Archive for the 'Bike' Category

The Legend of Mac: Quest for Castle Mountain

Published by Bob Sanchez on March 13, 2008 in Bike. 0 Comments

Sometimes life in Japan resembles Nintendo adventure games so much that it’s no wonder the games came from here.

Take for example my first days in Fukushima. All I knew was that Fukushima was an hour north of Tokyo on the Bullet Train, and that was going on the word of my boss-to-be (the same guy who brought me into the country without a proper visa. It took 90 minutes, by the way).

I was plopped down in a fine apartment in the Bakersfield of Japan, but I had taken a night train and it had been raining, so I awoke on my first day in town without the foggiest clue of where I was or what anything looked like.

Kind of like Link in the GameBoy version of the Legend of Zelda where he has to wake up the Wind Fish to make Marin’s dream come true.

The map in that game was a 256-square grid, and you couldn’t look at places you hadn’t been yet. If you tried to look at the map while you were at Marin’s house in the very beginning, you couldn’t see anything at all.

Waking up in Fukushima that day in 2005 was frighteningly similar. I pushed out square by square and got my bearings, and I had to work at it. Different language, little order to the placement of roads and buildings, no street names, randomly distributed rice fields on any inch of undeveloped land - it was in every way a strange new world.

One of the reasons I so enjoy bicycling around Kochi and traveling through Japan is the interesting geography. Japan is basically a bunch of steep mountains sticking up out of the ocean, and Kochi has some of the gnarliest land formations in the country.

My apartment and school are 4 miles away from the Pacific, but you wouldn’t know it for the 1,000 foot mountain range that runs parallel to the shore between us and the ocean. Kochi Bay comes in through a gap in the mountains less than 1,000 feet wide.

About 10 miles to the west, an even smaller opening creates a dragon-shaped bay that stretches 8 miles inland, but parallel to the shore so that the peninsula is literally mountains poking up out of the water. There is very, very little sand and minimal beach area, and the treacherous road that runs the length of the peninsula offers several views of the bay and the ocean simultaneously.

My descriptions don’t do justice to the amazing natural sights, and the numbers probably don’t mean much to anyone with less than a passing interest in geography. To LINK this back to the Legend of Zelda, it’s as if God wanted to cram all of these geographical features into a limited space - much the same way that artists and programmers had to make everything fit onto the limited memory of a game cartridge.

So you get cool stuff like an active, ash-spewing volcano in the middle of a bay next to a city of 600,000 people Or how about another stinkin’ volcano jutting up out of the ocean on one side and overlooking a lake on the other within a span of 5 miles?

While driving on a Kagoshima highway that doubled as a tsunami wall, I saw an island about a half-mile off the coast. A small, sandy boat launch stuck out between the road and the bay, and I pulled the car off the road to read the sign posted in the turnout.

It was talking about Chiringashima, the uninhabited, tree-shrouded island I saw before me. What I couldn’t see, because it was high tide, was a six-foot wide sandbar that leads out to the island only at low tide. Totally natural. How cool is that?

It reminded me of a level in WarioLand where you had to return to one of the beginning stages, which had changed dramatically because the tide had come in. The higher sea level gave Wario access to a secret door unreachable at low tide.

I often have these kinds of thoughts. Nerdy? Yes. Lame? Perhaps. But tell me that you would be prepared for facing down some video game situations in real life.

On to Castle Mountain. In search of the perfect Morning Ride, I decided to take a road that the Bike Shops recommended to me in the fall.

The main road, Highway 33, begins in Kochi City, goes up and around a group of mountains and a river gorge, and ends on the west side of town. Dozens of farming roads work their way up and down the mountains inside the loop, and I wanted to cut through the circle on the road that went up to the peak of Castle Mountain.

This kind of thing wouldn’t be too difficult with a Thomas Guide and a full tank of gas, but, as I mentioned before, Japan doesn’t name streets. There are highway numbers, but to my frustration, nobody seems to use them. If I stop and ask someone how to get to Highway 195, for example, I usually get a blank look and something like the following:

“This road goes up that-a-way, and that road goes over there.”

That suffices in this video game world. Navigating in the city isn’t too difficult as you have buildings and traffic lights to count, but get away from the concrete jungle and you have to start using riverbends, felled trees, Honesty Markets, and abandoned vehicles.

For the Castle Mountain bit, I looked at my big map of Kochi City and tried my best to visualize what the route would look like. I could see where I wanted to go in the overview map in the bottom corner, but the actual roads on the enlarged map were covered by the legend.

Unfazed, I set out at 6 a.m. the following morning with what I thought was a good picture of the adventure ahead. I made the correct turn off Highway 33 and made it up to Castle Mountain without any problems.

Getting down would be the tough part. Four- and five-point intersections greeted me like pitchforks, and while some roads were obviously dead-ends into someone’s cabbage patch, others tantalized with better pavement or a lighter slope. A few times, I actually had to stop and scratch my head to figure out what to do.

I made it back to Kochi, but I had gotten sucked into a loop within the big loop and ended up descending on the same road that brought me up.

I checked the detailed commercial map at school the next day and saw where I had made a wrong turn. I vowed to set out again and make it through to the other side.

The correct road got steep and nasty pretty quickly after Castle Mountain, which, by the way, turned out not to be the highest peak. I guessed at a few forks in the road and found the back side of Highway 33 on its winding trip back toward the west side of Kochi. Yahoo!

The seven-foot wide concrete road was strewn with pine needles and belied its status as a state highway. It looked like it got one car per hour tops.

A few miles later, I was confronted by a surprise junction - it was exactly the same shape as the one I had taken to get back to the highway. The smoother road made a sharp turn downhill while the rougher-looking option continued in the same general direction at the same altitude.

A rusted sign declared that Kochi City was downhill while Ino, the town to the west of Kochi, was straight ahead. I bought that and also figured that the well-paved road better suited a numbered highway, so I turned and started down the slope.

I arrived at an awfully familiar-looking crossroads, and with good reason: it was one of the head-scratchers from the climb up. I had just made another circle!

I laughed and shouted, “DAMMIT!” Fooled again. I wanted to climb the mountain once more and beat the maze, but my energy meter was critically low and time was running out. I hit SAVE and turned the game off to try another day.

Straight to the Bike Shop I went to solicit the advice of this game’s sages. I asked them why this particular area had to be such a puzzle, and why it was that I couldn’t stop thinking about figuring it out. They chuckled; this obviously wasn’t the first case of bike fever or Castle Mountain Syndrome that they’d seen.

Mrs. Bike Shop wrinkled her nose and said, “Mac, you’ve got to get a nose for Kochi. You have to stop at a fork in the road and be able to say, ‘Kochi is THIS way!’” She sniffed like a curious dog as she delivered her local wisdom.

I complained that even my sense of direction wasn’t working. I just couldn’t predict where the twisting mountain roads would go once I made a decision on one or the other.

“Well, if you do it my way, you only have to use your five senses,” she replied. I didn’t recognize the word for “five senses” right away and she saw it on my face.

I caught the meaning a fraction of a second before she started to ask this question:

“Do you guys have five senses, too?”

Mr. Bike Shop looked up from the cruiser he was assembling and his eyes met mine. We struggled to hold back the giggles, and Mrs. Bike Shop realized what she had just asked after two or three seconds.

“No, no, no! That’s not what I meant!”

But it was too late. I had to take a knee to properly hold my sides, and Mr. Bike Shop dropped his tools while guffawing loudly.

Three years ago, I was ready to punch the next Japanese who asked me if there were also McDonald’s in the U.S. or if I was physically capable of eating with chopsticks. Questions like that are still annoying to an extent, and while Mrs. Bike Shop’s question was formed with precisely the same kinds of words, the context was completely different.

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I am going to conquer that uncharted territory up around Castle Mountain. I’ll draw a better map, send it to the map company, and tell them to put their damn legend over the Pacific Ocean instead of over a very interesting network of farming roads.

But not today. It’s raining, and Mario doesn’t come out to play when it rains.

2.08 Horsepower Engine

Published by Bob Sanchez on March 6, 2008 in Bike. 0 Comments

Things are changing in Kochi.

People are putting away their gas heaters, and I’ve turned mine down several degrees. I’ve stopped wearing leg warmers to school and actually felt hot in my layers on Friday!

A brand-new Kochi Station opened up last week, and the town held a massive cleanup day for its 2008 tourism campaign. I’m seeing more and more people outside walking around.

We’re pulling out of this strange thing called Winter. It wasn’t a particularly tough or bitter winter by other people’s standards, but SHUT UP. I’m a pansy from Southern California, OK?

Upon departing from my house for the Sunday Ride, I was faced with a choice - ski mask, or no ski mask. It has never been cold enough to warrant wearing the mask to prevent frostbite and such, but being outside all day for the first time in January tore up my throat something awful, so I had been wearing it to keep my beautiful baritone beautiful.

These silly little incidents are significant to me because I’ve never had to think about them on a daily basis. It’s a pain and I’m learning more and more about why people would pay exorbitant amounts of money to live in Orange County.

I decided against the mask and went with a scarf and earmuffs instead. I applied sunscreen and got blasted by Level 3 Confusion. My fingertips were icicles on my face, but my nose was saying, “HEY, what’s that? It’s summertime! We’re going to the beach! All right!” It had been that long since I had gotten even a whiff of sunscreen and it threw me for a loop.

The scarf came off before we departed from the Bike Shop. Other bikers were taking off their windbreakers and masks. The sun was high and bright and I’m sure it got up to 60 degrees. It was a gorgeous day and we were out there spending it.

Our destination was a mountaintop cherry orchard, but we climbed some other mountains for fun along the way. The first one was Buddha Slope, a long, dark climb that has a much longer, brighter descent into a valley full of apple, pear, and peach orchards.

I made it to the top before a few other riders, and while it’s never a race, that felt pretty good. As Mrs. Bike Shop huffed and puffed through the pass, she said, “Ohhhh, I lost to Mac and his horsepower!”

Opportunities for me to brag about myself in this group are few and far between, so I told her about the time I generated 2.08 horsepower in physics class in high school.

I participated in an experiment in this physics class as a TA in my senior year of high school. The students were studying power and learned that horsepower was a unit of physical work done within a set amount of time.

We went out to the football bleachers to see how much horsepower each of us could generate. We had already calculated the height of the stairs and each person’s approximate mass, so we knew how much work was required to move each person’s mass up the stairs.

From there, it was a matter of how fast that work could be done. Some students jogged up the stairs and others walked, but nobody skipped steps. I asked the teacher if it mattered whether we took every step, and he said that it didn’t.

My turn came up, and I jumped up the stairs as fast as I could. We ran the numbers and I had churned up more than two horsepower. Nobody else had even reached one.

That didn’t sound right, so I did it again. And again. And again. Even tried running all the way to the top of the bleachers, and not once did the number dip below two.

The teacher busted 1.5 but I took home the grand prize with 2.08, the number from the last run.

Of course this doesn’t mean that I’m capable of sustaining that kind of power over any significant amount of time or of doing anything meaningful with it. But I think it’s cool to say that I can generate the power of two horses by somebody’s standard.

I take every chance I can get to relate stories from my past in Japanese because it’s a confidence-builder; when saying something for the first time in Japanese, I do better telling old stories than I do attempting to answer unexpected questions.

I was very satisfied with the way the story came out in Japanese. So satisfied that when we reached the other bikers and Mrs. Bike Shop asked me to tell the story to them, I didn’t disappoint. That was a big mistake.

Everybody laughed at the story and that was fine with me because it was meant to be a freakish and humorous account, but I’m never going to hear the end of it.

Following our break, I switched gears going uphill and heard a strange sound. I stopped after going up and over the hill and saw that my chain had somehow come off the cog in the very back of the derailleur and was passing over a metal clip instead of the cog. I hailed Mr. Bike Shop, and he took a look and had no idea how that could have happened.

I should’ve seen this coming:

“Gee, Mac, must’ve been that 2.8 horsepower of yours.”

The final climb up to the cherry orchard featured a crooked, Lombard Street-esque road whose switchbacks offered great views of the bikers behind and below. Playful horsepower barbs rained down from above as I struggled up the steep incline:

“Come on, Mac, use that horsepower!”

“What was it? 3.5?”

“Unhitch the horse cart!”

These jabs, and the fun in general, have been missing from the Sunday rides since I returned home from Christmas. I am quite sure that the season has a lot to do with it.

Mr. Bike Shop and I endured ribbings about our unkempt beards (pretty much any facial hair appears unkempt here). A Canadian girl who rides with us tried out a local slang phrase, but it sound like “BALLS!” when she said it, so we razzed her about that. We poked fun at Mrs. Bike Shop for communicating so well with the farmers, whom none of the rest of us could understand because of their thick accents.

Laughs abounded and they, coupled with the sunlight pouring down from the sky, made it very easy to keep the energy level high. I peeled back the finger coverings on my gloves and rolled down my leg warmers for the ride home. We traveled nearly 60 miles, and I’m usually broken around 50. Today, however, I finished just a few minutes behind everybody else and felt like I could have continued!

The best part of the day came while we were sitting around at the orchard, eating cherry-flavored rice and mochi balls that reminded me of Cream of Wheat with a hint of cherry. I turned to Mrs. Bike Shop and said, “Man, I can’t wait for spring!”

She delivered the gem of the day, music to my ears:

“Whaddya mean wait, Horsepower Mac? Spring is here!”

Boys in a Box

Published by Bob Sanchez on January 29, 2008 in Bike. 1 Comment

This particular ride was canceled due to rain, so I was really looking forward to the makeup a week later. Didn’t know exactly where we were going, but I knew that it wouldn’t be at a hellish pace because the old ladies were coming along.

We departed at 8:30 from the Bike Shop, and if I had to guess I’d say it wasn’t a hair over 40 degrees. I had a ski mask, earmuffs, and scarf on underneath my helmet as well as double layers everywhere else, and I was cooking. I took off half the stuff and jammed it into the pockets of my heavy jacket, right next to a small bottle of sake that I was told to bring along to keep warm.

We took back roads all the way up to Tosa-Yamada, a town I had been to several times before to watch baseball games. We passed a little patch of land peppered with every vegetable imaginable. It was just a quarter-acre among thousands of acres of farmland, and nothing was special about it except the variety of produce. Cabbage, ginger, carrots, radishes, broccoli, tomatoes, pumpkins, several different types of onions, and the list goes on.

We waited for the old folks in front of this plot, and I didn’t read the sign until we had started up again. It threw me for a loop, so I turned around and read it again:

Pick-It-Yourself Market!
Grab a basket from out back and load it up with whatever you want!
Drop the money in the bucket!
Enjoy the fruits of the labor of your land!

I thought that was a pretty cool variation of the Honesty Market and said so out loud. It was here that Mr. Bike Shop would drop his first gem of the day:

“I don’t think that they are free.”

We met a large group at a temple in Tosa-Yamada and wheeled off for some museum on the Monobe River. I didn’t really care where we were going, it was just nice to be outside and with people after spending last weekend alone at home watching the rain. I spoke mostly with another foreign fella in the club, and he was giving me plenty of reasons to stay in Kochi for another year.

It really is a wonderful place. For being the toughest winter I’ve ever experienced, it isn’t bad at all. Aside from the crappy apartment buildings and having to defend yourself against the cold all hours of the day, it’s totally doable in Kochi.

Broken record time: the scenery and nature are just amazing. I looked at the Monobe River, the sky, the trees, and the road and I got so excited about it that it took a physical toll by the end of the day.

We continued upstream, crossing the river on iron bridges several times. These bridges were constructed with see-through steel grating where asphalt would normally be, so we were afforded views beneath as well as above and of all sides!

The museum was in there somewhere, but it was under construction and I was too busy trying to appreciate everything I had been seeing all day. Most riders headed home on their bikes from the museum, but Mr. Bike Shop coerced us into going “just 6 miles farther” to a hot spring that he knew of.

I still haven’t learned how to speak Mr. Bike Shop’s language. He said it would take “1 hour plus alpha,” to which I asked what the hell this alpha business was all about.

He said, “Relax, alpha is just some undetermined amount of time. It’ll probably be like an hour and a half.”

Over two hours and about 12 miles later, we arrived at the Sasa Hot Spring, nestled in a canyon beneath Three Peaks.

I’m beginning to think that Mr. Bike Shop talks the way he does on purpose and that his distances and times are latent challenges. Maybe when he’s duping me into doing something I wouldn’t have done if I knew the truth, what he’s really doing is saying, “See? Didn’t know you could go that far, did you?”

Back to Sasa Hot Spring and Three Peaks. We dismantled our bikes and put them atop the Bike Shop’s van, which their daughter had driven in order to meet us and take us home. We entered an A-frame building made of logs, complete with a smoking chimney.

This would be my first hot spring with the bike club, and I was looking forward to it. Six guys, including me, piled into the tiniest bathhouse dressing room I’ve seen since I’ve been here.

It didn’t get much better as I stepped through the curtain and into what I can honestly call a bath-room. Most hot springs are resort-like, with rows upon rows of squat showers, saunas, and Turkish baths. This place was just a bit bigger than my bedroom.

Three sets of spigots, not shower heads, stuck out of the wall about 18 inches off the ground. Icy water spurted from the hot water spigot and I did my best not to gag at the hideous odor of sulfur when the hot water finally came out.

And the bath - it was a wooden tub about the size of a couple of coffins put together. It looked like a gigantic sake box, and the hot spring water trickled into it from a single bamboo reed resting on one corner.

I had dallied getting naked and showered, so I had the unenviable task of squeezing between middle-aged men who were already positioned, very comfortable, and very naked. I got in and the displaced water whooshed over the side, much to the delight of the other guys. I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in and I weigh about what I did in high school, but you can still pinch more inches of me than you could of them.

Rub-a-dub-dub, six men in a tub. We were able to relax, but quarters were cramped. Mr. Bike Shop started telling me about his first trip ever overseas, to Los Angeles about 20 years ago. He’s a good story-teller and he had me leaning closer and closer, trying to get the best earful possible.

His left eyebrow shot up, and he gave me a sly look and said, “Wait a minute, Mac. Check this out!”

His left hand was fishing around for something in the murky water, and I choked at the thought of what it could be. What was this crazy old dude about to show me?

He cocked a grin and slowly raised a One-Cup Sake bottle out of the bath. He peeled back the lid, giggling, and gave a toast to an imaginary partner.

After three seconds plus alpha, I exploded in laughter so deep and hard that it hurt. Mr. Bike Shop is a tricky fella, he certainly knows how to take a kid for a ride.

“LSD Ride” or “I Put the S in LSD”

Published by Bob Sanchez on January 13, 2008 in Bike. 0 Comments

I make it a point to go and see the Bike Shops once a week outside of our Sunday group rides. They’re good people and have plenty to say about matters other than pedals, gears, and equipment.

I doubt that I’ll leave much of an impression on their lives, as they are well-known in the biking world and have enough friends and acquaintances, but I treasure my chances to learn from them.

Mrs. Bike Shop gave me the traditional New Year’s greetings and then said, “Pictures?” in English because I had promised some snapshots from home in exchange for a picture of the Bike Shops. I told her the truth, that I had not snapped a single shot while I was at home. I left that to my family and friends, and they took some great photos, some of which I’m using on this site.

She smiled nonetheless and produced a bike club newsletter with the complete schedule for 2008. I thanked her and returned home without looking at it.

What a surprise when I checked the schedule for January 13th and saw that we would take an “LSD Ride.” It was written on this Japanese newsletter exactly as it appears here: “LSD Ride.”

Now, I’m not silly enough to believe that this actually had anything to do with drugs, and I knew that there would be a reasonable explanation. Japanese people abbreviate things and write out words in English quite casually and often, far outside our use of burrito and laissez-faire.

However, for literary purposes, cue up my giddiest, most bewildered voice: I prepared for the trip, wondering what amazing things we would see, hear, and taste on our LSD ride. Would we shoot up together at the Bike Shop or wait until we got to the top of Magic Mushroom Mountain?

I got to the Bike Shop before anyone else and caught Mr. Bike Shop with a toothbrush in his mouth (they live above the store). “Yo, Mr. Bike Shop, what’s an LSD Ride?”

He informed me that it stands for Long Slow Distance Ride, which in Japanese sounds like “Rong Su-roh Deesutansu Raido.”

He said that we’d be going about 65 miles round trip and that everyone would do the course at their own pace. Which, in this bike club, means that we were probably going 75 miles, the pace would be maniacal, and that I should’ve packed a sleeping bag because I was going to finish a day behind everybody else.

Keeping up with the pack was a lot of work for me, even on flat ground. The wind was in our faces as soon as we turned away from the coast and started the gentle ascent, and I quickly fell behind and lost whatever draft I could have gotten. I climbed steadily until I reached a tourist trap nearly 20 miles out of Kochi and probably got there within two or three minutes of everyone else.

The shop owners had prepared a giant vat of a New Year sweet bean soup and gave each of the riders a bowl. I got a “Wow, you’re good with chopsticks!” from a guy who has heard me detail in Japanese the trials and tribulations of being the group’s caboose. Still gets me!

It’s not LSD, but egg nog sends you on a trip that lasts for weeks. The way that sweat was oozing out of me instead of running like water, I figured I was still feeling some effects of the copious amounts of egg nog that I consumed when I was home for Christmas, so I decided to call it a day and head home.

I would have liked to see whatever it was that we were working toward on the LSD Ride, but I decided a few days ago that there’s no sense in making myself crazy on the bike and pedaling myself blind each time I go out. I don’t have anything to prove; I did that last year by trying this new activity and grinding it out. Until I get a roadie like everyone else, I will probably not accompany them for complete trips.

That will go down as my first LSD trip!

Next Ride

Published by Bob Sanchez on October 6, 2007 in Bike. 0 Comments

Today, we took an “easier” route. Right. No longer the Fastest Biker in Kochi, I was ready for another whipping when I came out this morning.

We rode 18 miles just to get to the start of the climb, and I fell behind even then. These guys can sprint! I may have been able to keep up with them for awhile, but I didn’t see any sense in burning all of my energy just to get to the foot of the mountain.

The path was next to a beautiful river carved out between two mountain ranges, and again, just breathtaking. I checked on a map later, and the slope we climbed was only 725 feet, but given the steepness, I think that qualifies as a mountain. Then again, I’m from an area that is flatter than the awful curve ball I tried to throw in high school, so anything impresses me.

I got up in reasonable time and even beat a guy who had gotten a flat tire. How pathetic that I’m stoked on that! From there, we weaved through a valley with rice fields and apple and pear orchards, all the way to a train station that gets maybe four trains a day.

I actually got to rest and eat lunch with the rest of the club today! That’s a big kicker about falling behind; not only is it tough to get to Point B, but by the time I get there, everyone’s ready to go to Point C.

There were a few ups and downs, and on one of the ups, Mrs. Bike Shop led me down a different path. I think a younger me would have been upset about that, but the fact is that I struggle to hang with the big boys and it was best that we did what we did.

Naked cherry trees dotted the long, winding road down, and Mrs. Bike Shop told me that it was the old highway and that nobody travels it anymore. That makes it a great secret spot for cherry blossom viewing in late March, and I’m going to have to write that down and remember it.

We met up with the others and followed the inner road of a peninsula before heading back to Kochi, and it rained the whole way back. A hair under 60 miles today, all told.

I like this group. We’re out doing something during the day and we don’t go out and get plastered afteward. The members of the White Lillies Volleyball Club in Koriyama said “good morning” to each other when practice began at 1 p.m. on Sundays, and the four-hour practices were little more than a warmup for the ridiculous drinking parties that followed.

Kochi Cyclist’s Touring Club is focused on something that’s fun and good for you. They’re showing me the backroads of Kochi, and there are too many to count and probably too many to take in before I move away someday. I’m experiencing them in an exciting new way, on a bike! Way different than those long drives I liked to take in California. I wish that everyone was in good enough shape to do it this way!

The Fastest Biker in Kochi

Published by Bob Sanchez on September 29, 2007 in Bike and Lessons. 0 Comments

I think I’m a serious biker.

Come on, I rode 15 miles a day in Hawaii going to and from work at sunrise and sunset. I haven’t owned a car since I graduated from high school and have only driven in one of the past six years. I have big, strong legs and I use them to ride as fast as I can. I’m gnarly and I’m faster than you.

I needed a new horse in Kochi, so I visited the bike shops in my area only to find that none of them had frames in my size. One kind gentleman pointed me in the direction of The Bike Shop, about two miles away from my apartment.

I located The Bike Shop and passed through the narrow door into a cramped, crowded room jam-packed with bicycles and accessories. Bikes hung from the ceiling and leaned against walls and display stands. Spare inner tubes peeked out from behind a rack overflowing with helmets.

I had to wade through bicycles to get to the back wall where a woman studied gloves and jersies with a pair of reading glasses. She had dark, leathery skin and a hawk nose, and she looked up when I said, “Excuse me, I’m looking for a bike.”

Looking into her face for the first time, I was struck by how much she reminded me of Santa Barbara volleyball legend Kathy Gregory, albeit a Japanese version. Something about this woman said, “Trust me, I know bikes” in the same powerful way that volleyball knowledge emanated from Coach Gregory.

I told her what I was looking for: something sturdy and smooth, but cheap. Something that I could tour the area with but wouldn’t set me back six months’ pay. Most of the price tags in the shop had more zeroes than I was thinking about, and I was fairly certain that I wasn’t going to come away from The Bike Shop with a new ride.

Mrs. Bike Shop worked on me and had me deciding between a $400 hybrid with fenders and a $700 road bike that looked much too serious for me. I deliberated a bit before going with the hybrid because it looked like other bikes that I had enjoyed riding in the past.

It’s the best bike I’ve ever had. It’s also the worst bike in the Kochi Cyclists’ Touring Club.

I joined KCTC after exploring Kochi on my own for about two weeks. I awoke every morning at 5:30 and rode up and down the coast on relatively flat terrain. I zoomed through the city streets to get to the beach, sure that I was the fastest thing ever to spin two pedals.

On my way back home from these rides, I’d pass junior high and high school students with their heads down, slowly wheeling their way to whichever gulag their uniforms represented. And I laughed. Look at me, I’m going three times as fast as you are. I’ll be shat, showered, and shorn before you can even sniff the school gates.

Obviously, this much biking prowess needed another outlet, so I asked Mrs. Bike Shop about the club and she invited me out for the next Sunday Ride.

I showed up in my baseball shorts with an athletic pullover, running shoes, a helmet and cool gloves.

Everyone else had a fancy road bike with super skinny wheels, proper biking attire including clip-on shoes, spare tires and pumps attached to their bikes, and two water bottle racks each. I had a bottle of water in a bag tied to my rear rack.

So at first glance, I knew I’d be spending time catching up. But most of the members were middle-aged and I thought I stood a decent chance of hanging with them.

WRONG. Mrs. Bike Shop called everyone together and said, “OK, today we’re going up Mountain X and then down to Valley Y. The distance isn’t there today, but it’s so damn hot that we’re going someplace cool.”

I had never been up a mountain on a bike, but I was ready to give it a try. We sped off (rather, they sped off) toward the mountain. We followed Mirror River, which passes through downtown Kochi, to its source and it was just gorgeous. I wanted to jump off my bike and go for a swim.

Fishermen and farmers were out doing their thing along the way, and green overflowed from every hillside and riverbank.

I reached the first rest stop just two minutes before the rest of the bikers were ready to continue the climb. There were so many switchbacks that I lost count, and at one point I decided that I could only handle three more before I would have to take an unscheduled break and fall further behind.

Luckily, the next one was the peak. I don’t think I’ve ever gone as fast on a bike as I did going down that mountain. I caught up with the pack going down, and it was thrilling to be in line with them, zooming past townsfolk and cars alike.

We got to a city-looking area, and it was the city to the east of Kochi. I figured we’d head back to The Bike Shop then, and I was very already patting myself on the back for making it the whole way. The leader made a quick right and we were off through a valley full of rice fields and little two-story houses.

There was enough of an incline that I got tired and started seeing spots, so I pulled over to the side and rested for a few minutes. I got back on and arrived at an intersection where Mr. Bike Shop waited patiently.

To the left was an unfinished tunnel. To the right, more valley. Ahead was a rather sketchy-looking tree-shrouded road that went straight up.

Mr. Bike Shop grinned and delivered what I would come to know as his Gem of the Day, a phrase in English so simple yet so appropriate:

“From here, four kilometers UP!”

I made it about a mile into the crooked, thin road up the mountain and almost passed out. I had to get off the bike and rest for about 10 minutes. I felt bad that Mr. Bike Shop had waited for me, but I just had no energy left. I had used up even my fumes.

I walked the bike the rest of the way up where a few bikers were waiting. We rode down, and it was fun, but I felt like I hadn’t earned it and deserved to walk the bike down.

Everyone was waiting midway down the mountain at a fork in the road. Mrs. Bike Shop (the only woman in the club) said, “Come on, Mac! We’re going back to The Bike Shop,” while everyone else tackled mountain number three.

I felt like a little baby for about five seconds until I was hit by THE MOST INCREDIBLE VIEW EVER. Kochi City splayed out beneath me - rivers, trees, buildings, hills, and the Pacific Ocean off in the distance. It was just fantastic, and the road down into the city was fun, too.

Mrs. Bike Shop said I could go home, but I wanted to be at The Bike Shop when everyone got back so I could pick up some words and maybe some tips about biking. I was dead tired, but I liked the challenge and was glad that I went back to the store.

I found out that the leader had won the 45-49 age group bike marathon weeks earlier as well as several other races, so I didn’t feel so bad.

Mrs. Bike Shop said that I had gone 40 miles and that my slowness was due to my bike as much as it was to my shape and inexperience. I was willing to say 70-30 in favor of me just stinking, but it would be nifty to try one of those road bikes just once.

In sum, I got smoked. Creamed. Whipped. Taken to school.

I thought I was a serious biker.