うたぴょんスポーツOn Sunday, February 22, 2026, we drove to Himeji, a city in Hyogo known for its castle, a UNESCO World Heritage site, for the Himeji Castle Marathon. We had been calling this one 'the toughest field yet' for weeks before it even started.
Uta is 10, born in early 2016, and running kids' distances alongside a big city marathon event like this always feels like a step up. This time the field looked stacked even before the gun went off.
How the day went
We talked about this race differently than most. In the lead-up, I kept telling Uta this was probably going to be the highest-level race she had run in. Not just fast kids, but a deep field of them, all lined up together on the same morning in Himeji.
She went in healthy, which matters more than people realize. No cold, no sore legs, nothing nagging. We call that going in with 'perfect condition', and for a 10-year-old, just getting to the start line without some small complaint is half the battle. She felt ready, and she said so herself before we even left the hotel.
Himeji in February is cool but usually calm, and the castle sits right there over the course, which always makes the morning feel a little bigger than an ordinary local race. Lining up against a field everyone had been talking about as unusually strong adds its own kind of pressure, the kind you can see on a kid's face at the start even if she will not admit it out loud.
A few days before the race, Uta also showed up on Nstar, a Japanese evening news program, alongside another young runner known online as Ran Gal-chan, at around the 10:29 mark of that broadcast. It was a small thing, a few seconds of air time, but it is still strange to watch your daughter pop up on the evening news before a race weekend.
She is currently ranked 10th nationally in Japan for third-grade girls over 1000m, based on 2024 results. That ranking is not from this race, but it is part of why fields like this one in Himeji keep getting tougher. The kids she is running against now know who she is too.
What a parent took away from it
Going into a race you have already labeled 'the hardest one yet' changes how you talk to your kid beforehand. I tried not to oversell it. I did not want her standing at the start line thinking about the field instead of her own race. So we kept the conversation simple: run your own pace, feel out the first part, and save something for the end.
Her being in full health going in was something I did not take for granted. Looking back at past seasons, half of what goes wrong on race day in the weeks before is a cold, a tight calf, a bad night of sleep. This time none of that got in the way, and that alone felt like a small win before she even started running.
The TV appearance was a good reminder too. It is easy to get wrapped up in rankings and splits and forget that she is still a kid who gets excited about being on a screen with another young runner she looks up to. I want to keep some of that lightness in this, even as the races get more serious and the competition gets deeper.
What I want to work on next is less about speed and more about composure, helping her treat a stacked field as just another start line, not a different kind of race. The level around her is rising. My job is to make sure that does not change how she runs her own race.
Next up we will see how this result feeds into her spring season, and whether Himeji turns out to be the benchmark we think it might be.
The full race, including the Himeji Castle backdrop, is in the video above.