Mara prepares for marathon journey in her adopted home world

By Simon Turnbull

Athletics Correspondent

Britain's No 1 marathon runner of 2006 and 2007 has been in St Moritz for the past four weeks preparing for the World Championships, which open in Osaka on Saturday week. She is due to depart on Tuesday, but not for the Great Britain team "holding camp" in Macau. "No, I'm going home, actually," she said.

"Home", to Mara Yamauchi, is Tokyo. She spent three years working there as a Foreign Office diplomat - acting as an interpreter for Baroness Thatcher at one function and sharing a hot sand bath with Jack Straw on another occasion - and has lived there with her Japanese husband, Shige, since the start of last year.

Thus, while the other 56 members of the Great Britain team face a marathon trip half-way around the globe to get to Osaka, Mrs Yamauchi, an Oxford woman by birth and university education, will be only a three-hour bullet train ride away. For the former Mara Myers, Britain's second-fastest marathon woman of all time (behind Paula Radcliffe, who is out of action seven months after the birth of her daughter), the looming championship is halfway towards a London 2012 experience: a chance to take on the world in a home-from-home environment.

"Well, Japan is my home," she said. "We live there. But I will be running in a GB vest. I don't have any intention of giving up British nationality. Anyway, I would probably never make the Japanese team even if I had Japanese nationality."

That might be putting it a little too modestly. Japan isthe long- established world superpower of women's mara-thon running, yet only three of their athletes have run the distance faster this year than Yama-uchi, who was just 28 seconds outside her personal best with a time of 2hr 25min 41sec for sixth place in the heat-affected London Marathon in April. Running in the Sapporo Half-Marathon in June, the 33-year-old Briton even got within 23 seconds of Japan's national sporting treasure, Mizuki Noguchi, the mini-sized marathon woman who sped away from the ailing Radcliffe to win Olympic gold in Athens in 2004. Yamauchi's time in Sapporo, 68min 45sec, ranks her fifth in the world for the half-marathon in 2007.

"I could have run a bitquicker, because there was a headwind in the second half of the race," she said, "but I was really pleased with that run. My training this year has been going reasonably well. I'm hoping I can keep everything together for the next few weeks and start the race in Osaka in good shape, and then just try to cope with the heat and humidity on the day."

The expected hot (up to 30C) and humid (70 per cent) conditions are likely to add up to another X factor in a race that could well favour fringe contenders such as Yamauchi. Championship marathons seldom run to the same script as the major city marathons, with their tendency towards fast times and a finish order corresponding to previous bests. "It'll be a very open race," Yamauchi said. "Anyone capable of running 2:30 on a fast course could win, because the faster people might struggle in hot weather or go off too quick."

The field may include Chun-xiu Zhou, the Chinese winner of this year's London Marathon, and Catherine Ndereba, the Kenyan who won the 2003 World Championship race. There will be no Noguchi, though. "She's not in the Japanese team," Yamauchi said. "She's focusing on Beijing next year. She wants to win Olympic gold twice.

The Japanese team for the marathon in Osaka includes Kiyoko Shimahara, who runs for the Tokyo club that Yamauchi has joined, Second Wind AC. The woman from the Foreign Office (on extended unpaid leave up to Beijing) is, though, still a member of Harrow Athletics Club. And, of course, she willbe on a special mission for her country when she runs on home-from-home ground on 2 September. It will be up to Yamauchi and Tracey Morris to defend the world marathon title that Paula Radcliffe won for Britain in Helsinki two years ago. "It's not impossible," she said, "but it would be very difficult for either of us to win."

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