Where does the time go? I'm finally following up to “Minh and Nghia Photoshoot Preview” about two weeks later than I expected.

After having a coffee and chat to get to know them a bit, we headed toward the always-photogenic Heian Shrine. I wore Nghia's backpack so it wouldn't bother the photos, and we got down to it...

I never really expect anything to come of the first shots, since we're just starting to get comfortable with each other and with the situation, but what came immediately after the shot above pretty much foreshadowed the entire day:

I don't recall what it was that set them off, but it didn't take much. They just seemed so easygoing with each other, laughter seemed to come spontaneously.

It turns out that this last photo is actually part of a wigglegram , which we see in the next post of this series.

Continued here...

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 second minute, do four squats, then six, then eight, and so on, increasing by two squats every minute until you can't perform all a minutes' requisite squats.

Generally speaking, I've got strong legs. I do a lot of long-distance cycling (100+ miles at a time), and many lessons at the gym include squats and lunges. It's common to do 50+ squats as a small part of an hour's routine. No big deal.

However, a lot has conspired to drive my fitness level down this year. In imagining what this exercise might be like, I thought that 40 squats in a minute wouldn't have been much of a challenge last year when I was in my best shape, but knew that I'd probably not get to that point (the 20-minute mark) in my current condition. Anyway, I gave it a try.

The “whatever pace you like” naturally meant for me that I'd do them quickly, then rest for the remainder of the minute. At first it felt silly, as the first minute's squats are done in three seconds, so I just stood around waiting for the next 57. Actually, during the early stages, I filled the waiting time with some simple tidying, such as putting laundry away. Such was how unchallenging the start was.

I was still fine by minute 10, finishing its 20 squats in about 25 seconds. At this rate, the 20-minute mark didn't feel so far away. But oh, how my hubris would soon be revealed. The insidious nature of this exercise is that while the amount of work increases, the amount of rest decreases.

Soon I was struggling. I was also struggling to keep my balance in the pool of sweat that had formed on the hardwood floor under me.

As fatigue slowed down my pace, the ever-increasing number of squats left less and less time to recover, and I finished the 15th minute's 30 squats with less than 10 seconds to catch my breath. I knew I'd never finish 32 squats in the next 60 seconds, but thought I should at least try to see how far I got. I finished 26 of them. Having failed to do the allotted number, I was done.

All in all, I'd done 266 squats in 16 minutes.

My legs were absolute jelly. I'd experience this while cycling, such as after an explosive effort on a short climb, but in those cases control would return in a few minutes. This time, I was still shaky in the evening, 12 hours later.

The muscle ache the next morning was monumental. Every movement hurt, giving me a certain “that must have been great exercise” satisfaction. In the past, muscle aches the next day are helped by light exercise, just to get the juices flowing, so I went out on very light bike ride. Oddly, I could cycle just fine, but when I got off my bike I could barely move without crippling pain.

I'd hoped that the light movement would have helped relieve the muscle ache, but the pain on the 2nd day after was unlike any I'd ever experienced. And on the 3rd, it was almost unbearable. I literally couldn't stand from a chair (or from the toilet) without plotting tactics on how to support myself on the way up. Attempting to walk down a set of steps was frightening, even while holding the rail, as I simply lacked the physical control to guarantee the legs wouldn't buckle.

Somewhere around this time I started to feel that the name “Death by Squats” wasn't as appropriate as “Suicide by Squats”, since it's something I did to myself. But then I realized that even more appropriate would be “Botched Suicide by Squats”, since I wasn't actually dead and so I was feeling pain and paying the price from what I'd attempted.

Sadly, “Botched Suicide by Squats” doesn't roll off the tongue so well, so “Suicide by Squats” it is.

The 3rd and 4th day after were the worst, but then it started getting better. The 13th day was the first that I felt no effects.

I have no explanation for why such a short little exercise had such a dramatic impact. It'll be interesting to see whether I see the same results next time.

Update... workout log:

#1	266 squats over 16 minutes
#2	373 squats over 19 minutes ← new record
#3	457 squats over 21 minutes ← new record
#4	388 squats over 20 minutes
#5	457 squats over 21 minutes
#6	494 squats over 22 minutes ← new record
#7	452 squats over 21 minutes
#8	460 squats over 21 minutes
#9	503 squats over 22 minutes ← new record
#10	516 squats over 23 minutes ← new record
#11	505 squats over 22 minutes
#12	484 squats over 22 minutes
#13	540 squats over 23 minutes ← new record

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 bit of a “trial by fire” to gauge someone's level.

In this case, Alexis' demeanor on the bike on the steepest sections remained unchanged from when casually cruising among the flat rice fields, as if the effort that was a challenge for me was not at all an effort for him. He seems ridiculously strong, but not particularly interested in using that strength during this ride. This was lucky for me, because the subsequent longer climbs that he was happy to just casually enjoy ended up at a pace that I could, with effort, maintain.

All in all, Alexis had done 89km with about 1,750m of elevation gain. He seemed to have enjoyed his time, and I enjoyed both his company and that I didn't slow them down too much.

After Alexis bid us farewell, Joshua and I headed east across the city heading to our respective homes...

Here's my full ride at Strava:

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, Galileo Offline Maps (Name changed Feb 2019 to Guru Maps), maps.me, and many others, so where I've done this these maps are more accurate than Google Maps.

Once I got out of the city, I tried to take any little street that looked like it might go somewhere. Usually they didn't.

Before heading out, I scoured the satellite view in Google Earth for things that looked interesting, such as this recently-built dam with a road that wasn't on any map:

The approach road, though, was paved only so far, and then I ran into gravel:

I knew from the satellite view that it would become paved again, but I didn't have all that much time, so I decided to defer. Plus, I knew there were two other potential approaches to the dam road, so I went to try them...

Continuing on, I came to another location I'd spotted via Google Earth, a place I'd ridden by dozens of times without ever noticing....

Let's head on up to the first corner...

Until this point the average grade is just over 25%, but it flattens out a bit around one more corner, eventually reaching the temple...

Because it flattened out at the end, the full climb from the road averages only 22.1% over its short-but-sweet distance of 150m. It's a little longer and a little steeper than the “Nasty” hill in Kyoto.

Sadly, Strava no longer allows one to create that-short a segment. The shortness of the segment, combined with the impreciseness of GPS tracking that non-geek athletes don't really understand, probably results in too much burden on their customer-service department, so they just disallow them now. One Stava user got around the problem by extending the distance to include 170m of the run-up to the climb in the segment, creating the “for Sairinji Climb” segment. Better than nothing. I'm the third Strava user to have made the climb.

I continued on my way to putz around the minor streets. One paved street ended at a little cemetery.

The road continued into the woods, but unpaved...

The maps I consulted indicated that in one area I should find some tennis courts, and indeed I did...

... but the road that they indicated should have exited from the area, not so much:

I finally made my way to the main road I wanted to check out, the driveway to a temple. I'd often stopped by the pretty area where the driveway meets the road, but it seems I've posted about it only once, here.

For some reason I thought the driveway was off limits to all but pedestrians, but after seeing the report on the minor-road blog, I knew it was okay. There's a parking lot up there.

Let me say up front that when it's dry, as it was when I was there, the road is perfectly fine to ride up and down.

But the moss on the edges would make me very wary to take this road were it wet. Still, this road is nowhere near as bad as the road to the Ushio Kannon Temple, which is scary-slippery in the best of times.

In his article on this road, the author of the minor-road blog noticed that this tobidashi-kun has a “K” on it, and wondered what it meant...

So I asked a local, and it turns out that I was talking to the grandmother of a “Ken”, a young child that lived there. His father had made the tobidashi-kun, so added a “K” for his son's name. The lady went on to explain that people steal these things (“geez, how rotten do you have to be?”, I thought), so the father thought to personalize it in the hopes that no one would take it.

All in all it was a pleasant ride. I returned home to find that I'd whittled another second off my best time on this sprint segment, having taken advantage of a partial tailwind. That puts me tied for seventh out of 1,327 people. Now if I can just shave a few more seconds off....