It’s official–Canada’s quickest marathoner, Cam Levins, has signed a sponsorship cope with the Japanese sporting model Asics.

The two:07 marathoner spent the complete 2022 season unsponsored, after leaving Hoka in late-2021. His fourth-place end within the males’s marathon on the 2022 World Athletics Championships was the best end by a Canadian within the males’s marathon at a serious championship within the IAAF/World Athletics period.

Levins’s time of two:07:09 shattered his earlier Canadian marathon report of two:09:25 from the 2018 Toronto Waterfront Marathon. 

The 33-year-old continued his string of stable performances earlier this month when he smashed the Canadian half marathon report by 42 seconds on the Vancouver First Half, working 60:18. This was the primary time a Canadian runner has gone beneath the 61-minute mark over 21.1 kilometres.

Levins is on the elite listing for the 2023 Tokyo Marathon on March 5, and indicated to Kate Van Buskirk on Canadian Working’s The Shakeout Podcast that he’s “prepared for one thing actually particular there.” 

“I’m excited to move again to Japan for one more alternative to compete in a serious marathon,” Levins mentioned on Instagram.

The final time Levins was in Japan, it was for the 2020 Olympic marathon in Sapporo, the place he ended up ending a disappointing 72nd. “The Olympics have been a low level for me,” Levins mentioned in an August 2022 interview. “I felt I used to be proper there, however I noticed I used to be to this point behind the most effective on the planet.”

The boys’s discipline for Tokyo options 9 sub-2:05 runners, together with 2022 Amsterdam champion Tsegay Getachew; London 2021 champion Sisay Lemma and his former coaching accomplice and Japanese 5,000m (and previously, marathon) report holder, Suguru Osako.

Levins at the moment lives and trains within the Portland, Ore. space, and is coached by Victoria’s Jim Finlayson.