Yesterday was the inaugural social ride hosted by NORU Kyoto. Whatever allergy/sickness that has been plaguing me of late was in remission, so a slow relaxing group ride seemed perfect for me.

This was my first ride with Tomas, the fastest rider in the group. Although I'd not ridden with Tomas before, we'd chatted at other events and share an interest in photography and programming. I was happy that my first ride with him was a slow social group ride, allowing me to keep up and chat.

To give a sense of Tomas' speed, his time on my benchmark Hanase Pass climb is less than 24 minutes, which seems inhumanly fast to me. My best time is more than 32 minutes.

A few people were new to the group, including Antony who had never really ridden in the mountains. His showing up in street clothes without experience largely paralleled my own first ride, except his bicycle was much less appropriate for the mountains than mine, and this ride was going to be longer than what I did. He had guts. It would be interesting to see how far he got.

I was about to have you compare the photo above to “clean-shaven Ross”, but it turns out he's not as clean-shaven in that pic either.

We took some group photos near Kyomi Pass, one of which opens this post.

I Photoshop'd myself into the copy seen above, from a separate photo that Joshua took. It turns out that I was standing a bit closer to the camera than anyone else, so my height was exaggerated to the point of making me look grotesquely big. So, I took the liberty to shrink myself to a more contextually-balanced size. 🙂

A bit of “motion blur” adds life to cycling photos, but I had incessant problems with blur and focus all day 🙁

Our route, a clockwise version of Kyoto's “Heart Loop” ride, next brought us to Mochikoshi Pass, which from this direction is neither long nor challenging.

I continued down early to set up to take photos of others coming down, settling for a spot with a small splash of color because it didn't seem like the rest of the (very steep) way down would offer a better background. Sadly, I was wrong and it would have been much better had I continued, but I guess it doesn't matter because most of the photos didn't come out. I think I just don't know how to use this small camera I bought for use while cycling. I'll bring my Nikon D4 on the next social outing.

The bad Photoshop job above is the result of a joking promise I made to Joshua to “make him look fast” by adding motion blur. He'd come around the corner slowly, and did a track stand in front of me to pose for the photo. Sadly, I'm no good at this kind of Photoshop, so it would have been easier to make him look fast by just asking him to go back and actually be fast (something he's more than capable of doing, as an exhausted me found out on my first ride with him).

The biggest problem I face trying to capture the photos I want (besides the need to avoid crashing) is getting far enough back to include all that I want while at the same time excluding unsightly stuff from the background. The shot of Tomas above was just a bit too late to capture what felt to be the perfect combination, and I ended up with dilapidated corrugated metal for my background.

Undaunted, I tried again later on the next little climb...

We then did the last climb of the day, to Ebumi Pass (江文峠), then down the other side to the large but picturesque village of Ohara (大原).

While I'd stopped to take photos of the fields, the others had gone to a farmers' market to partake of what the fields produced...

The return to Kyoto from Ohara is downhill the whole way, which I'm sure Antony appreciated. Having ridden over three passes on that heavy city bike, I'm sure he was exhausted.

Antony, who lives near me, joined me for the ride home after coffee and cake at NORU Kyoto.

In the end my ride was about 66km (41 miles). Here it is on my cycling heatmap and at Strava.

A great day with great folks.

Update: here's a short video from the ride.