うたぴょんスポーツThis one is not a single race day. It is a round-up video: Uta and I picked the five kids' marathons in Japan we would most recommend to other running families, and ranked them.
Uta is 9 now, born early in 2016, so she is still in the younger grades of elementary school. Last year she finished tenth nationally among third-grade girls over 1000m, which is partly why people keep asking us which races are worth entering.
How this list came together
We did not sit down and plan a top five out of nowhere. Over the past couple of seasons Uta has actually run all of these races, and each one already has its own video on the channel. This countdown is us looking back and saying, honestly, which ones we would do again first.
That matters to me as her dad. It is easy to just enter whatever race is nearby. But after enough weekends in a car seat with a race bib on her lap, you start to notice which events actually treat kids well — good courses, a decent atmosphere, organizers who seem to understand that an 11-year-old and a 7-year-old need different things than adult runners do.
So this video is less about one performance and more about a season's worth of experience, condensed into five picks with reasons attached.
The countdown itself
Counting down from five: S&B Chibikko Kenko Marathon, a kids' fun-run put on with sponsorship from S&B, the food company known for spices. Fourth is the Odawara Kids Marathon, in Odawara, Kanagawa. Third is the Shinjuku City Half Marathon, run through central Tokyo. Second is the Himeji Castle Marathon, in Himeji, named for the castle the city is famous for. And first, Uta's top pick, is the Tsurugajo Half Marathon, named after a castle in Fukushima.
Each one gets its own clip linked in the description, so if a particular race catches your eye, you can go watch how it actually went for her rather than just take our word for it.
What a parent took away from it
Ranking these forced me to think about what I actually care about when picking a race for Uta. It is not just distance or scenery. It is whether the course is safe for a kid running her own pace, whether there is a proper kids' category instead of just shrinking the adult race, and whether the whole day feels worth the travel.
A half marathon like Tsurugajo or Shinjuku is a different commitment than a short kids' fun-run, so part of my job is matching the event to where she is in her training, not just picking the biggest name.
Going forward, I want to keep using these five as a kind of benchmark when new races come up, rather than entering everything we hear about.
Anything left over that matters
A couple of extras from the description: Uta also appeared on Nsta, a Japanese TV news program, alongside another young runner, and there is now an Uta T-shirt available through her own online shop. Her running data is also public on Strava, if anyone wants to see the training behind these race picks.
None of that is the main point of this video, but it is part of the same project — trying to share, honestly, what youth distance running in Japan actually looks like from inside one family.
We will keep adding races to this list as Uta runs them, so this top five is likely to get revisited later in the year.
The video itself has all five clips linked if you want to see how each race actually looked on the day.