Disregard everything I wrote about cycling and cycling trips two days ago. Cycling sucks. I suck. Everything sucks. What was supposed to be an epic victory today turned into easily one of my top 5 worst cycling days. The worst part is, I’ve really got no one else to blame but myself.
It all started out pretty well yesterday. Although the immigration at Haneda took forever, the bike arrived fine and nothing was broken. I managed to put it all together yesterday evening at the hotel near Haneda, with the intent of cycling to Atsugi via Kamakura and Enoshima today. At 10pm the jet lag hit and I was out like a light. Sadly I did not wake up early in the morning – I woke up at midnight, and I did not manage to fall asleep again. My jet lag seems to get worse with age, but perhaps it was also the excitement of doing my victory ride – any cycle that takes me back to Atsugi on my own bike is always a highlight for me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, up the point where it got to 7am and I started micro-obsessing about the routes to take, the sunlight hours to avoid, and so on. At that point the fatigue started to hit, I got a headache and wanted nothing more than to just stay in my hotel room all day.
Two paracetamols later I was on my way. I was dreading the first part the most, because the roads between Haneda and Kamakura are the ones I’m least familiar with, and there’s always tons of traffic. Traffic ended up being less bad than I expected, but I did spend a significant amount of time tweaking my saddle and handlebars since any previous alignment got lost when packing the bike up for travel. I ended up cycling with a crooked steering wheel and a sideways saddle for a while until I got fed up with it, took my luggage off (otherwise I couldn’t reach the bolts) and fixed it. Unfortunately, even though it was supposed to be sunny all day, the sky was massively hazy and there were some insanely wild gusts of wind, even in downtown Yokohama. Definitely not great conditions for cycling, and I got sandblasted many a time as my route took me along the coast later on.
Yokohama, and many other cities in Japan, do this thing where they pretend to be cycle-friendly by having a separate area of the sidewalk marked off as a cycle lane. Unfortunately (I’m using this word a lot in this post) that area is a complete wild west, with crazy moms on cyber-electrobikes passing you left and right and causing general chaos wherever they go. What’s worse, there are many major junctions everywhere where the cycle lane just veers off into the street being crossed, and there’s barriers everywhere between the sidewalk and road, so you can’t just hop on the road and cycle straight on. The only ways to get around those is to either go into the crossing street until the next normal zebra’d crossing, or to carry your bicycle up and down an overpass. Both of these options suck, so the best way to deal with these kinds of situations is to just cycle on the road, completely defeating the purpose of those “convenient” sidewalk bike lanes.
By around 10am I had finally sorted out all my alignment issues and left the worst part of Yokohama and it’s wild gusts of wind behind me. My original plan had been to cycle via Kamakura, but at this point it had become very clear to me that I was way more tired than usual. I bonked, had shivers and felt generally miserable, right at the point where the roads started to get hilly. On the short cycles I do on the exercise bike I tend to be not in terrible shape, but I have noticed a bit of a decline after starting the weight loss medication I’m on. This definitely seemed related, because I don’t usually feel this fatigued and empty after a fairly short and flat ride. I foolishly decided to mostly stick with my original route, with a slight modification: taking the national route 1 to Fujisawa and Enoshima, bypassing Kamakura entirely. A slight shortening but still sticking to the spirit of the original plan.
I could have, at that point, decided to go straight to Atsugi, but that would have come with its own navigational challenges, so I figured that, as long as I get to the seaside, it’s smooth sailing from there. Unfortunately (there’s that word again) route 1 has a little bit near Totsuka where the signage indicates that no bicycle are allowed. I could have backtracked a bit and taken a major side road, but instead, I saw a tunnel going underneath route 1 that seemed to be a more direct way forward, so I went with that. That was a big mistake.
I ended up being lost (with a maps app!) for half an hour around these parts. Despite checking the map at literally every corner, the roads were so unintuitive that I ended up doing a full circle back to this horribly steep hill, which I ended up having to push my bike up twice before managing to escape, all the while in the full 30 degree sun while worrying that my sunscreen had drooped off due to the excessive sweating I was doing. Not great. Whoever designed that neighborhood must love mazes. Eventually I managed to make it out of there but those hills definitely drained whatever energy I had left, and I was on reserve power from there on with a good 35km left to go..
And that’s when my nipples started to chafe! Yet another one of those joys of cycling I had forgotten about. Out of energy, nipples chafing, I continued on towards Enoshima, where I received some renewed facial sandblasting from the crazy winds at the seaside. I decided to take a break there and sit out the peak sun hour, though I could barely get any food in me. It just seemed that my body had shut down entirely, waiting for me to finish cycling before doing anything again.
The rest of the way wasn’t too eventful, though it was slow going. I was on familiar territory again, and route 134 has some decent wind shielding and uninterrupted road cycling, at least compared to the more urban areas I had just come from. Despite it being flat all the way to Atsugi I did end up taking a recovery break again mid-way because I could feel myself running out of energy again. This will sound like a duh moment, and I feel stupid even writing it, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to do any serious cycling while on weight loss medication. At least I’ve proven that now.
Despite the haziness and my lack of energy, I did manage to appreciate the moment where the suburbs of Hiratsuka finally end and there’s this brief bit of rice fields and mountain views before reaching Atsugi. I love seeing this every time, it never gets old.
This day is definitely in my top 5 worst cycling days, maybe even the top 3. I’m not sure about the rest of the rankings, but the two worst cycling days are definitely that time I severely underestimated the climb up to the Fuji five lakes, and that time I climbed up towards Mount Aso while also getting a flat tire and getting stopped by police. Oh, and to top it all off, after I reached the hotel and tried to sync my cycling data to Garmin, Garmin conveniently lost the entire day when I had to set up my bike computer with my laptop. Thanks Garmin..
So, while this post might seem like the start of another big adventure, it really isn’t. I’m only in Japan for a week, and it looks like the weather is taking a turn for the worse later this week, so this might have been the most cycling I’ll do this time. Still, suffering makes for a powerful memory. I won’t soon forget this day, and I have good hope that I can pick up the more strenuous cycles again once I’m off the weight loss medication. Here’s to the future.