Tama River Cycliing Road

  • Beware The Rides Of March

    By the Australian reckoning, where seasons change on the first day of the month, I am always a sucker when I get on a bike in March and suddenly expect spring conditions. No amount of experience seems to change the way I approach this. And it only happens in March, really, where I await the transition from winter to spring, which seems to drag on for an interminably long time. Every year, the gap between winter and spring seems to linger longer than ever before. Of course, each year is a relatively shorter period of life, so all things considered, it’s actually shorter. Japanese has a saying to describe this…

  • Summer Drawing To A Close Even If It Doesn’t Seem So

    It’s gonna top 35 degrees again today, but it was pretty obvious to me this morning on my ride that Tokyo’s summer is drawing to a close. Not only are the mornings getting cooler, albeit only slightly, they’re also getting darker. I’ve been using a small, flashing light to let others know I’m around for the past few weeks. But today I needed to use a bigger light that would enable me to see what was going on during the first part of my journey along the Tama River Cycling Road. And instead of being accompanied by the sound of chirping cicadas, the dominant bug life on morning rides this…

  • Hammered By The Cycling Gods

    Despite a short work week, life was busy and the cycling gods dealt another blow that made it hard to stay on the bike. After riding more than 30,000 kilometers in 2021, the fates have combined to drastically curtail my riding as I’ve been affected by work, play, family, health, commitments and theft have intervened. This week, I worked on site every day and left my PC in the office, which enabled me to commute by bicycle two days in a row. By the time I went to a colleague’s band play on Friday night at the Ruby Room in Shibuya, I was exhausted, but also crippled by arthritic pain…

  • Darkness Deathtrap

    This morning reminded me that I am a potentially lethal presence on the Tama River Cycling Road. It was cold, wet, dark and raining. And I realized yet again that I am basically blind in those conditions, being unable to see. I’m not helped by only using an 800 lumen light on the track instead of the 2,000 lumen light I had used up until last winter, but which is no longer financially tenable to maintain. Luckily, I made it home safely and was rewarded to see a lush garden basking in the bath it received in the first rain on Tokyo for 40 days!

  • Jama on the Tama

    Autumn is a delightful time for cycling, and unfortunately for running, too, which means almost daily encounters with one of my least favorite Japanese words: jama. Jama, 邪魔, literally translates as “evil magic,” but means something like hinderance, impedance, or, as I prefer, bloody nuisance. Autumn brings out all the joggers onto the Tama Cycling Road and, despite a perfectly good path below the levy on which the track for cyclists has been made, runners take over the path. They’d be fine if they kept to the rules and ran to the edges of the path, but rare is the runner who does so, and most joggers have pods in…

  • Many Happy Returns

    Don’t be fooled: This post has absolutely nothing to do with birthdays. It’s about doing things again for the first time in a while. The whole day was a series of events reminding me of the past. We started by cleaning the estate garden. We live in what is basically a retirement village that has cheap management fees, and they’re cheap because residents have to keep the common gardens and grounds maintained. When the cleaning was over, it was back on the bike. And I was back with a camera bag on my back for the first time in many years. I had a delightful ride up to the end…

  • Cycle of Life

    Life looks like it’s gonna be pretty busy for the next few weeks, so it might be something of a last chance to post for a while, and fortunately I got to kick off this period with a ride along the Tama River this morning. It’s been a funny rainy season so far; it’s onset delayed by weeks and the consistent rain I expect has been replaced by heavy rains punctuated by long periods of sunshine and heat. The garden loves it!

  • Roo-ed Good Health!

    Not much is going well (except rude good health), but I got a lucky break today and feel pretty chuffed about it. Following the morning’s customary ride, I got home and discovered the kangaroo badge I had velcroed to my bike saddle bag just two days ago was gone. I kicked myself with the reminder of my incredible propensity for breaking, losing, damaging or otherwise rendering unusable just about anything I ever get my hands on. Then, I happened to look at Strava and noticed that a follower had posted a photo of the lost badge! “You bloody ripper,” I thought, believing that I’d be able to pick it up…