うたぴょんスポーツThis one almost didn't happen. Uta had just gotten over the flu, and we went back and forth about whether she should even start the Joshu Fujioka Kaiko Marathon, a local road race held in Fujioka, a city in Gunma, north-west of Tokyo.
In the end she wanted to toe the line. I wanted to see how her body would actually respond, not just how she felt sitting on the sofa the night before.
How the day went
We showed up with lower expectations than usual. Uta had been off training for several days with the flu, and her legs hadn't done anything close to a real run in that time. She said she felt okay standing around at the start, but okay standing around and okay running are two different things, and we both knew it.
There wasn't the usual pre-race bounce in her. No joking around, no fidgeting. She was quiet, which for Uta is its own kind of signal. I didn't push her to act hyped up. Some days you just show up as you are.
The race itself
Once the Joshu Fujioka Kaiko Marathon 2025 started, it was obvious pretty quickly that this wasn't going to be a normal effort. Her legs weren't responding the way they do when she's fresh. The title says it plainly: you can't run properly when you're still coming off being sick, and that's exactly what played out.
She kept moving and finished the race, but it was a grind from early on rather than the kind of race where she settles into a rhythm. No big surprise there, her body simply hadn't had the days of recovery it needed. I was proud she stuck with it anyway instead of dropping out at the first sign it was going to be hard.
What a parent took away from it
The lesson here isn't really about pacing or technique, it's about timing. I let the decision to race come down to how Uta felt that morning, but a few days off training after the flu doesn't just disappear because you feel 'fine' standing still. I should have weighed that more before we committed to the start line.
Afterward I didn't talk about the result at all. I told her that finishing a race on legs that weren't ready is its own kind of tough, and that counts for something. What we'll work on next is being more honest, earlier, about whether a race is worth running at all when she's just come off being sick, rather than deciding on race morning.
Next up, we'll give her a proper block of healthy training before picking the next race, rather than rushing back in. Video above if you want to see how the flu-legs race actually looked on the course.