After three months away, I'm now back in Japan.

I'd left suddenly at the start of February because my mom had a stroke, but she'd recovered enough by the start of May that I could return.

My return was on United Airlines, which over the decades I've flown more than any other. They used to be a good airline, but have gone stunningly downhill in the last decade (yielding occasional rants from me, such as this and this), so it was with trepidation that I tried again. The saving grace was paying the extra $250 to bump myself up to [...]

This should be my final post about having watched my first cyclocross bicycle races recently.

There was a lot of mud.

Most photos in previous posts (the intro, "Practice at the Mud Baths", "The First Two Races", and "Falling in the Mud") concentrated on areas I called "the Mud Bath" and "Mud Hill". I finally got far enough through my photos to find some that show them in context a bit... here's a wider view showing folks going through and away from the Mud Bath....

A reverse-angle shot from the overpass in the distance...

Some other random shots from the [...]

Last week's "Watching My First Cyclocross Bike Race" opened with the photo above. Today I'll share the whole fun sequence of photos that followed.

As I write this I'm dealing with a family medical emergency in America, and as I sit in a hospital waiting room, these photos from a cyclocross bicycle race last week in Kyoto Japan strike me as a perfect metaphor for life: if you suffer a setback, just shake it off, put on a smile, and continue forward.

(PS: I just made up the "Cyclocratic" seen in the title; there's probably a more grammatically-appropriate word I [...]

This post, brought to you at 4am by jetlag, is a continuation from "Cyclocross Races: Practice at the Mud Bath". Above we have the very first rider of the first race to make it to where I was at the Mud Bath.

The first race actually was three separate races run in parallel: "Category 3" (men who had earned the right to advance from the anyone-can-enter Category 4), "Masters 2" (men 40 and over who have done well enough to progress from Masters 3 and Masters 4), and "U17", children 17 and under who, presumably, are too old or too [...]

I'm currently at airport hotel in Osaka (which I've recommended before) so I can make an early flight out in the morning, for an unfortunately-sudden family-emergency trip to America. Having arrived here with plenty of time, I'll go ahead follow up on this weekend's "Watching My First Cyclocross Bike Race".

Today's pictures concentrate on the Mud Bath during the practice before the races.

A common pattern was for the rider to enter fast and powerful, with the apparent intention to just brute force his way through the mud. This would have been fine except that the mud was sufficiently deep [...]