Most visitors training toward T100 Yokohama will spend at least some of their trip in Tokyo — it's the international gateway, and Yokohama is a thirty-minute train ride away on the Keikyu Line. This guide covers the routes both cities' own runners actually use, rather than a generic "the city has parks" gesture, plus the run-station infrastructure that solves a specific traveller problem: where do you shower and store your bag when you don't have a home base to run from.
The Imperial Palace loop — Tokyo's most famous run
The path circling the Imperial Palace grounds (Kokyo Gaien) in central Tokyo is roughly 5km around, starting near Takebashi Station, and is one of the most-run urban loops anywhere in the world — a genuine draw for visiting runners well before Japan became a running-tourism destination in its own right. Convention, not law, has runners going counterclockwise; the course has no traffic lights or road crossings, so once you're on it you run the whole loop without breaking stride. Distance markers along the path represent each of Japan's 47 prefectures, giving the loop a built-in sense of progress.
- Keep left on the path — this leaves room for faster runners to pass, and matches the general left-side pedestrian convention in much of Japan.
- Run single-file where the path narrows, and give way to pedestrians, who have priority over runners on a route that's genuinely shared.
- Running directly in front of the palace's own gates is restricted; the public loop itself is unaffected, but it's worth knowing the whole area isn't unrestricted.
- Early morning and evening are when the loop is busiest with local runners — arguably part of the appeal if you want the shared-loop atmosphere rather than solitude.
Run stations: showers and lockers without a hotel base
A genuinely useful piece of Japanese running infrastructure for visitors: "run stations" (often called ran-sute, a contraction of "running station") are part-locker-room, part-community-hub facilities clustered around Tokyo's most popular loops, letting you change, shower and store bags before and after a run without needing your own place nearby. Runners Station in Koujimachi, close to the Imperial Palace loop, charges around ¥500 for a walk-in locker-and-shower visit, with running kit, shoes and towels available to rent for roughly ¥200 per item if you're travelling light. Nohara, operated by Mizuno next to Yoyogi Park, offers a similar shower-and-locker setup alongside a café and fitness studio. Both are aimed at exactly the situation a visiting runner is often in: wanting to run somewhere in the middle of a sightseeing day without carrying kit around all afternoon.
Yoyogi Park and Meiji Jingu Gaien
Yoyogi Park, a short walk from Nohara, is Tokyo's other genuinely famous running park — flat, spacious, and popular enough with local run clubs that several of the city's best-known groups train there. Reported loop distances vary meaningfully by source and by exactly which path you take: the inner paved loop is commonly cited around 1.6-2.7km, the outer dirt-path perimeter closer to 3.2km, and some sources describe a combined loop nearer 2.5-3km. Treat that spread as genuine route variation rather than a single wrong number — Yoyogi rewards exploring which combination of paved and dirt paths you actually want, rather than expecting one definitive lap distance the way the Imperial Palace loop offers.
Namban Rengo — Tokyo's best-established English-friendly running club, founded in the mid-1990s by American expat Bob Paulson and now roughly half Japanese, half international in membership — runs its main weekly session, a structured interval workout of around 6,000m, at Oda Field inside Yoyogi Park every Wednesday evening, with a 5,000m time trial on the month's final Wednesday. 080 Tokyo, a separate English-friendly international run club, meets Monday evenings around the wider Yoyogi/Shibuya area. Both welcome visitors, not just residents — see Verus's guide to running culture in Japan for more on joining either as a traveller.
Yokohama: Yamashita Park and the Minato Mirai waterfront
Yamashita Park, Yokohama's waterfront green space stretching roughly 700m along the port, gives a compact loop of around 1.8km — a fast, easy option for a short shake-out run. It's also the historic host area for World Triathlon Championship Series (WTCS) Yokohama's Olympic-distance run leg, four laps of a 2.5km course along this exact waterfront (see Verus's T100 Yokohama guide for the full course precedent, and why it isn't yet confirmed for the 2027 race).
For a longer run, the waterfront path extends northwest through Minato Mirai — past the Red Brick Warehouse (Akarenga Soko) and the Minato Mirai 21 district — onto the Kishamichi Promenade and further to Rinko Park and Takashima Suisaisen Park, a combination that can stretch a Yamashita Park out-and-back to as much as 10km. It's a genuinely scenic, well-paved route, and the same broad district WTCS Yokohama's 40km bike leg has run laps through for years.
Racing in Tokyo and Yokohama
The Tokyo Marathon is the obvious centrepiece of the region's racing calendar — flat and fast (a net downhill of roughly 38m over the full course), run in early March, and one of the hardest World Marathon Majors to gain entry to: around 300,000 applicants compete for roughly 30,000 general-lottery places, an acceptance rate of about 10%. The 2026 edition had 38,773 finishers, including 2,161 Six Star finishers (runners who've completed all six Majors) from 87 countries; the 2027 edition marks the race's 20th anniversary with a field grown to around 40,000.
The Yokohama Marathon, founded in 1981, is the city's own long-standing full-marathon event (42.195km, plus shorter relay and fun-run categories) and has run in late October in recent years — the 2026 edition was held on 25 October. Older sources describe a mid-March date, so check the current year's official date directly rather than assuming either month by default; the race appears to have shifted its calendar slot over its more-than-forty-year history.
- The Tuwaiq-style logic of avoiding Japan's humid block applies here too — both Tokyo Marathon (March) and the Yokohama Marathon's current October slot sit outside the June-September heat window Verus's own conditions guide documents in detail.
- T100 Yokohama itself (15-16 May 2027) sits in the same comfortable window — see Verus's dedicated race guide for what is and isn't yet confirmed about the course.