うたぴょんスポーツThis one was a wet, cold day at the track. Uta ran two races back to back: the 100m and the 1000m, both in the rain.
She also runs with a club we call Saitama RC (Saitama Running Club, a local youth athletics club), and a younger teammate, Saku, gets a bit of the spotlight too.
What happened that day
Uta lined up for the 100m first, then came back a bit later for the 1000m. Both races were run in rain and cold, not ideal conditions for anyone, let alone a 9-year-old. She's a 2016-born kid, so she's currently racing in the age group where she already has a national ranking: 10th place nationwide in the 2024 school year for third-grade girls over 1000m. That's the kind of result that tells you she takes this seriously, even if she doesn't always say so out loud.
After the 1000m, she cried. Not because the weather was miserable, and not because of where she placed against the other kids. She cried because she felt she hadn't run the race she knows she can run. That's an important distinction and it comes through clearly in the footage: this wasn't a meltdown about losing to someone else, it was frustration at herself.
The video also spends a little time on Saku, a teammate from Saitama RC who the title calls a 'super second-grader' (so about 7 or 8 years old). Watching a younger clubmate push himself in the same miserable conditions is part of what this kind of local club running is about - everyone out there together, rain or not.
What I thought about it
I keep coming back to the fact that she didn't make excuses. It would have been easy to point at the rain, the cold, the fact that conditions were bad for everyone. She didn't do that. She held herself to the same standard regardless of the weather, and when she didn't hit it, she felt it.
As a parent, there's a strange mix of pride and worry in watching your kid cry after a race. Pride, because at 9 years old she already has a real internal standard - she's not just comparing herself to the kid next to her, she's comparing herself to what she believes she's capable of. That's not something I taught her directly. It's something that seems to have grown out of doing this sport for a while now.
The worry is simpler: I don't want her to think that crying is the only acceptable response to a race that didn't go the way she wanted. We've talked about this before - that disappointment is fine, even useful, but it shouldn't swallow the whole day. On camera, she gets through it. Off camera, we talked about the fact that a tough 1000m in the rain and cold is still a real effort, ranking or no ranking.
Seeing Saku out there too was a nice reminder that this isn't a solo project. Club running means other families, other kids, other small moments of someone pushing through bad weather because the schedule said today was race day. That's worth something on its own, separate from how any one race goes.
If you've got a kid who takes their own standards seriously, you'll recognise this one - the tears aren't always about the other kids on the track. Sometimes they're about the gap between what she did and what she knows she's got in her.