s sense of change is backed up data.
There have been four fewer days of subfreezing temperatures in the US per year, on average, between 2001 and 2025 than there were in the previous 25 years, according to data from Climate Central. The data from more than 240 weather stations also found that spells of subfreezing temperatures have become less widespread geographically and haven’t lasted as long — until this year.
In Albany, about 40 miles from Steele, the change has been more pronounced than the national average, with 11 fewer subfreezing days in the last 25 years than the previous quarter century.
“You’re out of practice,” Steele said. “You’re kind of lulled into complacency.”
Coldest week someone under 30 may have felt
Climate change has shifted what people are used to, said several climate scientists, including Daniel Swain of the University of California’s Water Resources Institute.
“It’s quite possible that for anybody under the age of 30, in some spots this may well be the coldest week of their life,” Swain said.
Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, said, “humans get used to all kinds of things — city noise, stifling heat, lies from politicians, and winter cold. So when a ‘normal’ cold spell does come along, we feel it more acutely.”
We forget how cold it used to be
People forget how extreme cold feels after just two to eight years of milder winters, according to a 2019 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Americans have gone through a much longer stretch than that.
Over the past 30 years, the average daily low in the continental US has dropped below 10 degrees 40 times, according to meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But in the preceding 30 years, that chilly threshold was reached 124 times.
“People have forgotten just how cold it was in the 20th century,” Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said.
Their wake-up call came late last month, when the country’s average daily low dipped below 10 degrees three times in one week.
Regardless of how it feels, extremely cold weather presents dangers. People and vehicles slip on ice, power can go down, leaving people freezing in homes, and storms limit visibility, making commuting to work or even doing basic errands, potentially perilous. More than 110 deaths have been connected to the winter storms and freezing temperatures since January.
Shaking off our cold ‘rustiness’
As this winter’s frigid days stretch on, people adapt. University of San Diego psychiatrist Thomas Rutledge said people shake off what he calls their “weather rustiness.”
Rutledge explained what he meant via email, recalling the period decades ago when he lived in Alaska. “I assumed that everyone was a good driver in winter conditions. How couldn’t they be with so much practice?” he wrote. “But what I annually observed was that there was always a large spike in car accidents in Alaska after first big snowfall hit. Rather than persistent skills, it seemed that the 4-6 months of spring and summer was enough for peoples’ winter driving skills to rust enough to cause accidents.”
That’s Alaska. This cold snap hit southern cities such as Dallas and Miami, where it’s not just the people unaccustomed to the cold. Utilities and other basic infrastructure are also ill-equipped to handle the extreme weather, said Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
While this ongoing cold snap may feel unusually long to many Americans, it isn’t, according to data from 400 weather stations across the continental US with at least a century of record-keeping, as tracked by the Southeast Regional Climate Center.
Only 33 of these weather stations have recorded enough subzero temperatures since the start of 2026 to be in the top 10 percent of the coldest first 32 days of any year over the past century.
When Steele moved to the Hudson Valley as a toddler in 1949, the average daily low temperature over the previous 10 winters was 14.6 degrees . In the past 10 years, the average daily low was 20.8 degrees .
As a younger man, Steele used to hunt in winter and sit for hours on cold rocks.
“I could never do that now,” he said. “I’m rusty. I’m out of practice.”
