うたぴょんスポーツOn March 8, 2026, Uta lined up for the Kazo Fuji no Sato Ekiden, a relay race in Kazo, a town in Saitama, north of Tokyo, where runners pass a sash from one leg to the next instead of a baton.
She wasn't running with her usual club. This time she was part of a 'dream team' made up of fourth graders, put together to go up against some of the established, well-drilled running clubs in the field.
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How the day went
Uta is nine, born early in 2016, and in fourth grade this season. Lining up at an ekiden against stronger, more experienced clubs is a different kind of pressure than running her own solo races. You can feel it in the way the kids check the start line, look at who else is there, and go quiet for a minute.
The team she ran with wasn't a club in the usual sense. It was a group of fourth graders brought together just for this race, up against squads that train together every week. That's a tough ask on paper. But an ekiden isn't only about raw speed on paper — it's about who holds their nerve when the sash is in their hand and the next runner is watching them come in.
I won't put a number on the result here, because the video is the honest record of it, not a stat sheet. What I can say is that she went out and raced a team that had every reason to be favored, and she gave it everything she had on her leg of the course.
Weather and course details aside, the bigger story of the day was the shape of the team itself — kids who don't train together every day, pulled into one unit for one morning, trying to hold their own against clubs that do.
What a parent took away from it
Running on a mixed, one-off team is its own kind of preparation. There's no shared warm-up routine, no inside jokes from months of practice, just kids who have to trust each other fast. I think that's a skill in itself — one that doesn't show up in a split time.
Before the race I didn't tell her to beat anyone. I just said: know your leg of the course, know where the sash exchange zone is, and run like the team is counting on you — because it is. That's a different kind of pressure for a nine-year-old than a solo 1000m, and I think it's good for her to feel it occasionally.
What I want to work on next isn't speed. It's composure in exactly this kind of situation — walking up to a start line next to a club that trains five days a week, and not letting that change how she runs her own leg. She's already shown she can hold a national ranking for her age group (10th nationally among third-grade girls over 1000m in the 2024 season), so the raw ability is there. The ekiden is teaching her something the solo races can't: how to run well when the team, not just the clock, is depending on you.
Next up we'll see how she carries this into her next solo races this spring. For now, the full race — sash exchange and all — is in the video above.
