Saturday: 16,000 steps, 600 kcal burned. Sunday: 22,000 steps, 800 kcal burned. Every weekend ends with me checking my smartwatch and cross-referencing the numbers with how exhausted I feel.
Saturday started with my usual 4:30 AM wake-up, a strength training session at the gym, and then heading out at 8 AM with my two sons to the local elementary school field. They both play on a youth baseball team, and I serve as the parent association manager, helping run operations. Practice wrapped up around 12:30. After a quick lunch at home, I took my three-year-old daughter to the community pool for the afternoon.
We splashed around at the edge of the pool, grabbed a snack, and were back home by 4 PM. Dinner, then falling asleep alongside the kids.
Sunday I was still a bit tired, but pushed through and was up at 4:50 AM for a 5 km run. My wife and I prepped breakfast and packed lunches in parallel, and by 8 AM we were back at the field again.
After practice, the kids and I ate lunch together on the school grounds, then I loaded everyone into the car at noon and drove to an away game for the older kids. This week it was a match against a team from Hyogo. My oldest son was recovering from an illness and couldn't play his usual position as catcher, and unfortunately the team ended up losing.
I managed the game operations while cheering them on, then immediately drove the older kids back to school once it was over. From there, I headed straight to a different venue — my second son's younger-division team had a game at 3:30 PM.
The younger team pulled off an impressive upset against a strong opponent. The parents were all on their feet cheering. Everyone came home covered in sweat and dirt. I got the washing machine running as soon as we got back — three full loads before bedtime — then collapsed into bed and woke up to Monday.
Somewhere in between all of that — during the short windows after coming home, or on early weekday mornings when I have a bit of breathing room — I've also been working on improvements to Dugout, a team management system I built myself. Dugout is a service I created specifically to streamline operations for our baseball team.
Before Dugout, all communication happened on our team's LINE group chat: weekly schedules, attendance tracking, carpool coordination — everything was buried in a flood of messages, and just finding the right information was a chore.
With Dugout, we can enter practice and game schedules well in advance so parents can check whenever they need to. Each schedule entry includes normalized fields for things like whether lunches are needed and whether parents can serve as umpires.
Attendance collection works through dedicated links that anyone can respond to without logging in, which means the whole week's operations now run on just one or two LINE messages.
Since I use it every single week, I catch usability issues and minor bugs quickly and fix them as they come up.
Recently, another team's parent manager has started using it as well. That's meant adding multi-tenant configuration support and monitoring for any issues that come up in the other tenant's use case — a new item on the weekend to-do list.
I'm well aware that the window where I can be physically active alongside my kids and genuinely share their enthusiasm is short. I want to make the most of it — enjoying this season with them while contributing to the community in the ways I'm actually good at. Yes, I'm tired. But the sense of fulfillment more than makes up for it.
That's what weekends look like for me lately.
(This photo is from a recent baseball game with colleagues from work. That's CFO Yamada-san — former captain of the University of Tokyo baseball team.)
