After yesterday’s piece on the Japanese marathoner who runs with her arms held low and stiff by her sides, my wife dug into the topic a bit deeper to find out that her methods are called Ninja running. Following up on her claim, I found this interesting bit of Ninja expertise online.

Some of the people commenting on the article asked these questions:

Her form has been dubbed “ninja running.” Both arms held straight down with almost no movement. That idiosyncratic style carried Yuka Ando, 23, to the fastest-ever marathon debut by a Japanese woman, 2:21:36, at March’s Nagoya Women’s Marathon to land at #4 on the all-time Japanese lists. All at once Ando found herself catapulted to the top level of women’s marathoning, a candidate for Japan’s next great marathoner.

When she was younger Ando ran moving her arms like other runners, but she had a bad habit of moving robotically, her upper body and lower body not working in sync. The turning point came in 2014 when she joined Suzuki Hamamatsu AC. Working there with coach Masayuki Satouchi to eliminate the faults in her form, the pair arrived at the ninja running style that let her run relaxed. “Other people keep asking me, “Isn’t it hard to run like that?” but for me it’s comfortable,” she said. The efficient form helped her maintain her stamina and run head to head with Rio Olympics silver medalist Eunice Kirwa(Bahrain) over the second half of the race.