Hat
the path of today's bicycle ride through Kyoto

After long rides on Wednesday and Thursday, and a very hard workout at the gym on Friday, my legs have been extremely sore, so today I went on an easy “recovery ride” in the city, just to get my muscles moving a bit.

It was nice... I go the “KOM” (best registered time) on the highly-sought-after “Jolly Hat” segment.

Doing an image search for “Strava art” yields many impressive results. Some are sort of “fake”, like this famous “cyclist” drawing and this famous “bear” drawing, but many are real and amazing. (I put “fake” in quotes because they are indeed “art” created via “Strava”, but the route you see as a picture is not the path the cyclist actually rode; some parts are created out of thin air with digital trickery, making the result substantially less impressive in my eyes.)

I've been wanting to do one myself, and have vaguely envisioned something impressive, but ran into the slight problem of having absolutely no artistic skill (except with a camera, which doesn't help me here). So over time I kept lowering my sights, and finally got it low enough to make it a reality, copying a simple line drawing of a jolly hat. Even this meager creation taxed my artistic “talents” to their limit. Being a Sunday morning, traffic wasn't too bad; it took about 2½ hours to ride the 35km (22mi) of stop-and-go city streets.

We didn't have the energy to do Christmas Cards this year, so perhaps we'll consdier this it. /-: