うたぴょんスポーツJanuary 19, 2026. We drove out to Hitachi Omiya, a city in Ibaraki, north-east of Tokyo, for the Hitachi Omiya Ekiden 2026 — an ekiden (a road relay where team-mates pass a sash) with a separate division for girls in fourth grade and under. Uta is nine.
This video is the 'Another Story' cut, put together from Uta's own helmet-cam view and a few other angles, so you get to see things the main race video doesn't show.
How the day went
It was the usual winter ekiden morning — cold air, a crowded start area, kids in team jackets stretching and trying to stay warm before the sash goes on. Uta seemed loose and talkative beforehand, which is usually a good sign with her. She's been chasing this kind of race since she first started running seriously, and at this level the whole team stands around the same patch of grass waiting for their turn with the sash.
The division was girls, fourth grade and under, so Uta was racing against kids her own age or younger across the field. Her team had run together before, and you could tell from how they talked to each other at the start that they knew their roles.
The race itself
The video title says it straight: there was a fall out on the course, caught on camera, and in the middle of it you can see a genuinely kind moment between runners — someone checking on someone else mid-race instead of just running past. I won't say who, because it isn't my place to single out another family's kid, but it's worth watching for.
Despite that hiccup, Uta's team won the under-10 girls' division outright. Every single runner on the team posted the best time on her leg of the course — a clean sweep. And on the day, their times beat the boys' teams in the same event too. For a team of elementary schoolers, that's about as complete a result as you can get.
What a parent took away from it
Watching the fall back afterward, what struck me wasn't the trip itself — kids go down in races, it happens — it was how fast the response was. That's not something you can coach the week before a race. It comes from training together for months, from knowing the other kids as people and not just competitors in the same bib colour.
Talking to Uta afterward, I didn't make a big deal of the win. I asked her how her own leg felt, whether she paced it the way she'd planned, and what she noticed about the course. The team result is great, but the thing I want her carrying forward is her own read on her own race — pace, effort, recovery — because that's the part that's actually hers to improve.
Anything left over that matters
There's a small side note in the description: Uta also showed up briefly on a TV news program, alongside someone nicknamed 'Run Girl', around the 10:29 mark of a separate video. It's a reminder that these kids' races sometimes get a bit of outside attention, even if the kids themselves are mostly just thinking about their split times and their team-mates.
Next up for Uta is more of the same — training through the cold months, more ekiden starts on the calendar, and hopefully fewer trips on the course. For now, go watch the clip; the fall and what happens right after it says more than I can in text.