3 Imperial Laps in a Haze
July 24, 2008 · Print This Article
- Distance: 15.82 miles
- Time in motion: 1 hour 00 minutes 56 seconds
- Average speed: 15.6 mph
- Max speed: 28.5 mph
I just didn’t have it tonight, and I knew it even before I left my apartment. A ludicrously late bedtime last night, a late, undigested dinner, and lots of humidity and red lights all added up to a very slow 3-laps around the Imperial Palace tonight. I felt like my head was in a cloud the whole ride. The constant red lights just getting out to the palace loop did nothing for my rallying, and I didn’t even make the light for dropping into the loop, which I make like 90% of the time!
I had no delusions of doing 4-laps tonight as I proudly did last Thursday night. I just barely finished the 3-laps tonight in the allotted 30-minute time limit. I had to even clip out of my pedals once the traffic was so bad. No doubt I have to go riding earlier from now on. I now believe traffic picks up again after 11pm. So the best time is between 9:30pm and 10:45pm.
Of note, the level of safety Japanese cyclists find adequate totally baffles me. I saw these two things tonight:
- On one of the fastest parts of the palace loop I pass a young j-girl on a Japanese-style bike listening to earphones while checking e-mail on her cell phone with no front or rear lights and wear dark-ish clothes.
- A seemingly real cyclist j-dude on a track bike riding in between two lanes of full speed traffic in a very hairy section of Shinjuku-dori without a rear light in dark clothes! (later I saw he at last had a front light)
I would personally feel totally petrified to ride under either circumstances. It was really shocking just to see that j-dude ride in the middle of the road with cars zipping by him to his left and to his right, all with no rear light! This wasn’t just for a second either, it was for several hundred meters. Shocking.
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