Archiv der Kategorie: 2009

Since some some weeks I have this strange idea to start the creation of a new team outfit for this year’s season and since some weeks less I am in contact with F2P in Singapore to find out about possible options. And all that despite all the considerable time and effort I had last years which brought nothing but blood, Swiss and tears. And of course a lot of colors to our otherwise boring and meaningless, gray existence. Well, it was mainly orange I have to admit.

There are three major reasons why I thought about having new team outfits:

1. The 2008 short sleeve jerseys were nice, but a little bit tight for some (most) of the team members. This is because they are based on so called „pro-cut“ specifications, i.e. these jerseys are made for guys and girls who do not only ride like pros [just as we do], but also look like cycling pros [which most of us don’t]. I send F2P some photos of typical Positivo Espresso riders [I will mention no names, but my one was included] and, well, they didn’t said it that clearly, but, how can I explain …. well I also had to swallow …. but basically they recommended something called „fun-cut“.
   But better to own a jersey which can be used than one to hang in a frame on the wall.

2. As the 2008 jerseys were the first design we made, there were certain strategic mistakes incorporated which are closely interlinked with the problems outlined above under (1). To cut a long story short, I was many times mistaken for Sydney Greenstreet and Tom was asked to sign autographs with „Akebono„. Even Ludwig would have looked like previous German Kanzler Helmut Kohl. So I got some strategic hints from F2P this time how to do a design that makes as look, smarter, faster and slimmer.

3. Finally we had no matching bib shorts for our fantastic team jerseys. In 2008 I rode a lot of times with the Positivo Jersey and the NFCC bib shorts – the best shorts I ever had and coincidentally manufactured by F2P. So I thought it would be nice to have some comfortable, good looking bib shorts as well.

4. And we didn’t had a long sleeve jersey as well, which meant that we could not sport the Positivo Espresso logo during the cold season. Yes, we could also use wind stopper jackets, rain vests, team socks and condoms imprinted with our logos but at some point one has to draw a line and say: Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish.

So, I had some discussion about possible designs, minimum lot sizes and options and I came up with the following ideas for 2009:

2009 POSITIVO ESPRESSO SHORT SLEEVE TEAM JERSEY

Well I didn’t want to change the overall theme so drastically so I stayed with the same colors as last year as a principle theme: orange, light and dark gray. I also left the „flag bands“ at the sleeves as they are very good looking and can be used handily to explain the international background of the team. I added the Haiku from Beat Takeshi on the back side, please check here for the explanation.

In order to make as look faster, smarter and slimmer I put the flamboyant orange of the front and back and the grey on the side panels and shoulders.

The joke on the side panels about dogs, pedestrians, cars and bikes was nice for 2008 but should not be extended in to this year.

And we can also easily make a long sleeve jersey out of this as well.

2009 POSITIVO ESPRESSO TEAM BIB SHORTS

A continuation of the same theme as on the short sleeve jerseys to have a unified outlook. Please note that the so called base panels are all uniform dark grey (so called „carbon grey“), they come only in eight base colors and cannot be imprinted with logos or patterns. At least not at a reasonable cost and also not without loosing durability.

The design emphasis our mights legs and people we will pass along the road will be terrified in awe and respect. Please also note that the long awaited „Traffic light bug“ sticker is now integrated on the back side for everyone to see. From behind, of course. These are extremely comfortable bib shorts – I wrote that already I know, but I would like to emphasize this again.

I still need to work on the long sleeve jersey design which I will do within the next days.

Please let me have your honest feedback, we can still work very much on the design. We need to place an order of 20 items of each of the basic types (so either SS jersey, LS jersey or bib shorts) and then we can have a minimum lot size of 5 or 10 or the other two basic types. Obviously, the more we take, the cheaper it will get. So please let me also know which types would be of interest to you.

To give you an idea of the cost involved :

– Short Sleeve Jersey app. 8.000 Yen
– Long Sleeve Jersey app. 9.500 Yen
– Bib Shorts app. 8.500 Yen

The last time I have paid upfront the complete order of 20 jerseys, however this time I would expect some help in this regard from the Positivo Espresso Hard Core Team members.

It would be nice to have the jerseys ready for the Fuji Hill Climb event at the start of June. Or Itoigawa? Hurry up guys.

I was thinking about doing some track training with Hiroshi in Kawasaki but I couldn’t reach him on the phone. Damned, I should have called much earlier! Because of the track, I canceled also the Shirokuma ride with TCC. And I didn’t know that Tom and Goro planned to take on Miura Hanto. AND I was idling around in the morning, so finally I was leaving the house at noon. What now?

So I had to decided fast and I decided for a fast, short and itense Otarumi – Tsukui trip which would bring me back home hopefully before darkness.

With a strong tailwind, everything was going according to plan. In no time I reached Sekidobashi on the Tamagawa and continued along the Akigawa towards Takao station. I have ridden this road now so many times, I wonder why I even bother to write about. As I was late, I decided to skip the break at the Takao 7-Eleven and charge Otarumi immediately. I didn’t planned to go for a good Togebaka time but I also didn’t wanted to slack. And then I saw a Nalsima rider about 200 meters in front (two legs this time) and of course I wanted to catch him, which I did. I stayed behind him for a while as he was going faster with me in his back but when he lost his power, I overtook him and then I saw another rider about 100 meters in front. And I also caught this one, although I was running out of steam. But once in front I didn’t wanted to be overtaken so I charged on until the very end. 15:06 minutes, not my best time but very good for this part of the season. And already after a little bit more than 2 hours on the bike.

There was no traffic on route 20 and going down to Sagamiko was fun as always. As I know the road now well I am going a little bit faster and more risky. Along road #515 / #517 and #412 (Doshi Michi) I continued until the point where one take a left turn at the Sunkus Combini. This time I found the right fork to the spectacular hanging bridge over lake Tsukui and the small and nice road along the slopes of the lake on the North side. Beautiful – thanks to Hiroshi and David to introducing me to this one.

Then it is a little bit boring to ride through Hashimoto and I don’t know where the „tank road“ is. After a little bit more than three hours I took the first break at the 7-Eleven in Hashimoto close to the military ground.
In no time I was on the bike again on Kan-One and continued in direction Tamagawa. I have never seen Kan-One as congested as today – OK, this was also only the third time I rode there. But sometimes there was no speed riding possible as I had to pass lines of cars waiting in front of traffic lights.
Still there was tailwind and some of the downhill parts were fast and finally I arrived back at the Tamagawa. From there it took me another 45 minutes home through Yokohama, going fast on a second power wave.

Overall it was a very fast trip in good weather with very few breaks. When I checked the Ciclo data tonight, I found out that the total trip time was 4:44 hrs, whereas the riding time was 4:29 hrs, meaning I had only 15 minutes of breaks, including traffic light stops and .. everything. 95% of the time out there actually riding on the bike is very good. So I good curious and checked the other two trips I had made, virtually taken the same road [one 3 km exception]. The riding time was 4:38 hrs and 4:30 hrs, so almost identical, however the total trip time was 5:54 hrs and 5:49 hrs respectively. In other words, one hour of breaks more … what a waste of time.

So let’s try to keep the breaks a little bit shorter if we do want to cover longer distances in winter/spring season.

… is actually a parody on a book title by Karl May, the author which is beloved by Germans for his Wild West stories and almost completely unknown to the rest of the world. Military intelligence indicated clearance of the Chichibu area so Ludwig and me took off on Wednesday for a longer ride.

We met at 8 AM at Tamagawara bridge and proceed under cloudy skies along the Tamagawa to Ome, where we had the traditional breaks at (1) Aurore bakery and (2) 7-Eleven on the other side of the road. I filled my bags with food as we had quite some ambitious plans in front of us.

From Ome we crossed into Chichibu and paid our first homage to a temple on the long pilgrimage still in front of us. Monshuin boasts a beautiful garden that has always caught our attention while pacing by the road in front of it at 45km/h – but this time we actually stopped for it.

 

Having left the temple, we followed road #53 leading towards Shomaru Toge. However before we reached the pass, we took a right turn to road #395 and made a shortcut to road #299. This was the first charter into unknown territory this day. It was much harder than expected, the road was nice and in good shape but partly a little bit steep and in the end leading us to elevation 465 meters. 

The descent was equally fast and before long we found ourselves on road #299 and climbing again – relatively steeply and immersed in rather too much fast traffic. Before the long tunnel we turned right and started attacking Karibazaka Toge. As I was slowly coming into shape, that went much better than I expected.

I made a silly joke about whale penis in relation with Japanese food, hardly hammering down my point while trying to suck enough air in to keep me going. Ludwig insisted that I should write about on the blog.

On the top we took a break ate our rations and finally blue sky was filling the gap between god and us above us. But is was bloody cold, only three degrees so we went on. Luckily no ice or snow in sight. So far we have always turned to the left in direction of Ono Toge, Shomaru Toge and Sadamine Toge, but this time we went to the right in direction Iimori Toge.

 

But we didn’t continue for too long and took another small forest road on the left which led us down, down and down. Within no time we have lost substantial elevation and we felt pretty cold. There was also one stretch of the road that was not paved, but this continued only for a kilometer or so. Unfortunately it was enough for both or us to warrant a new round of bike cleaning.

We visited another temple along the roadside (Tatsugaya) and then came to a small village (Ogose) where a cafe called „Die Sonne“ („the sun“, but not a newspaper) was closed except for Saturdays and Sundays. And probably also for all month which include the

 letter „R“. The local

 supermarket offered nothing to eat but Shoju, rice and flour but luckily we were able to find a nice Soba shop shortly before the entrance to the prefectures natural forest reserve. Ludwig was running out of steam but after he had his power-soba lunch he was winded up like an old tin toy racing car tuned with a titanium spring. From elevation 150 m 

we had to make our way up to 650 m again on road #61.

Our final goal was to reach the legendary temple called Takayama Fudoson. (This is NOT a real estate temple, because then it would be called Fudosan). Well to be honest, I don’t know if the temple is legendary or not, but it looked very tempting to ride there on a map.

Finally we made it, the last 300 meters or so really steep going down on a „concrete circle surface“ type of road, easily reaching 20% inclination. The temple was OK, not great, so we started to crawl up this crazy slope again – which is really crazy without compact crank.
It was already close to 4 PM so instead of going back to Ome, we decided that we continue on road #299 to Hano and take a train back home. Due to all the climbing (2.320 meter in total) we have covered only 115 km in 8 hours – unbelievable. So once we were finally on a slightly downhill road we speeded ahead at 30 Km/hr plus average more or less continuously.

And then after 140 km and 9 and a half hours our ride was over. We really did a lot of new roads, some serious climbing and saw a lot of interesting things. I guess a lot of these roads have been already covered by Tom in the summer of 2008 though.

http://www.mapmyride.com/route/jp/setagaya%20daita/174224540973

Now only a short train ride home was waiting for us.

But what was that? We had to wait almost 30 minutes before a train arrived – and finally it took me even after this 30 minutes two hours to arrive at home. OK, better than riding in the dark and cold on busy four lane roads home, but this was not after my taste.

Anyway a good ride and training. for Tsukuba. Anyone in?

Photos, map etc. will follow in different blog entry.

Jon Sparks and Craig Saphin from Wall Street Associates are organizing a longer bicycle tour with support vehicles in Kyushu between May 23rd and May 29th. Five days – 750 km. They are currently in the processing of assembling a group of riders, so far they have 20 riders committed and 15 tentatively registered. If I remember correctly, James send some e-mail about the same tour around some weeks ago.

I signed up tentatively as I am not exactly sure how my life will be in May. If you are interested to get more infos, please let me know, I will establish the contact for you.

小春日和 – a balmy day in autumn may not exactly describe the weather today, but is the only beautiful Japanese word I know which comes close to describe a feeling of spring. This normally will be followed by 三寒四温: three cold days, followed by four beautiful warm days.

I wanted to stay in bed rather long, so I opted for a 8.30 AM Tamagawa rendezvouz with Ludwig instead of the earlier alternatives with David, Jerome and James. Outside the wind was very strong. When I crossed the Tamagawa it was extremely strong – and Ludwig was not at the meeting point. Perhaps blown away on his superlight Canyon bike and with 3% body fat? No he was in bed, so I decided to take an easy spin alone.

Painful slow progress along the Tamagawa due to the strong headwind, it was difficult to ride faster than 20 km/hr. I decided to go to Takao, anyway away from the Tamagawa. I skipped the break at the 7/11 and attacked Otarumi immediately but was terribly slow again. But the weather was nice, very warm, so I decided to take on Yabitsu. Apart from Route 20 between Hakone and Jukoku Toge this is my favourite road/climb in Japan.

Before I started I had soba with duck meat at a restaurant at the Miyagase lake, the first longer stop of the ride. The soba was good, but the duck must have been very, very old.

With a tailwind the climb was surprisingly fast, only 1.26 min slower than my best time from last year. On the top the view was beautiful, the best ever: Not only the coastline, but also the sea was clearly visible with Oshima, Nijima and Kotsujima lingering in the background.
I still felt good when I arrived in Hadano and I briefly thought about climbing up Hakone, continue on route 20 and take the Shinkansen home from Atami [the Ekiden route]. But when I reached national road #1 I recognized that I was still 14 km away from Odawara and reason and logic took charge again. So I continued in the opposite direction along the coast in direction Enoshima and then further on to Kamakura.

I had coffee & cakes at Seacastle, the old German restaurant at Kamakura, my second longer stop in 8 hours of riding . The rest was an uneventful ride through Kamakura, then back by train from Ofuna, all in all 160 km.
The weather was really fantastic today and I was glad that I went out riding. Other riders must have thought the same way; rarely I have seen that many on the road. As if the official riding season has started on February 1st.

I just bought „Showa Japan“ written by Hans Brinckmann (Tuttle) and managed to read until page 72 when finally I came about something interesting. A haiku, written by every body’s darling Beat Takeshi, commenting subtly on the state of minds in Japan:

I do not want to start a discussion whether is is just or not to cross red lights – I basically believe that everybody has to make his decision on his own. But I like this haiku very much and I believe that it deserves a place on the 2009 Team Positivo Espresso jerseys.

After being married for more than 16 years I never stop to marvel at the complete chaos which can be maintained within a women’s handbag. My wife owns a great variety of bags and all of them, even if not used for months or even years, are full with all kind of stuff. So I wondered, can the same be said about saddle bags?

In order to answer that question, I posted a thread at the TCC website and asked for comments what kind of stuff should be in a saddle bag when riding out. The answers were most interesting, you can read the details here.

Below is an intermediate summary of the results

Multitool Some hex keys and plus/minus drivers are a must. Punctured tire I believe this is regarded as the number one problem on rides so everyone has at least tire levers, spare tires and patches with them. The info about the easy patches was particular helpful, so I will use them only for temporary repair in the future. Also I have bought some tire patches from park Tool in case there is some serious damage to the tire. But I don’t think this has as high a priority as a punctured tube. Pumps or CO2 Cartridges I have to agree with some of the comments, that working with CO2 cartridges can go wrong and that one only has one chance. I remember a particular incident where three of us thought be would have 5 cartridges to inflate a punctured tired and we failed nevertheless (in fact we had only four with us, two were empty on the valve, another one blow the first tube, and we forgot to close the valve when we screwed the last cartridge on). The valve itself I use is very small, so from a volume point of view I guess the cartridge solution has a point nevertheless. One more disadvantage is, that you cannot take the cartridges with you on a flight. Neither in your suitcase, nor in your hand baggage. My personal feeling is: I had pumping, so I would prefer the cartridges but overall it is a very balanced issue. Spokes This is a point I completely overlooked. But broken spokes happen from time to time on a ride and if you have a wheel with only a few of them, it is rather impossible to continue to ride. (like my G3 Campa Zonda wheels). Of course the reasonable choice is to buy a wheel with 28 or so spokes (with standard replacements at every bikeshop in Japan) , but they look so …. boring. I think it is a good idea to pack a tool/wrench and a spoke on a ride, but for me that is impossible, as the bloody Campa spokes are different left and right AND rear and front, so this would mean four replacement spokes. No way. Batteries Standard types can be bought at most of the combinis, so I don’t think that they are really necessary. (also some of them tend to leak and to clean the acid in your saddle bag is comparable to the Exxon Valdez disaster. Latex Glove This was the most surprising idea. The only time I got in contact with them was for rectal cancer prevention. But I guess that is something you perform rather seldom on each other during a ride out in the country side. Good Luck Charm Of course. How could something like this been have possibly overlooked? Small types, made out of carbon or titanium are preferred. Otherwise an arrow or an 絵馬 with the pleas written on them for every ride are also decreasing the risk of accidents, punctures and general poor performances. Should always have a small bell attached to. Electrical Tape I think this is also a very good idea. A German craftsman if called for to a house, would invariably carry a set of tools with him, such as screwdrivers, hammer etc. with which he would work on a problem. However, when I was living in (countryside) China, a plumber would normally come without any tools but always with a roll of duct tape. Believe me, there is no problem in China which cannot be solved with the appropriate dossis of duct tape. Leaking water pipe? – 100 meter of duct tape will do the job. Broken light on your car due to crash? – duct tape first. High unemployment rate in the cities? – duct tape over the mouth if protesting. Even the Beijing Olympic stadium design, as one can clearly see, was inspired by random wrapping of huge duct tape over a standard stadium. So electrical tape is a very good idea. In can help if the handlebar tape unravels because one is too stupid to do that properly. And probably it can be used to repair tubes, tires, tie spokes together, provide first aid and silence your wife and kids. In Japan there is a wide variety available and I bought some in nice colors (yellow, grey, red) for 37 Yen a piece at the local home depot equivalent. I used it as a finishing tape on the handle bar – the stripes provided with the handle bar tape are ridiculous short. Looks great now. Actually very Chinese. Finally I found Edogawakikomans idea very good to have a wad of freshly printed 10.000 Yen notes in a brown envelope printed „LDP“ on it in the saddle bag; in case something goes seriously wrong. Better to buy a new bike with them instead of wasting time with repair.