This will be the 95th winter featuring the New Year's tradition — the Tokyo-Hakone Round-Trip College Ekiden Race, or as it's more commonly known, the Hakone ekiden.

There's a story behind how the annual race came to be over a century ago.

Shiso Kanakuri was one of the world's elite marathon runners and had competed at the 1912 Stockholm Summer Games as one of Japan's first-ever Olympic athletes.