Today was the 2017 Kyoto Marathon. As in some years past (2012, 2014, 2015) I went out for a few photos of the 16,000 runners.

This little scene unfolded before me at a corner 500m (⅓ mile) before the finish...

According to his bib-number stats, this guy (木村剛 / Goh Kimura) finished in 3:55:21, which includes the unusually-long 9:44 it took him to get to the starting line (and, of course, includes the time needed for the event above).

I was able to find in the shots I took earlier, as well... can you find him in this shot from about the 32km (20mi) mark?

Continued here...

I've recently been taking a fancy to yakitori (grilled skewered chicken), and especially the crunchy nankotsu variety.

“Torikizoku” is a chain of yakitori restaurants whose thing is that everything on the menu is 280 yen (plus tax, making each item currently about US$2.60), so the menu is just a list of items.

Any drink is “one item”, and this includes a normal serving of Suntory Premium Malts beer (seen on my blog in “A Visit to Suntory’s Kyoto Beer Brewery”), making the price comparable to the cost of a can in a convenience store, instead of the about-double price a restaurant normally charges. It's a wonderful value for a tasty beer, but even better is the Octoberfest-class jug of Kinmugi (金麦) seen above. It seems to be about a liter, and is the same $2.60 price as the Premium Malts despite being about twice the size, because the relative proportions of the ingredients falls outside Japan's legal definition of “beer”, so it's taxed much less than “beer”. Just as tasty.

The bowl of cabbage to nibble on with your chicken is also $2.60, which is perhaps steep for a bowl of cabbage, but unlike other items, this one is bottomless so you have it refilled as often as you like.

All the meat items come in pairs, on skewers, so the two sausages above are $2.60 for the pair.

As you are done with each skewer, you put it in a bamboo receptacle on the table...

These patterns repeat, with the occasional other item thrown in. I tend to stop eating nankotsu when they run out.

“Nankotsu” is cartilage, and in this case, they're chicken knees. Sounds yucky, but sooo tasty.

This post picks up from part one on my two-year-cycleversary ride though the snowy mountains north of Kyoto. I'd suffered a spell of frozen fingers, but was now mostly warm again and in good spirits.

The area is fantastically beautiful in the snow.

As I mentioned in Part One, riding through the semi-compact snow with thin (28mm) road-bike tires often felt like my tires had to work like ice breakers, shoving through a semi-frozen slushiness of evil-Goldilocks consistency (it's not strong enough to support the weight of the bike, nor weak enough to be easily shoved out of the way).

It was particularly bad on the super-steep initial climb toward Nomi Pass, and the added power needed to push through the ice required more traction than my tires could afford, so I ended up walking the worst parts of it.

Sometimes so much frozen gunk would get caught up in the mechanisms, the rear tire would lock up until I gave things a few good kicks to jar things loose.

Over time, I also lost the outer range of my gears, also due to frozen gunk, first losing the easiest “granny gear” up front, then the higher gears in the rear. I didn't miss the latter until I got to the fast, snow-free downhills later in the ride.

I'd stopped at the spot above because the farmhouse scene is quite picturesque...

Having reached Route 367 (the same road as covered in this silly-cycling article), the road was mostly clear for the undulating return to Kyoto.

All in all it was a great ride, though next year I'll take a bit more care with my gloves. I should also get more knobby tires for the snow, but I don't know whether one ride a year is worth the hassle.

Here's the ride at Strava:

Can't wait to see what the next two years brings...

I started cycling two years ago when I naïvely went on this ride, joining only because I had no clue about what was intended. We ended up doing 55km (34 miles), which was probably 10× what I had ever ridden before. I was invigorated to have done so easily what I would have imagined would be impossible, so I decided to set out on a “real” ride, a longer, hillier one done with intention.

So a week later, on Feb 7 2015, I did another ride — what I now consider my first “real” bicycle ride — a 91km (57mi) course through snowy mountains. I blogged about it in “Attempting a 100km Bike Ride in the Mountains of Kyoto” and its followup. The long mountainous course went through the middle of nowhere, far from any kind of services; I could consider such a ride, particularly in the middle of winter, only because I was woefully, stupendously, sumptuously ignorant of everything involved.

Earlier this week, on the two-year anniversary of that “first real ride”, I repeated it. This time, I headed into it with 15,000km (9,300mi) of cycling experience.

On the initial ride two years ago, a photo of this exact spot shows no trace of snow. Despite the snow this time, the road surface was still fine.

By the time the first big climb started at the Kurama Hot Spring, the road had some slush on it but it was easily ridable, but I didn't have to go much farther for the road surface to become much more difficult:

A particular curve on the road holds special memory for me, as the first place I actually stopped for a rest on that first climb (mentioned here). As I rode the same mountain again over subsequent months, riding past this point without stopping became somewhat symbolic for me, until I was finally able to do the whole thing without stopping.

Today was different, though. By this time the road surface had become difficult to ride on. The difficulty was not because there was too much snow, but because of its nature: it was hard-packed “almost ice” that sometimes the bike could ride on, and sometimes not. When the bike could ride on the surface of this stuff, it was a bit slippery, but easy going. But more often, the weight of the bike caused each tire to break through the surface, and the tire would have to shove through this hard thick layer like an ice breaker struggling against thick ice (which uses its power to push the bow up onto the ice until enough weight is over the ice to break through).

It was like riding with two brakes on; it was very slow going.

I wasn't kidding when I said that the road surface made for slow going. It's not that I was trying for speed in the first place, but it took ridiculously long to get here from the hot spring.

On that initial ride two years ago it took 48 minutes, and I was much faster on subsequent attempts, eventually reaching my current PR (personal record) of just under 29 minutes. But on this two-year anniversary ride, my 29th climb up this hill, it took more than 58 minutes! I knew I was slow, but this was shocking.

As slow as the climb was, the descent down the other side was even worse, taking more than 4× as long as typical. On the way up I had to contend with the “ice breaker” effect of the road surface, but on the descent I also had to worry that when in “ice breaker” mode, the front tire would get a mind of its own as far as direction.

Also, just like an icebreaker that rises over the ice until heavy enough to break through, repeating this sequence over and over, sometimes the tires would do this as well, making it feel like I was riding a jackhammer instead of a bicycle.

It was dicey at times, and combine with the general slippery nature of things, I went very slowly, far more slowly than even climbing the same road. Instead of my best-ever time of 11:24 for the descent, it took 47:20. My best time to make the same climb is 28:54

It was slow going, but beautiful.

I dressed well, and was warm for the whole ride, except during the descent my fingers became bitterly cold. It seemed sudden, the change from “warm and toasty” to “so freain' painful I can't stop crying”.

There's some kind of park-related cafe on the route... the only business/services of any kind for the bulk of the ride, and I was hoping to make it there for coffee and noodles before having to do something about my fingers. But I just couldn't stand it, and had to stop to put in little hand-warmer heater packs I'd brought along. Trying to first warm up my fingers by shoving them under my armpits did indeed warm them up, but it was exquisitely painful. I should have stopped sooner to put in the hand warmers; it was a miscalculation to think the two pair of gloves I had would be sufficient.

My toes were getting a bit chilly, and I had extra warmers to put in, but I'd wait until I got to the cafe.

By the time I got to the cafe, I was so ready for a hot cup of coffee and a warm space heater.

To be continued...

Today was the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine (and many shrines around Japan). I've written about the overall festival earlier, such as “Setsubun and Mamemaki: Driving out the Demons” nine years ago, and “Attack (and Repulsion) of the Evil Spirits” five years ago.

Today I went only to watch the final bonfire event. I explain it in some detail in “Intense Burn: Shinto Rite at the Heian Shrine” from nine years ago, and so like this post from five years ago, this time are just some photos.

I wandered over to the shrine about half an hour before the fires were to start, only to find that they were almost done already! )-:

That was a bummer.

I broke out my Nikkor 300mm f/2 and started shooting as best I could without having done the prep I should have (camera settings, etc.). My photography mojo has gone downhill since cycling has taken my attention.

(Again, what's going on during this festival is explained in this blog post.)

I'm having the hardest time with the white balance for these shots. The scenes include any number of things that are ostensibly “white”, such as parts of the red/white striped banners in the background, and the shirts/collars of the chanting priests, but using them with Lightroom's white-balance tool yields wildly crazy results that are just all over the map.

On top of that, they feel washed out and dull, and the focus is off. I dunno. Gotta get my mojo back.

300mm seems to be a bit tight for this event. I used Lightroom to stitch together a few shots to make this:

Check out the ripples in the upper-right corner:

It was over pretty quickly, and that was that. I've got to use this lens more than once a year to get used to it.

While things were winding down, I chatted with a group of students on summer break from their university in Australia. They posed for a photo: