I attended a cycling event this weekend that was really fun, even though I didn't ride in it.

The Suzuka Circuit, best known for hosting F1 and motorcycle grands prix, also sometimes hosts bike racing. The entire event is officially called “The Suzuka 8-Hour Enduro”, though currently races are only three, four, and six hours.

It's really more of an “event” than a “race”, where you can challenge yourself to do as many laps as possible within the allotted time. Those trying for more laps than anyone else are racing, but it's perfectly okay to just plod along and have fun.

Each time range (three hours, four hours, and six hours) has two kinds of race: solo and team.

Kyoto riding buddy Nancy has been doing triathlon training hard for the last year, and her cycling (the part that I see) has improved by leaps and bounds. She had originally planned to ride the three-hour solo event, but after she signed up for that, members of her triathlon team asked that she join their four-member six-hour enduro team for Suzuka.

While chatting during a ride a couple of weeks ago, she was lamenting having to leave one race entry unused, so I suggested that she invite Kata to ride it.

Kata was also on this same ride a couple of weeks ago, which is where both Nancy and I met her. Making small talk with me as we rode, she had mentioned that she used to do triathlons back home in Hungary, so when Nancy mentioned that she wasn't sure what to do with her Suzuka entries, I suggested that maybe Kata could ride one of them.

And that's what happened. Kata was allowed to use Nancy's registration for the three-hour solo, while Nancy then joined the six-hour team race.

Before the race, I wandered around the pit area a bit...

The cycle event runs the course in the opposite direction to how the motorsports run it, so for F1 and the like, this is where they exit the grandstands.

I guess that they run it backwards in order to make the run up Pit Lane be slightly uphill instead of slightly downhill. When F1 and other motorsports are running, they don't let just anyone wander around the pits, so one can expect a certain competence among crew and racers. Here, anyone can wander around, making the pit lane a bit dangerous. Lowering the speed perhaps makes it safer. That's my guess.

Those riding the six-hour events start first at 10:00am. Then the four-hour events start two minutes later, and two minutes after that, at 10:04, the three-hour events start.

The course is filled with riders of all skill levels and speeds. The rule is that faster riders ride on the right, while slowest riders are on the left. (This is, not coincidentally, the same rule on Japanese highways.) The lead group for each time range gets a motorcycle escort in front, reminding slower riders to stay to the left because fast riders are coming up quickly from behind.

It seemed to all go quite smoothly.

The photography did not start out well. I had brought the Sigma 50mm-500mm zoom for its versatility, but I hadn't really used the lens in many years, and had forgotten that its autofocus and image-stabilization features were broken. So I was stuck trying to manually focus on approaching cyclists with a razor-thin depth of field. The vast majority of shots were out of focus.

Also, standing in the marshals' area between the pit and the racetrack, looking up the track trying to spot a specific rider approach among the crowd, it was very difficult to recognize them in time to take a photo. Over time I learned to set a stopwatch so that I could estimate when they would next approach, concentrating my concentration to that limited window of time helped, and over time, I got better at it.

The rider coming in rolled to a stop, and one person takes it off his leg and passes it to another who puts it onto Nancy's leg.

After watching various teams do this, I see some areas for improvement. For example, Nancy should already be completely clipped in, with someone holding her saddle to keep her upright. The guy coming in should take off the ankle bracelet himself and pass it directly to the person that will put it onto Nancy's leg. Another person should stand well in front of Nancy and slightly to the side, to ensure that no other rider coming into pit lane will be too close to Nancy when she starts out. She can then start out and pedal a few times before needing to check traffic. This could all save five to 10 seconds each lap (which over the course of their 36 laps could have added another lap).

The rules for the mixed-gender teams are sort of bullshit. If even one lap is done by a woman, it qualifies as “mixed gender”, and apparently teams that really want to win will have a woman do exactly one lap, leaving the big powerful men to ride for the next 5h50m. Not so for Nancy's team, where they split the work pretty much evenly, mostly riding in three-lap shifts (though scheduling is a bit complicated by the fact that pit row shuts down for about half an hour twice during the race, so whoever's out at that time has to stay out until pit row is reopened).

Nancy didn't start her stint until an hour into the races, and by then the many riders were strung out over the 6km course, so it was much easier to spot her coming.

I eventually realized that I could move to another part of the course.... in fact, I could wander around anywhere on the entire course. I wish I had known this earlier!

Every time I'd see him in the crowd at a distance, for a moment I thought that someone was crashing, and that's a horrible, horrible feeling.

Kata won 9th place among all women in the three-hour race!

I didn't realize it at the time, but the guy center right in the photo above, in the light-blue kit, is Ryo Inoue, a name I've seen many times at the very top of Strava leaderboards. I had figured that he's some young collage kid with incredible power, so I was surprised to see in a photo of him on the podium (he got #3 in the premier six-hour solo race) that he's a fair bit older, with two kids. With incredible power. His average speed for the six hours was 40.4kph (25.1mph).

This guy, out there cycling while I'm just strolling around with the camera, reminded me of The Competitor that I wrote about in cyclocross.

Kata came in 9th in her race, and Nancy's team came in 8th in theirs, great efforts!

All and all, it was a really fun day. I'll go next year, to ride.