The race, due to take place on March 13, claims to be the world’s largest women’s-only marathon and is a World Athletics Platinum Label event.

The event hosted 21,436 runners in 2019, but due to the COVID-19 outbreak, it only staged an elite race with 110 athletes in 2020, an event won by Japan’s Mao Ichiyama in a course record of 2 hours 20min 29sec.

The 2021 race was held as the first mass participation road race in Japan since the COVID-19 pandemic started and welcomed 4,704 local runners in an event won by Mizuki Matsuda.

Afterwards, organisers claimed that there had been no cases of coronavirus infection among any of the participants, Japan Running News reported.

"Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have not been able to welcome 22,000 women runners and support their marathon challenge for the past two years," Koji Kitano, race director of the Nagoya Women’s Marathon said.

"As a runner myself, I understand how running fans around the world are waiting for mass races to return.

"We will use our experience from the past two races held during the pandemic to act in best practice to ensure the health and safety of 22,000 runners.

"Race entries will start in November, and we are looking forward to receiving applications from many runners."

Growing coronavirus cases caused by the spread of the highly variant Delta strain caused Japanese officials to hold most of the delayed Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo behind closed doors.

Cases peaked in Japan on August 26 when a record 24,950 cases were recorded.

Numbers have since declined and yesterday there were 10,634 positives.

Nagoya Women’s Marathon organisers are confident that by March conditions will have eased enough to ensure they can fulfil their plans of having full fields but will revert to holding a virtual event if they have to scale back the event.

The first Nagoya Women’s Marathon can trace its history back to 1980 when it started as a 20 kilometres race in Toyohashi in Aichi.

After its first two years there, the venue changed to Nagoya, in the Nagasaki Prefecture, for the third edition in 1982 and converted to a marathon race for the 1984 edition, when the winner was New Zealand’s Glenys Quick.

The 2011 race was cancelled due to the Tōhoku earthquake that March but the following year the event was held on a newly designed course and was opened to the public for the first time.

 Around 15,000 runners took part that year, with Russia’s Albina Mayorova crossing the line first.