The Days She Cried After Losing — I Don't Want Her to Forget Them

This one isn't about a single race. It's a video I put together, posted on January 15, 2026, looking back at the days Uta cried hard after losing.

No course, no finish time, no placing in this one — just a reminder of something I don't want either of us to forget.

What happened that day

There wasn't one specific race this time. The video is a collection, a kind of mirror held up to all the times Uta lost and broke down crying afterward. She's still in elementary school, already racing distance events, and losing has never been rare for her — it's part of most seasons.

I tagged the video with a few hashtags: tears, the idea that you can grow stronger for every tear you cry, and kid athlete. That's really the whole shape of the post. It's less a report on what happened on a given day and more an admission that this has happened, over and over, across many days.

What she said or how she looked

I don't have a quote from her for this particular video — it's made of moments, not one conversation. But anyone who has watched a kid cry after a race knows the look. The breathing that won't settle. The refusal, at first, to be comforted. Then, eventually, the quiet.

Uta has had that look plenty of times. Sometimes it passed in a few minutes. Sometimes it took longer. What struck me, going back through old footage to make this, was how similar her face looked each time — same scrunched-up frustration, same fists, same refusal to just shrug it off.

What the parent thought about it

I almost didn't make this video. Watching your kid cry, more than once, is not footage you naturally want to revisit. But I kept coming back to the thought that I don't want her — or me — to forget those days.

Not because losing is good. It isn't fun for her and it isn't fun to watch. But those tears were never about nothing. They came from caring, from wanting it badly, from being disappointed in herself in a way that only comes from trying hard in the first place.

I don't think the crying made her faster. I'm not going to claim that. But I do think the version of Uta who cries after losing is the same one who keeps showing up to the next race. I'd rather remember the hard days honestly than edit them out and pretend she's only ever smiling at the finish line.

If your kid cries after a loss, I don't think that's something to fix quickly. It might just be something to remember.