That makes sense. xD
Cue Tanya putting in her head that she has to honor the whole polish side of the family due to being the last Uma in it, and going 200% effort. ;p
'Isn't this a bit cruel? First of all, they're making us sing and dance after running a race. Sure it's a pretty short one but some of the other runners look tired. Even worse, they're making the losers dance too! Is this some sort of humiliation ritual to encourage them to try harder next time? Several of them look like they've been crying.'
Shirogane's only been running deliveries for something like 3 years, since she started doing that in Middle School. She has, however, been doing what she considers light military style PT for most of her life. Scaled for an uma's strength. She was also running against another uma who was a few years older than her and later on became a racing academy student, so her training scale was closer to that of Tracen than she realized.
A bit of both. Most of her classmates like her because she brings interesting food and will help people who ask her, despite having a somewhat intimidating personality. Shirogane doesn't think much of it since she's been through school a few times and doesn't find it particularly difficult, but she did help improve a good number of her classmates' scores.
It's a replica/refurbishment of a Duchy of Warsaw uniform that some of her family wore at parades a few times.
Shirogane: "Why am I being propositioned by so many people?!"
Basically they look like some of the Pegasus knight headpieces from fire emblem but sized to fit on an uma's ears.
She's something like 145cm. And she's scaled to this height based on her horse equivalent's size in comparison with other horses.
She's also able to tweak her own diet to match, and figured out how to make a variety of supplemental materials, like electrolyte gel packs and the like. It helps that she was specifically training for physical conditioning rather than trying to win a race, so didn't have a time pressure that might push her to overtrain.
Shirogane will take racing seriously in the sense that she treats a job or school seriously. Mainly she's aiming to get on the podium so she gets a cut of a purse. First place obviously gets the lion's share of the money, but for her it's more important to keep getting cuts of the purse over time than winning any specific one. For her to really run like her life was on the line would require her to have a PTSD episode on the track.
At some points it might be more accurate to say that the Polish military had a human corp, since at many points in history their military was mostly cavalry.
Shirogane could find herself unexpectedly popular in Poland if she plays into her Polish heritage more.
...There *are* some circumstances where it might happen, isn't there?.. Shirogane diverting back to her Tanya reactions and scaring other contestants shitless while absolutely gunning it to the finish line would be a rather striking scene.
