うたぴょんスポーツOn Sunday, October 12, Uta ran the Suzaka Run Fes 2025, a road race in Suzaka, a town in Nagano, central Japan. She's in fourth grade now, nine years old, and this one was the 2km.
The title says it all: she got made to cry in the lineup before the start, then got her revenge with the run itself.
How the day went
Before the race even started, something about standing in the lineup set Uta off and she started crying. It happens — standing still with a crowd of other kids, waiting for the gun, can be its own kind of pressure, sometimes worse than the running.
But once the race started, she turned it around. She ran the 2km in 8 minutes 40 seconds and won her race, picking up a prize for it. No slow fade after a rough warm-up — if anything the opposite, like the nerves burned off the second her legs started moving.
What a parent took away from it
I think the lesson here isn't about pace. It's about the gap between how a kid looks standing at the start line and how they run once they're moving. Uta crying in the lineup didn't tell me anything about whether she'd race well — it told me the waiting is sometimes the hardest part for her, not the race.
Next time I want to spend less energy worrying about how she looks before the gun and more on helping her get through those few minutes of standing around — a joke, a distraction, anything to get her mind off the wait. The running, it turns out, she can handle fine on her own.
Next up we'll see if she can go into the lineup a bit calmer — the running clearly isn't the problem. The video is barely a minute long, but it's a pretty good one-shot summary of tears turning into a win.
