Let me tell you about a short, 16-minute exercise that I did a few weeks ago, an exercise that had an incredibly-unproportional impact, leaving me with the worst muscle soreness I'd ever experienced, by a very wide margin. It wasn't until the 13th day after this simple exercise that I got through the whole day without feeling its painful effects.

This exercise, which involves nothing more than simple bodyweight squats, was introduced to me with the name "Death by Squats".

It's simple: Start a timer, then do two squats during the first minute, at whatever pace you like. During the [...]
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Alexis, a cycling Frenchman living in England, contacted NORU for a private bike tour around the far-flung mountains of Kyoto. Joshua set him up with a bike and took him around, while I tagged along for photos.

Right after this photo is the first real test of cycling ability, a short, steep climb that averages 10% over 760m (half a mile), but has some 17% sections.

When you're contacted out of the blue by someone for a bike ride, you're not really sure of their level and what would be appropriate/fun/challenging/daunting for them, so this initial climb would be a [...]

I did a fun photoshoot today with Minh and Nghia, vacationing from San Jose, CA.

We're all American, but they had almost as much trouble with my German-ancestry name as I did with their Vietnamese-ancestry names. Her name is pronounced "min", like the start of "Minnie Mouse". His sounds like "knee-ah".

I literally haven't seen more than a smattering of the photos I took, but throwing a few darts at my Lightroom catalog brought up a few I can share right away.

They started their vacation as a celebration of five years together, but Nghia had loftier plans...

Continued here...

I had an enjoyable bike ride of exploration around the nooks and crannies of Ohara the other day, so I thought I'd share some photos. Here's the ride at Strava:

The impetus for this ride was to check out some of the minor roads I'd seen on 路面と勾 配 (literally "road surface and slope"), a blog full of reports on exceedingly-minor mountain roads, each replete with detailed photos and commentary. He's got well over 1,000 such reports so far.

I spend a fair amount of my time updating OpenStreetMaps based on his articles. These are the maps used by Strava, [...]

It's not been a good year for me so far, having been beset by all manner of colds, injuries, and other things that have made a big dent in my fitness. As I mentioned earlier in "The Silliness of Japanese Medicine-Dosage Rules" a couple of weeks ago, I topped things off with a horrible cold that put me out of commission for the better part of two weeks. The third course of antibiotics seemed to have finally done the trick, and now I'm looking to reclaim my life.

When in good form last year, I was about 86kg (190lbs) with [...]