うたぴょんスポーツAutumn road race season always starts the same way for us: an ekiden (a relay where team-mates pass a sash instead of a baton). This year it was the Aizawa Akira Memorial Cup Ekiden 2025, named after Akira Aizawa, a well-known Japanese distance runner.
Uta is 9 now, born early in 2016, and this video is shot from her own point of view on the course.
How the day went
This was the first road race of the autumn for us, so there was a bit of that back-to-school feeling, getting the shoes out again after the summer break. The venue is tied to the Aizawa Akira name, which gives these local ekiden days a bit of extra atmosphere, even for the kids' races.
Uta seemed settled before the start. No nerves that I could see in the footage, just her usual quiet focus. She has had a good year of racing, and it showed in how calm she looked lining up.
The race itself
The course has a feature everyone talks about: the Tsuruya turn, a tight turnaround point. Uta hit it not once but twice in her leg, which is where the video title comes from. Taking a sharp turn twice in one leg is harder than it sounds when you are moving at race pace and trying not to lose your line.
She came through both turns clean and kept her rhythm after each one. Her own read on the run was simple: she felt she ran well. I will take her word for it. Watching her perspective of the race, you can see her holding her effort steady rather than spiking and fading, which is exactly what we have been working on.
What a parent took away from it
Uta was ranked 10th nationally among third-grade girls over 1000m in the 2024 school year, so she already has a sense of where she stands against faster kids around the country. But an ekiden is different from a solo time trial. You are running for a team, with a sash on your shoulder, and the turns like the one at Tsuruya matter as much as raw speed.
What I noticed watching this back is how much calmer her turning has gotten. Early in the year she would lose a step or two on tight corners. Doing it twice in one race and staying smooth both times is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that adds up over a season.
Next for us is figuring out which race comes after this one, and keeping that same calm approach to the technical parts of a course, not just the straight running.
More autumn road races to come, and I will keep posting them as we go. For now, here is Uta's own view of the Tsuruya turn, twice over, at the Aizawa Akira Memorial Cup Ekiden 2025.