うたぴょんスポーツHappy New Year! This was Uta's first practice of 2026, on January 3rd. She's 9 years old now, born early in 2016, so she's on the younger side of her school year group.
We had a plan for the day — a set pace, a set distance. Then it started snowing.
Why this session
The first practice of the year is usually just about shaking off the holiday rust. No big meet on the calendar, no race to peak for. The goal was simple: get back into rhythm after the New Year break with a pace target we'd set in advance.
Uta had a strong 2024, finishing 10th nationally among third-grade girls over 1000m, so there's real ability there. But rankings don't train themselves, and a few days off over New Year can undo some of that sharpness. The point of this session wasn't to chase a time. It was to see where she stood after the break and ease back in.
Then the snow showed up. Not forecast, not planned for. Running in snow changes everything — footing, pace, effort for the same speed. There's no honest way to hold a pre-set target once the ground conditions change underneath you.
How it actually went
We scrapped the original setting. That's the honest part of coaching your own kid: you plan a number on paper, and then the weather tells you the number is wrong, so you throw it out instead of forcing it. Uta ended up redoing the session — what the video calls an 'okawari', a second helping — adjusted for the unexpected conditions.
She handled it fine. No meltdown over the change in plan, no insistence on the original target. That matters more than it sounds like. A 9-year-old who can accept 'the plan just changed, let's go again' is building something more useful long-term than any single pace number.
As her dad, my job on a day like this is mostly logistics and judgment calls — deciding when to pull the plug on the original plan, when it's safe enough underfoot to keep going at all, and making sure the redo doesn't just become 'push harder because the first one didn't count.' It wasn't about cramming in two full efforts. It was about getting one honest session done, however it had to happen.
Is this sustainable as a regular pattern? Not as a strategy — you can't plan for snow. But as a habit of mind, yes: set a target, stay ready to drop it, and don't let a disrupted day turn into a wasted one or an overcooked one.
If you're training a young runner and the weather turns on you mid-session, don't just push through the original numbers — footing changes the honest effort behind any pace, and that's a hard thing for a kid to judge on her own. Better to reset than to grind through a plan that no longer fits the ground under her feet.
Here's to a 2026 with a lot more normal practices than snowy ones. Happy New Year from us.