うたぴょんスポーツEvery autumn the local clubs around Saitama, north of Tokyo, get together for the Sainokuni Track Club Exchange Meet. Uta is 9 — born early in 2016, which in Japan's school-year system puts her a grade below kids born later that same year — and this time her event was javelin ball, a safety version of the javelin thrown by younger kids.
I went in planning to film her throw the way I always do. That plan did not survive contact with the day.
How the day went
We got to the venue the usual way — early, with her gear checked twice, nerves checked once. Uta was signed up for javelin ball, which for her age group is thrown, not run, so the morning had a different rhythm than her usual middle-distance days. She seemed loose and ready, more curious about watching the older kids' 800m heats than worried about her own turn.
The meet itself ran the way these exchange meets usually do — age group after age group, families clustered around the infield, announcements over a tinny PA system calling runners to their lanes. It is a small, local kind of event, not a big prefectural final, and that keeps the pressure low.
The race itself
Here is the part I have to be honest about: I never got Uta's javelin ball throw on camera. Something went wrong with the recording right when she stepped up, and by the time I noticed, the moment was gone. So there is no footage, and no result to report from her own event this time.
What I did end up filming instead were the 800m heats that followed — other kids from the training group, some of them regulars Uta trains alongside. The races were close and well run, decided by a second or two in several heats, the way these things often are at this level.
What a parent took away from it
The obvious lesson is the boring one: check the camera twice, not once, and have a backup running before the gun goes off. I have said that to myself before and clearly need to actually act on it.
The less obvious lesson is about how to talk to Uta afterward. There was no time to praise, no placing to celebrate, nothing concrete from her own event to point to. So the conversation was less about her result and more about the morning as a whole — the warm-up, the waiting, watching her training partners race well. I want her to be able to find something worth taking from a day even when the one moment we came for did not get captured.
Anything left over that matters
For context on where she is in her running: last school year she was ranked 10th nationally among third-grade girls over 1000m, which is the kind of number that reminds me this is a long project, not a single-meet story. One missed recording does not change that.
There is also a bigger team event on the calendar soon — a prefectural ekiden, a road relay where team-mates pass a sash — for kids in her training circle, and that is likely where the next footage comes from.
No clip of the throw this time, but there will be another meet, and another camera battery charged in advance. Next up is the ekiden, and I plan to actually catch it on film.
The video above has the 800m heats from that same autumn meet in Saitama, even if Uta's own event did not make the cut.