うたぴょんスポーツEvery January, towns across Japan hold an ekiden (a road relay where team-mates pass a sash instead of a baton) and this year Uta ran in the Hitachi Omiya Ekiden 2026, in the fourth-grade-and-under girls' division. She's 9, born early in 2016, so she's one of the younger kids who could enter this category.
She ran with a group the family has been calling the 'Dream Team' all season, and this was the day it all came together.
How the day went
Hitachi Omiya is a quiet town north of Tokyo, and ekiden season there means cold mornings and a lot of nervous kids stamping their feet at the start line. Uta's team had trained together for weeks leading up to this, swapping legs in practice so everyone knew the course. She told me before the race she just wanted to run her leg clean and hand the sash off without any drama. That's a modest goal for a kid, but it's the right one — ekidens are won or lost on handoffs as much as on raw speed.
By the time I got to the venue the team already had that focused, quiet energy you see in kids who've actually put the work in. No big speeches, just a last check of shoelaces and sash position.
The race itself
The division was fourth grade and under girls, which means Uta was racing against kids her own age and a year or two older. Her team didn't just win — they won outright, and every single runner on the team earned a section award for the fastest time on their leg. That's a clean sweep, and it doesn't happen by accident with five or six different kids all running well on the same day.
Uta's part of the sash held up — she kept her position and brought it through without losing ground, which in an ekiden is often the whole job. When the last runner crossed the line in first place, the team's reaction was pure relief as much as joy. Everyone had carried their piece of it.
What a parent took away from it
What struck me most wasn't the win itself — it was that every leg was fast. That tells me the team's practice of rotating legs and trusting each runner to run her own pace, rather than everyone trying to be the 'star' leg, actually worked. I said as much to Uta afterward: this wasn't one kid carrying a team, it was six kids trusting each other.
For what's next, I want to keep that same approach — let her run her own leg well rather than chase someone else's split. She's already shown she can hold her pace under pressure; the next step is just doing it again, race after race, without it becoming about the result.
Uta's already looking ahead to her next race, and we'll keep posting the results here as they come. The full ekiden, including her leg and the final handoff, is in the video above.