うたぴょんスポーツOn February 15, 2026, Uta ran the Hamamatsu City Marathon, a city road-race event in Shizuoka that includes short distance categories for elementary school kids. She was in the 1.5km race for third and fourth grade girls.
This was a rematch. Uta had raced this same rival before, and this time she wanted to settle it.
How the day went
Uta is 9, born in early 2016, which in Japan's school year system puts her with kids a grade below her birth year — she's currently in third grade. She came into this race already knowing who she'd be running against. No new nerves about an unknown field, just the familiar pressure of a rematch.
The 1.5km distance is short enough that there's no room to ease into it. Whatever happens in the first turn or two tends to decide the race.
The race itself
The title of the video says it plainly: the rival pushed hard, and Uta lost ground by swinging wide on a turn. We could see it clearly afterward on the point-of-view camera footage — the gap wasn't about raw speed, it was about the line she took. Her rival cut the corner tight. Uta drifted out. In a 1.5km race, that kind of small mistake is enough to decide who finishes first.
She lost this one. The footage makes it hard to argue with — the difference between the two girls' turns was obvious, frame by frame.
What a parent took away from it
Watching the video back with her, I didn't talk about speed. I talked about the turn. She's fast enough to be in these races — her name was tenth nationally in the 1000m for third grade girls in the 2024 season — so the gap here wasn't fitness, it was a racing decision made in half a second.
What I told her was simple: the rival wasn't braver because she's stronger, she was braver because she trusted the inside line. That's a skill, not a personality trait. We can work on it — running tight turns on training loops, getting comfortable with contact, not backing off when someone's elbow is near hers.
I also made sure to say she didn't run a bad race. She ran a race with one costly habit in it. Those are different things, and at 9 she can hear the difference.
Anything left over that matters
This race week also had Uta briefly on Nスタ, a Japanese evening news program, alongside a running character called Ran Gal — a nice reminder that this hobby of hers is starting to reach past our living room. None of that changes what happened on the course, though. The wide turn is the story of this one.
Next time we'll go back to that same corner in training and run it on purpose, tight, until it's instinct instead of a decision. The rematch after the rematch, probably.
The video shows the turn itself, side by side with her rival's — worth watching if you want to see exactly what a half-second looks like.