Anime Review – Run With the Wind

Haiji Kiyose is an enthusiastic fourth year student at Kansei University who has been stealthily gathering men for the track and field team of the campus. As Kakeru Kurahara, a snappish first year student, becomes the promising tenth member; Kiyose dreams of participating at the Hakone Ekiden, a famous relay university marathon race. – ANN

Streaming: Crunchyroll and Hidive

Episodes: 23

Source: Novel

This post was originally written for the April 2019 issue of Mangaverse, the anime, manga, and comics ‘zine published by the National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F) which I am currently in charge of editing. If you are interested in contributing to Mangaverse, please contact me at jessi@s1e1.com. I am always on the lookout for writers and artists!

This post may have been minimally-edited from its original form to correct minor errors and/or include hyperlinks.

Review: This review contains minor spoilers for the series.

Exercise has never been one of my strengths. In elementary school, we were tested every year on how quickly we could run a mile (4 laps around the outdoor gravel-coated track). My best time was somewhere in the 12-minute range, and that was when I was in 1^st grade. I think, deep inside, I never saw the point of running when walking was a perfectly serviceable mode of personal transportation. That, or I have always been chronically out-of-shape and unwilling to admit it.

Run With the Wind may seem like an unlikely favorite for someone like me; its romanticization of the feeling of the wind and the pavement and the tension of muscles being pushed to the limit might seem as though it’s trying to convince me of something which I know personally to be untrue. Yet, like most of the very best sports anime, its appeal isn’t in its depiction of a particular sport. What sets Run With the Wind apart is its ensemble storytelling and character drama, which captures the emotional highs of stretching to reach a goal that’s consistent across so many human experiences.

The story begins as newly-minted college student Kakeru Kurahara races through the darkened streets, clutching a stolen sandwich from the convenience store. Having lost his apartment deposit gambling, he’s left with few options. He’s spotted by Haiji Kiyose, who’s immediately in awe of Kakeru’s running form. Haiji invites Kakeru to fill the vacant room at his dorm, but he turns out to have ulterior motives; it’s been his goal all along to construct a team of 10 runners so that they can make an attempt at the Hakone Ekiden, a brutal Tokyo-to-Hakone round-trip relay marathon that takes place around the New Year holiday. The problem is that most of the group has little-to-no training for this type of running, and those that do have complicated emotional relationships with the sport that make them reticent to follow Haiji’s lead.

Much of the early part of the series is focused around Haiji’s attempts to convince the various members of the group to join him on his mad, improbable quest, and it’s this set of episodes that are likely to prove the most tedious for many viewers. To put it bluntly, Haiji becomes extremely manipulative in his tactics, showing up uninvited and essentially stalking many of the other characters until they give in and promise to start training with him. Starting around episode 5, the series becomes infinitely more charming as the various characters begin to take the spotlight and express their various personalities and experience the challenges that will help define the runners they are to become.

While each of the characters is appealing in his own way, I think the one whose experience rang the truest to me was “Ouji” (“Prince”), an unapologetic manga consumer with a lanky physique and a clear lack of talent for running. Ouji continually comes in last place in the group’s practice runs, and as the team members start attempting their officially-recorded timed races at regional track meets, it becomes questionable whether he even has the ability to achieve the baseline requirements for qualification. This becomes a point of contention for Kakeru, who has a lot of training and some innate talent; he sees Ouji as a liability.

What I loved about this part in the story wasn’t just Ouji’s change in mindset from grudging participant to active and invested trainee, although that in itself is inspiring to someone of similar ability. What’s special about this arc is what it reveals about Haiji as a sportsman and mentor, though we don’t learn the extent of his background until later on in the series. Kakeru insists that Ouji should be dropped from the team if they’re serious about competing – there’s no way that they can win the race with his lackluster times. Haiji refuses, his insistence indicative of his much deeper understanding of personal motivation and philosophy about the sport.

While the bulk of the series is comprised of each character’s personal arcs that eventually come together and feed into the series climax, there’s an underlying thread that speaks to something much broader about why and how people compete to achieve greatness. There are many examples throughout the series of characters who are driven by obligation and habit and are eventually frustrated by their lack of tangible success. There are other examples in which characters are brutalized by their mentors, their bodies broken through the endless challenge of succeeding in the eyes of someone who only acknowledges results. Some are even told outright that their physical make-up turns their goals into impossibilities. Haiji proves to be operating from a vastly different perspective, one which is defined by his own experiences and a goal which is extremely time-limited. This may be his one-and-only chance to see this goal fulfilled, and his way of seeing it through to the end is to allow each runner to come to their own personal place of motivation.

The second half of the series is, for lack of a better term, a true victory lap. All of the personal challenges, the intense training, and the characters’ emotional journeys build to a series of episodes in which measurable results honestly stop mattering. The anime begins to transcend the incremental and minute gains in individual qualifying times and suddenly transforms into a love-letter to sport written in sweat, the rhythmic clapping of shoes on pavement, and the throbbing breaths of runners as they hand off their relay sashes to their next teammate. Even I, one in love with remaining sedentary, began to long for the wind in my face and the feeling of comradery built from shared focus and suffering.

It’s that element of glorified suffering, however, that might be one of the bigger hurdles of enjoyment for some. Without revealing too many specifics, there’s a painful episode in which one character comes down with a bad illness and insists on pushing himself to run. The visual elements of the show are utilized to their greatest effect here, portraying the feeling of claustrophobia and feverish visual distortion of someone clearly too ill to be running the equivalent of a half-marathon in the icy weather. The sequence is extremely uncomfortable, not just because of the dizzying visual effects, but also because of the knowledge that athletes have actually collapsed and died when pushed to perform in extreme conditions. While the race cannot continue for our protagonists if the character drops out (so we know that he’ll likely choose to proceed in spite of his exhaustion and pain), the sequence goes a bit too far over the edge into the realm of discomfort.

Run With the Wind focuses on what turns out to be a somewhat unlikely, almost magical snapshot in the lives of its characters. Though they’re all very different people with their own personal goals and struggles, their ability to join together in service of a shared goal is as inspiring as it is unlikely. Though running, as an activity, can be extremely hard on the human body, straining muscles and tendons while doing a real number on one’s knee joints, the running that the characters perform throughout the series turns out to be almost a form of healing for many of them. They come out of the experience with refocused minds, a sense of personal accomplishment, and memories of their participation that will follow them for the rest of their lives; I find a profound sort of beauty in that.

While sports anime is in no sense a rarity and many can be said to capture more than just rote performance of the sport in question, it is the rare sports-focused series that really transcends the confines of its focal sport and captures emotions and truths that are nearly-universal. Run With the Wind speaks to so many of these universal experiences – the motivation that comes from positive rivalries, the ways in which poor mentorship can be damaging, and the drive to accomplish things in a group that might be impossible on one’s own. It’s almost inspirational enough for me to lace up a pair of running shoes and hit that track again… almost.

Pros: Formulates a strong character-based narrative around the sport of long-distance running. Each character is an interesting individual. The second half of the series is especially exhilarating.

Cons: Tends to glorify/romanticize physical suffering in a way that can be uncomfortable to watch. Haiji is a bit of a creeper for the first several episodes.

Grade: A