うたぴょんスポーツThis one is a little different from our usual posts. Instead of Uta racing, we made a video cheering on someone else: Toyo University, ahead of the Hakone Ekiden.
We filmed it on December 24, just before the New Year, and the whole point was simple — send some energy their way before the real thing happens on the road.
How the day went
There was no race for Uta that day. We sat down at home, talked about the Hakone Ekiden coming up — an ekiden, a road relay where team-mates hand off a sash instead of a baton, run from Tokyo out to Hakone every New Year — and put together a short cheer video for Toyo University. Uta has watched this race on TV with us before, so she already knew roughly what it was: long legs of running, one runner after another, a whole university riding on it.
The race itself
The actual Hakone Ekiden hadn't happened yet when we filmed this. The video title we used was 'shave off that one second,' which is the kind of line you hear a lot around ekiden teams — the idea that the whole race can come down to margins that small. So instead of reporting a result, this post is really about anticipation: Toyo University's name on the start list, and us getting ready to watch, with Uta picking out which section of the course she wanted to follow.
What a parent took away from it
Watching Uta get into a race she isn't even running was interesting. She asked why one second matters so much when a leg of the ekiden can take over an hour. I told her it's the same idea as her own races — you don't find speed on race day, you find it in all the ordinary training before it. She went quiet for a second, which is usually a sign something landed. I'm trying to use moments like this, away from her own competitions, to talk about pacing and effort without it feeling like a lecture about her own running.
Anything left over that matters
The title calls it a '神対応,' which roughly means someone handled something really well — in this case, I think it's just us being enthusiastic fans rather than anything that happened on the course. It's a short, light video, more of a send-off message than a report. Nothing to measure, no times, no placings — just a kid getting excited about a sport bigger than her own races for once.
Next up for us is back to Uta's own training, but we'll be watching the actual Hakone Ekiden with her when it runs. The video is short and mostly just us cheering — worth a quick watch if you're curious what gets an 11-year-old excited about a university relay.