Three weeks before the sternest physical challenge of my life, I was outside the Lululemon flagship store in Tokyo. A team running shirt, emblazoned with corporate logos and freighted with an expectation of sweat and speed, was waiting for me back at Financial Times HQ in London. I was shopping, on an eddy of team spirit, for shorts in traditional FT pink. Next door, from the sales hatch of the Oscar Wilde doughnut shop, the smell was extraordinary, as was the temptation.
Decades before Drive to Survive, Welcome to Wrexham and the whole addictive circus of sports-adjacent reality TV, Hakone Ekiden was spawning an off-track emotional feeding frenzy, gorging on the personalities of the student runners, their coaches and families. Japanese TV knows its audience and how to draw out their tears, sympathy and affinities. And where, inevitably, are the tastiest morsels of drama to be found? Slap bang in the individual’s fear of letting their team down.