うたぴょんスポーツOn December 14, 2025, Uta ran in the Tatebayashi Ekiden, a road relay in Tatebayashi, a city in Gunma, north of Tokyo, where team-mates pass a sash instead of a baton. This time she ran the fifth leg — the anchor, the one who carries the sash to the finish.
It was her first time ever running anchor. Before the race the question in our house was simple: could she get through it without crying this time?
How the day went
Fifty-one teams lined up for the Tatebayashi Ekiden, so the fifth leg alone had a long line of runners strung out across the course by the time Uta got the sash. Being anchor is a different kind of pressure. There's no team-mate waiting ahead for you to hand off to — you're the one who brings it home, and everyone watching knows it.
She's nine, born in early 2016, which under Japan's school-year rule groups her with slightly older classmates. Running an ekiden leg at that age already means handling nerves that plenty of adults would find heavy, and anchoring makes that heavier again. The video is filmed from her point of view, so you see the course the way she saw it — the sash on her shoulder, the runners ahead, the finish somewhere out there past the bend.
We didn't know going in where her leg would place among the 51 teams. That wasn't really the point of the day. The point was whether she could run her leg, hand over the result, and hold herself together doing it.
What a parent took away from it
Watching her line up as anchor, I kept thinking about what we'd actually told her beforehand. Not time goals, not splits — just that the sash matters more than the clock, and that crying or not crying isn't the measure of whether she did well.
Kids this age put a lot of pressure on themselves in relay formats. There's a version of an ekiden leg that's just about your own legs and lungs, and there's the anchor leg, where you're also carrying the whole team's morning. I think that's why we framed the question the way we did before the race: not 'can you run fast' but 'can you get through this one without it breaking you'.
What I want to work on with her next isn't speed. It's this: teaching her that nerves before an anchor leg are normal, that they don't mean something is wrong, and that the sash reaching the finish is what matters, not how she felt doing it. If she can carry that into the next ekiden, that's worth more to me than any placing in a 51-team field.
She'll keep training through the winter, and there will be more ekidens before spring. For now, I'm just glad she took the sash and ran her leg.
The video shows the full anchor leg from Uta's point of view, Tatebayashi Ekiden, December 14, 2025.