Having done a short excursion riding while clipped to the pedals, yesterday I set off on a longer mountain ride to really give them a workout.

昨日のサイクリングは、特別靴を使って、靴とペダルは繋がったままに乗りました。

I didn't have any trouble at the beginning, except at the very beginning when it took me about 10 seconds of trying to clip in before I realized that I hadn't taken the cleat covers (to make walking down to the bike easier) off. Doh!

The ride ended up being 54km (33mi) with 1,190m (3,900') of elevation gain. This is pretty mild for me, but it was my first real ride in more than a month, so I was happy to take it easy to shake off the cobwebs.

Once I got into the steeper climbs, I could definitely feel an advantage to the shoes... energy that I had apparently been using to keep my feet squarely on the pedals was now available on the upstroke to help propel me forward. I wasn't trying to do this... I could just feel it happen naturally.

We had some pretty intense storms blow through recently, so the mountains were pregnant with water. All the rivers were raging and so they were beautiful and they made a nice cool breeze, but the water flowing from the mountain at all sides made the roads wet and slippery.

For normal roads, this “wet and slippery” was an issue only when going down a steep grade, and didn't really matter otherwise except for getting me wet. I mention this to foreshadow that I eventually moved to roads so abnormally-steep that my wheels were slipping even when going up slowly. But that's later.

Anyway, the first climb of the day was 350m to Kyomi Pass, then down through the mountains and up another 150m to Mochikoshi Pass. Just over that pass comes a nice place to rest and see a little village down in the valley below...

This photos just screams “HEY, YOU FORGOT YOUR POLARIZER FILTER MORON!”, because I did. I've posted many examples of how a polarizer filter can help bring out the true color of something, such as this post last year, so I should know better.

So to make amends, I'll dip into my photo archives from the only other time I rode this route, when I did have the polarizer...

That ride on June 4th was with Gorm and Kumiko.

Because Gorm has returned to Norway it's been too long since we've seen his smile, so here it is from that trip...

The short ride down the eastern side from Mochikoshi Pass is really steep (upwards of 14% at times), so I took it very slowly, using only my rear brake. Being clipped into the pedals was on my mind, as I wouldn't be able to quickly compensate for any kind of slip. It was iffy once or twice, but I made it down in one piece.

Going back to the June ride, here's a shot of Gorm on a bridge at the bottom...

The original plan for yesterday was to do half of a “Heart Loop” ride, and if so we would now head back toward Kyoto, but Sakura-san was in the mood to do more climbing and to explore new roads, so we headed farther up into the mountains, on a road that I'd also taken last June.

It was a particularly pretty road last June, I thought...

It started nice enough yesterday...

However, the deeper into the mountain, the worse the road got...

The last 1.7km (1 mile) of the climb averages a 10.5% grade, but at times it's steeper, and with the wetness and general slippery-mossyness of the road, it was quite precarious going up. For long stretches the drive wheel would slip a bit with each downstroke of the pedal, before catching and moving me a bit forward.

The ability of the wheel to grab the road was at the border between “good grip” and “no grip”. If I were to hit a spot where the wheel fully spun under the bike as I put my weight into pedaling down, my forward movement would immediately stop and I'd have only a split second to put my foot down to stop myself from toppling unceremoniously over.

I didn't necessarily have confidence that I could unclip my shoe from the pedal as quickly as I might need, but I never found out... I made it to the top.

Where Gorm is standing in the photo above from last June is where I'm standing in this photo from yesterday:

We headed back down.

Not quite the same caliber of “artsy” as on the June ride. For example:

Did I mention that the area can be really steep?

Here's a picture of Paul Barr in this area on a visit in 2011 that produced “Deep In The Mountains Above Kyoto’s Kumogahata Village” among others...

This is one of the few pictures where I think I captured a sense of the steepness. I'm not very good at that, as I noted in another blog post from that day's outing, “A Photographic Challenge of Monumental Scale”.

In this next picture from about the same location looking down the road, you can see a side road leading off to the left....

I'd been wanting to explore what was on that road, so yesterday we did.

The road that leads off the “main” road starts over a bridge of suspect quality....

Then it goes up and up and up. Not only is it steeper than anything I'd yet done today, at times the road was more or less washed out, leaving deep rocky haphazard ruts where the road should be.

As I'm slowly trying to power myself up this lunar landscape, I remind myself that if it gets too difficult I can't just stop and stand up... I have to either keep going at all costs, or plan for the few moments needed to unclip my foot from the pedal....

... or, I could just hit a deep rut that makes the bike go a different way than momentum carries my body, and fall over into the mud. Yeah, that sounds like the best option.

Well, I wasn't planning on that.

I really wish I could capture just how steep this is. It looks like it's flat in the photo above. Even in this next photo taken later, looking back down after Sakura-san had walked her bike up and was now walking it back down, it looks mostly flat...

I didn't want to give up so I got right back on and continued on up. I was a bit surprised that I could clip in on the extreme slope. Perhaps it was more luck than not.

I continued for another 100m of vertical rise until the steepness/slipperiness factor was just too much, and I gave up.

Crazy steep, but again, I just can't capture it.

I returned to where Sakura-san was waiting, and she snapped a photo for me...

We headed back toward Kyoto, but popped back up to Mochikoshi Pass. I didn't want to push too much (more) on my first ride in a month, so I headed home while she continued on.

Back in the city I seemed to have hit just about every red light. It made for good practice clipping in and out. Even though most times when the light turned green I was able to clip in immediately on the first try, I was surprised every time I did it. I have the feeling that it'll be one of those things that has good days and bad, and that yesterday was a good day.

I wish I hadn't fallen, of course, but at the same time I feel a strange sense of relief having fallen and not really hurt myself beyond a scratch. Stress from the unknown has been taken away, a bit. As a bonus, no one was around when I fell (it would be a minute or so before Sakura-san came pushing her bike up), so it remains my dark little secret.

Continued here...