うたぴょんスポーツWe went into this one a little tired. The video title says it all: 'the day after the big cry' — Uta had a rough day before this race, and I wasn't totally sure how she'd show up for the start line the next morning.
But Sunday, January 25, 2026, she was at the Shinjuku City Half Marathon anyway, lined up with the other kids for the 2km race in the fourth grade girls' division.
How the day went
Shinjuku is right in the middle of Tokyo, so the start area was busy — big crowds, lots of noise, that half-marathon energy even though Uta's race was just the 2km kids' event. The organizers changed the course from last year. It's less chaotic now, which was a relief, though it ended up slightly longer than the old route.
Given what had happened the day before, I was watching her more than usual at the start. But she seemed okay — not bouncing-off-the-walls excited, just steady. That was enough for me.
The race itself
This is a big field. More than 250 kids went off the line at the same time for the 2km age-group race, so the first stretch is basically a wall of children finding their stride and their space. Uta's held her own in starts like this before, and she got through it and settled in.
The course change meant the route was a bit different — and a bit longer — than what she'd practiced in her head from last year's race. That can throw a kid off mentally, but she kept running, and by her own account afterward, she enjoyed it. No big meltdown, no stalling out. Just her, doing the distance in a stadium-sized crowd of other elementary school runners.
I'll let the video stand for the details of how she finished — the footage says more than I can in writing here — but the short version is: she started, she ran through 250+ kids finding their rhythm, and she came through smiling at the other end.
What a parent took away from it
The biggest thing for me wasn't the race. It was that she ran it at all, the day after crying hard about something that had nothing to do with running. Kids carry things from one day to the next whether we want them to or not, and showing up to a start line with 250 other children takes something out of a nine-year-old on a day like that.
So the thing I said to her afterward wasn't about pace or placing. It was just that I was proud she came and gave it a real effort anyway. That matters more to me right now than whether the new course suited her.
What I want to work on with her next isn't speed — she's already ranked 10th nationally in the 1000m for third-grade girls as of the 2024 school year, so the engine is there. It's more about helping her reset after a bad day so that a race like this doesn't feel like one more thing stacked on top. Recovery, in the emotional sense, is a skill too, and she's still learning it. So am I, honestly.
Next up we'll see how she handles longer distances as she grows into fifth grade. For now, I'm just glad she laced up and ran, even on a hard week.
The video has the full race, start to finish, including a clip of her on TV coverage of the event — worth a watch if you want to see the crowd at the start line for yourself.