Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: When did Ekiden start?
In the meantime, the first ekiden, Tokaido ekidentohokyoso(東海道駅伝徒歩競走) was held in 1917 between Sanjō Ōhashi, Kyoto and Ueno Shinobazunoike(上野不忍池) Tokyo, celebrating 50 years after Tokyo became the capital. This race was a big relay race between Kyoto and Tokyo (516km) held by Yomiuri Shimbun for three days. It succeeded and became the original form of Hakone Ekiden. Kanaguri was influenced by the success of the race and persuaded many universities that they should race in the Hakone Ekiden. As a result, Waseda Univ., Keio Univ., Meiji Univ. and Tokyo Kōshi replied to his offer and Hakone Ekiden started. Hakone Ekiden was started with great energy of the pioneers in Japanese sports society. It started during World War I, so industrial areas gradually expanded to the west and the Tokaido road was widened. Reflecting this active atmosphere, the Japanese sports society, including ekiden one, were developing great challenging spirits at that time.
Ekidens are usually road races, and as such require intensive route management and police traffic control. Cross country races can include grass, mud, sand, and steep slopes. Each ekiden competitor runs a different distance, whereas all cross country runners run the same course and start at the same time . Some Japanese high school ekiden stages are longer and some stages are shorter than the "standard" 5000 meters for USA high school cross country (see below). Ekiden competition does not highlight the single individual winner of the race as in cross country, but ekiden analysis does highlight individual fastest runners in each stage; these runners may be in the middle of the field. Each ekiden runner has to run without reference to his or her own teammates for help in judging pace,[7] whereas cross country team races can include strategies like "pack" running. This same contrast can be made between track and ekiden; only the runners in the first ekiden stage run as a group; later stage runners must judge for themselves the appropriate pace and the decisions to challenge and pass other runners, whose abilities might be significantly different and whose position was determined by the efforts of preceding teammates.
In addition to the abovementioned Hakone Ekiden at the beginning of the new year, there are many other collegiate ekiden races.
Honolulu Ekiden & Music Festival: The first annual Honolulu Ekiden & Music Festival was held on May 12, 2013. Certified by the USATF the course consists of six different sections; the course totals 42.195km/26 miles . Starting at the base of Diamond Head at Kapiolani Park, the course progresses eastward along the coast and winds past Hanauma Bay with a turnaround point at Sandy Beach Park. A maximum number of six (6) runners may participate on a team. For teams with less than six members, a runner or runners may run more than one section consecutively. Individual runners are also welcome to participate.[48]
The Tama-ko Ekiden near Lake Tama on the Lake Tama Bicycle Trail is an example of a citizen's ekiden, hosted by the city of Higashi Yamato in western Tokyo, south of the lake.
The All-Japan Interprefectural Ekiden Championships are two annual ekiden (road running relay) competitions between the 47 Prefectures of Japan. The championships are both held in January and are divided by gender. The Empress Cup - Interprefectural Women's Ekiden is held in Kyoto on the third Sunday in January. The Interprefectural Men's Ekiden is held in Hiroshima in recent years on the fourth Sunday of January.
The All-Japan Corporate Ekiden Championships is a series of races contested between Japan's corporate (business) running teams. The structure involves regional qualifying races and a national championship for women and for men. The All-Japan Men's Corporate Ekiden Championship, also called the New Year Ekiden takes place in Japan's Gunma Prefecture on 1 January.
Hakone Ekiden(箱根駅伝), which is officially called Tokyo-Hakone Round-Trip College Ekiden Race(東京箱根間往復大学駅伝競走,Tōkyō Hakone kan Ōfuku Daigaku Ekiden Kyōsō),[1] is one of the most prominent university ekiden (relay marathon) races of the year held between Tokyo and Hakone in Japan on January 2 and 3. The race is telecast on Nippon Television.
Brussels Ekiden: (for sponsorship reasons named Acerta Brussels Ekiden and later Adecco Brussels Ekiden) has been taking place in the Belgian capital since 2004. Over 1,400 teams and 8,000 runners participated in 2017 [50]
Hakone Ekiden was started in 1920.[6] Shizo Kanaguri, who is known as the father of the Japanese marathon, conceived the idea. His enthusiastic idea of bringing up a runner who could compete in the world became the driving force of establishing Hakone Ekiden. When Kanaguri was a Tokyo Koto Shihan school (Koshi) student, he participated in Olympic Games in Stockholm in 1912 as one of the representative Japanese marathon runners. He had to give up his race on the way, however.[7]
Teams gain qualification into the final ekiden race through a series of preliminaries which are principally conducted on a regional basis. Some qualifying competitions are for both men and women while others are single-sex qualifiers. The Eastern Japan Corporate Ekiden Championship qualifies men's and women's teams. The Kyushu men's qualifying race (Fukuoka City to Kita Kyushu city) is held in November. and others include the Kansai Jitsugyodan Ekiden in Tabe, the Chubu and Hokuriku Jitsugyodan Ekidens in Gero, and the Chugoku Jitsugyodan Ekiden in Sera, Hiroshima.
The lengths of ekiden in Japan can vary greatly, as can the number of runners on a team. For example, in the national junior high ekiden championship, 5 girls cover 12 kilometers and 6 boys cover 18 kilometers. The national high school championship involves 5 girls in a 21 kilometer race and 7 boys in a 42.195 kilometer race, the length of the modern Olympic marathon. In the national inter-prefecture championships, 9 women run 42.195 kilometers and 7 men run 48 kilometers. For the collegiate Hakone Ekiden, a 2-day event, 10 male athletes for each team run 219 kilometers. Each runner covers just over a half marathon. The mid-December National Corporate Women's Ekiden Championships, 6 runners cover 42.195 kilometers. In the January 1 National Corporate Men's Ekiden Championships, 7 runners cover 100.0 kilometers. For the mid-January national open championships (teams composed of selected junior high, high school and open athletes), the distances are 42.195 for the women and 48.0 for the men. Notably in distance, in the Round-Kyūshū Ekiden, a 10 days event, 72 segments cover 1064 kilometers around Kyushu Island and it is the longest relay race in the world.[4]
The collegiate ekiden championships in Japan are held for women and for men. The women's championship is in late October and the men's championship is in early November. These dates are relatively early in the ekiden season, with several other major races in subsequent months. 
The annual All-Japan Collegiate Women's Ekiden Championship, begun in 1981 and also called Morinomiyako Ekiden, is held in Sendai Miyage Prefecture at the end of October. It is a 6-stage, 38.6 kilometer race from Miyagi Track and Field Grounds to Sendai City Hall. Video showing Sendai course and terrain. The race is broadcast nationwide from Sendai on Nihon Television broadcast home page (in Japanese).
The All-Japan Interprefectural Ekiden Championships are held in January. The Empress Cup – Interprefectural Women's Ekiden is held in Kyoto, on the third Sunday in January. The Interprefectural Men's Ekiden is held in Hiroshima, in recent years on the fourth Sunday of January.
The All-Japan Men's Corporate Ekiden Championship, also called the New Year Ekiden, takes place in Japan's Gunma Prefecture on 1 January.
The New Year Ekiden, (officially the ), is an annual men's ekiden (road running relay) over 100 kilometres which takes place in Japan's Gunma Prefecture on 1 January. The race is a national championship contested between Japan's corporate (business) running teams. There is also an annual championship race for women in Japan – the Women's Corporate Ekiden Championships. The race starts and ends in the city of Maebashi and the course passes through the major cities within the prefecture, including Takasaki, Isesaki, Ota and Kiryu. The relay is divided into seven legs of varying lengths that alternate on a frequent basis. The 2012 race was divided as follows: 12.3 km, 8.3 km, 13.6 km, 22 km, 15.8 km, 12.5 km and 15.5 km. 
Weightman started out as a track runner but had her first success in cross country running, winning the under-23 section of the national championships in 2003. She took part in the Chiba Ekiden road relay competition the following year and finished ninth. In 2006, she became a double national champion when she topped the podium in the 10,000 metres and half marathon events, and she returned to the Chiba Ekiden to improve to fourth place in her stage.
The men have a slightly different pattern (men's divisions detailed in Japanese). One of the men's qualifying races is the Kyushu men's qualifying race (7 stages, 78.8 km, 48th on November 23, 2011), which begins in Fukuoka City and ends in Kita Kyushu city; 2010 video. Other regionals include Kansai Jitsugyodan Ekiden (2010 - 53rd, held in Tabe), Chubu Jitsugyodan Ekiden (2010 - 50th, held in Gero, Gifu), Hokuriku Jitsugyodan Ekiden (2010 - 40th, held in Gero, Gifu), and Chugoku Jitsugyodan Ekiden (2010 - 49th, held in Sera, Hiroshima).
Ekiden and Kitsune are two variants of a single DSU system that implements the state-transfer style of DSU for programs written in C. Rather than updating functions within a single program, Ekiden and Kitsune perform updates over whole programs, transferring necessary state between the two executions. While Ekiden accomplishes this by starting a new program using the UNIX idiom of fork-exec, serializing the target program's state, and transferring it, Kitsune uses dynamic linking to perform "in-place" state transfer. Kitsune is derived from Ekiden's codebase, and can be considered a later version of Ekiden.
On the first Sunday of November, the men compete in the 8 stage, 106.8 kilometer National Collegiate Ekiden Championship in Aichi and Mie Prefectures.[17] This race is the second of the season's big three, the first being the Izumo Ekiden and the last being the Hakone Ekiden. Here, 27 teams battle for the national title. The race starts in front of Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya City and then proceeds out of the city, along the coast and 106.8 kilometers later to Ise Grand Shrine in Ise, Mie Prefecture.
The second a final global medal of Chidu's career was earned at the 1995 IAAF World Cross Country Championships. She finished the senior race in 22nd position, which was sufficient to help the Romanian women's team of Gabriela Szabo, Elena Fidatof and Iulia Negura into the bronze medal spot. Individually, she won the Chiba International Cross Country that season. She made international appearances for Romania in the ekiden road relay and won both her legs of the Yokohama International Women's Ekiden and Beijing International Women’s Ekiden in 1995. Despite still being in her twenties, she did not compete at any major competitions after 1995.
More than 20 Kansai area universities gather for the eight-stage, 83.6km Biwako University Ekiden. It has been likened to the Kanto area's Hakone Ekiden.[18]
Other major collegiate ekiden races include Western Japan Regional University Women's Ekiden, Eastern Japan Regional University Women's Ekiden, National Invitational Ekiden
January 2 and 3 is the date for the annual Hakone Ekiden. The Izumo and National Collegiate ekidens plus the Hakone Ekiden have been coined the triple crown of collegiate ekiden.[21]
On the first Sunday of November, the men compete in the 8 stage, 106.8 kilometer National Collegiate Ekiden Championship in Aichi and Mie Prefectures. This race is the second of the season's big three, the first being the Izumo Ekiden and the last being the Hakone Ekiden. Here, 27 teams battle for the national title. The race starts in front of Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya City and then proceeds out of the city, along the coast and 106.8 kilometers later to Ise Grand Shrine in Ise, Mie Prefecture. Two versions of the course map are available: the meet website's own map, and TV Asahi's google map version. TV Asahi provides 2011 video highlights. 