by Brett Larner
After a long push starting at 25 km Moroccan Ahmed Baday ran a PB 2:10:14 to win the 60th anniversary Beppu-Oita Mainichi Marathon on Feb. 6. In a race targeted to be in the mid-2:08's Baday ran in a pack with longtime Japan resident Daniel Njenga (Kenya/Team Yakult) and a dozen Japanese competitors including pre-race domestic favorites Atsushi Fujita (Team Fujitsu), the 2007 Beppu-Oita winner and former national record holder, and Kazuhiro Maeda (Team Kyudenko), who had a promising marathon debut with a 2nd-place finish at the 2009 Tokyo Marathon only to miss most of last year following ankle surgery. Early pacemaking irregularities by course record holder Gert Thys (South Africa) and two other pacers resulted in an opening 5 km split of 14:55 followed by 15:32 versus the targeted pace of 15:15 / km. The fast opening left the top two seeds, 2003 Beppu-Oita winner Samson Ramadhani (Tanzania) and Abiyote Guta (Ethiopia) playing catchup, and neither ever factored into the race.
As the large lead pack ground down after halfway, Baday surged ahead with the lone pacer at 25 km following Thys' departure. Njenga was quick to follow, and although the lead pair's pace settled down and was not distinctly faster than the chase pack of Japanese runners Fujita, Maeda, Yuki Moriwaki (Team JFE Steel) and Masaki Shimoju (Team Konica Minolta), the Japanese athletes seemed to collectively give up on going for the win and settled into an internal battle to be the one to pick up a World Championships qualifying spot.
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