うたぴょんスポーツOn September 28, 2025, Uta lined up for the Aizawa Akira Memorial Cup Ekiden - an ekiden (a road relay where team-mates pass a sash) named after the Japanese marathoner Akira Aizawa. This time she wasn't running with her usual club team.
She was part of a fourth-grade girls 'dream team' pulled together from across the Kanto region: one runner from Chiba, one from Saitama, one from Ibaraki, one from Tochigi. Uta, who lives in Saitama, north of Tokyo, ran leg two.
How the day went
This race always has a slightly different feel from Uta's normal meets, because the team only exists for the day. Four girls, four prefectures, one sash. Momo came from Chiba to run leg one, Kurumi from Ibaraki took leg three, and Yuria from Tochigi ran the anchor leg four. Last year a girl named An-chan ran that spot, but she moved far away, so Yuria stepped in this time. Putting a team like this together takes some coordination from the parents too - everyone traveling in from a different direction to meet at the same start line.
The race itself
Uta's job was leg two, the stretch where she takes the sash from Momo and has to hand it on clean to Kurumi. Last year this same dream team finished eleventh overall, so going in there was a real question of whether they could match that, or do better, with a new line-up. The video shows how leg two actually unfolded for her - the handoff, the pace, how she felt partway through. I won't put numbers here that aren't confirmed, but the shift from last year's eleventh-place finish was very much on our minds watching her run.
What a parent took away from it
Running with girls you don't train with every week is its own kind of pressure. There's no shared practice history, no inside jokes about pace yet - just four kids who each know their own leg and have to trust that the other three will do theirs. What I noticed watching Uta prepare for this one was how much she focused on just her own section: where the hills were, where to push, where to save something for the handoff. That's a useful thing to carry into any relay, school or club. The other piece worth remembering as a parent is to say less before the start and more after - let her carry her own nerves rather than mine.
Anything left over that matters
A nice side note: Uta also appeared briefly on the Japanese TV program N-Sta around the ten-and-a-half-minute mark, standing next to a 'run girl' mascot character, which the family linked in the video description. It's a small thing, but it shows her running is starting to get noticed outside her own circuit, not just inside it.
Next up, we're looking at her regular club schedule again, back to training with the team she sees every week rather than a once-a-year dream squad. For the full picture of how leg two went, the race footage is in the video above.