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Today - August 2011

Not sure which way the water's flowing, if at all, so not sure which is left or right.

I had previously ridden the south bank, on my way to Choshi. So this time we took the north bank. The south bank is better, being all dedicated cycle Bummer.

Ok, I call that the left side only because you entered it from Edogawa....unless you were performing circus tricks...

I prefer that side... The gravelly section on the south side annoys me.....:eek: but I usually cross over the small footbridge at the high school...especially when heading to ride East down the Tone....or to Moriya...
Love the canal in hanami time....

A bit tricky to find the to evade via the golf course... Just remember to turn right at the post office and you will be fine.
 
Nice pix FarEast. What are you taking those shots with? A MarkD2 and a 50mm at F2.0? Looks like you know what you are doing.... If it is just a point and shoot, well done!
 
Mon (weather permittin) hope to do Edogawa again and this time go to the end of the trail (and back).
If you're hungry when you get there I recommend the Keyakichaya restaurant just in the shadow of the 'castle' at Sekiyado. And just next to the castle car park there's a small bridge where you can cross the river and start your way down the opposite bank. Good luck!
 
Thanks for the tips and advice!

Looks like the percentage of rain is too high (50-60% and it's wet now) for tom morn and I so I've called it off.
My last day off too. I gotta lotta stuff to do the rest of the day (afternoon on) and may be busy the next few weeks so it's really a shame (maybe no cyclin till 9/10 or 11).

I gotta be on a certain side at the sea end to go home but I know/saw a few bridges that cross the river (more near the ocean) so maybe I will 'adventure' down the opposite side on my way back.

Wishin I had navi but the wife isn't keen on me shellin out alotta dough on a bike GPS (so I may have to go the iphone5 route and buy two bats for it).

When I do finally do this ride I think it'll be my longest yet, I estimate about 120 km from Minami Funabashi Station and back.
 
Nice pix FarEast. What are you taking those shots with? A MarkD2 and a 50mm at F2.0? Looks like you know what you are doing.... If it is just a point and shoot, well done!

Nikon D80
F-stop f/5
Exposure time 1/60sec.
ISO speed ISO-200
Focal length 50mm
Max Aperture 4.5

Wanna se a pic of the whole bike, Looks real nice

Chuck, once the new saddle arrives will give her a full photo session ;)
 
It's raining now so at least I felt I made the right decision (although it sucks).

Oh well, I didn't have to cancel many days of riding due to rain during vacation so that was good.

Total of 676.96 km down on both bikes for my summer vacation in 10 dayz of riding.
Would have added another 100 some km today if I got to ride but it's double last year when I only had my mountain bike.

Now to dream of my next ride (maybe in about two weeks)...

Gettin down w/the camera lingo:
I don't take pics much myself anymore but I have a (old 35mm film) Canon EOS 5.
Always wanted the 50mm f1.4 prime lens (50mm is about what you see with your eyes, your normal field of vision). Canon also have a 50mm f1.2 (very expensive) and f1.8.
I like ISO 100 but then many pics have to be taken w/a tripod.
 
50mm film = 31.25mm digital, the conversion factor is 1.6. Amazing none of the manufacturers bother to tell us. A 50mm digital lens is about the same as an 80mm film lens, which is a short telephoto, so radically different.
 
Took some recovery (stomach virus) laps around the Pimple (Palace) this morning. Pretty vacant, which was nice. I decided to ride the new Alize since I wasn't in a romper stomper mood. If the Diablo is full on ultraviolence, then the Alize is la Femme Nikita. Very svelte, but when you give it a nudge - it full on roundhouses you! The aerodynamics are so obvious when riding this bike. I thought the Diablo was a smooth wind cutter - but the Alize is even more apparant. It's very quiet and when you hit wind gusts the bike literally goes 'on tack'. I had a fun time just cruising in a 53/12 and then doing change-ups on the short sprint section. Getting my chops back for a geared bike is some effort - riding fixedgear means I don't have to think about gears and can just focus on pedaling. Riding WITH gears means I want to use them smoothly and perfectly. I do miss being able to 'knock down' on the stand by wacking my knee on the rear shift lever, though.
 
more beer

An article after my own heart, but I know that one part about a liter or two is flat out wrong:

AUGUST 24, 2011, 12:01 AM
Nonalcoholic Beer Aids Marathon Recovery

A new study reports that beer is an excellent recovery beverage for marathon runners. But you may not want to start a raucous celebration just yet. The beer was effective only if it was nonalcoholic.
Running a marathon is, of course, punishing to the body, causing muscle soreness and inflammation. Grueling exercise can also weaken the immune system, making athletes susceptible to colds and other ills in the weeks after the event. Some athletes, particularly in Europe, long had downed nonalcoholic beer during hard training, claiming that it helped them to recover, but no science existed to support the practice.
To study the matter, researchers at the Technical University of Munich approached healthy male runners, most in their early 40s, who were training for the Munich Marathon, and asked if they would — in the name of science — be willing to drink a considerable amount of beer. Two hundred seventy-seven men agreed, even when told that the beverage would be nonalcoholic. Only half of the group received the alcohol-free beer, however; the other half got a similarly flavored placebo. No one knew who was drinking what.
All of the runners downed a liter to a liter and a half — about two to three pints — of their assigned beverage every day, beginning three weeks before the race and continuing for two weeks afterward. The scientists, meanwhile, collected blood samples from the men several weeks before the race, as well as immediately before to the start, at the finish line and on select days afterward. (These were an exceptionally obliging group of racers, it seems.) They monitored levels of various markers of inflammation in the men's blood, to see whether beer helped to blunt some of the immediate damage from running.
For the next two weeks, the men continued to dutifully swallow their nonalcoholic beer or other brew. They also reported any symptoms of colds or other upper respiratory ailments that developed during that time.
The men drinking the nonalcoholic beer reported far fewer illnesses than the runners swallowing the placebo beverage. "Incidence of upper respiratory tract infections was 3.25-fold lower" in the nonalcoholic beer drinkers, the scientists reported, in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. They also showed significantly less evidence of inflammation, as measured by various markers in their blood, and lower counts of white blood cells than the placebo group, an indication of overall better immune system health.
These effects matter, said Dr. Johannes Scherr, lead author of the study, because if a marathon runner's body is less sore and inflamed after a race, and he doesn't develop the sniffles, he can recover and return to training more quickly than he otherwise might have been able to. "It can be speculated that the training frequency could be higher (with shorter breaks after vigorous training sessions)" in those drinking beer, he wrote in an e-mail response.
Just how nonalcoholic beer eases the ravages of strenuous marathon training and racing is still being investigated. But, said Dr. Scherr, it almost certainly involves the beverage's rich bouquet of polyphenols, chemical substances found in many plants that, among other things, "suppress viral replication" and "influence the innate immune system positively," all beneficial for fighting off a cold.
Alcoholic beer happens to be drenched in polyphenols, too — "even more than nonalcoholic beer," Dr. Scherr said — but has the signal disadvantage of being alcoholic. "We do not know whether the side effects of alcoholic beer would cancel out the positive effects caused by the polyphenols," he wrote. "Furthermore, it is not possible to drink one to one and a half liters of alcoholic beer per day, especially not during strenuous training." We all knew that, right?
Of course, other substances containing polyphenols have shown early promise, and then underperformed in follow-up studies. Quercetin, for instance, a polyphenol derived principally from apple skins, was widely touted by endurance athletes several years ago after studies found that large doses allowed untrained lab mice to run for far longer than untreated animals. But the supplement has largely failed to show benefits in human athletes. An analysis of 10 human studies of the supplement presented at the American College of Sports Medicine annual meeting in June concluded that quercetin supplementation "is very unlikely to provide an endurance performance advantage."
But the beer experiment did not begin by looking at mice. It began with human marathoners completing a punishing, unsimulated race, and showed demonstrable benefits, in terms of minimizing postrace damage.
All of which is good news as the fall marathon season approaches. Asked if he would recommend that serious marathon runners add nonalcoholic beer to their diets, Dr. Scherr said, "When I look at the results of our study, I would have to answer 'Yes.'"
It's possible to get large amounts of polyphenols from other foods, he added, like those training-table staples chokeberries and mangosteens, as well as pomegranates and grapes. "But with these foods you do not consume the minerals, fluid and carbohydrates," he said, "so nonalcoholic beer seems to be optimal" for everything, perhaps, apart from your well-deserved celebratory carouse after the race. For that, at least, the beer can be full-potency.
 
Maybe for you mate, but I couldn't even drink half a liter every day for 2 weeks and thats withough heavy training thrown in. If you can drink more than a litre and a half a day, every day then you need help mate and propably something I wouldn't personally be inclined to brag about.

Kind of like saying " I snort 80mg of coke per day"
 
Intriguing study, but would be interested in whether it passed peer review, as by asking whether the subjects would be willing to drink a lot of beer, it has already become a self-selecting study and possible bias caused by previous body adaptations to beer. Also, where is the control group following their ordinary routine???? And, what was in the placebo??? etc... Trouble with so many studies, is bad methodology.

Anyway, pointless to me as 1 and a half litres of beer is more than I manage in a typical month. Now, if we're talking a litre and a half of pepsi...:love:
 
Nairiki recon with Takaaki san today. Unfortunately the first half of the course was closed due to landslide - but we could workout on the rindo section which is the main effort anyway. Managed to crack 20min on it running at about 9/10's , So I'm hoping that event day adrenaline I can break 18min on that section. The first section is about 5km at about 30kph, if I remember from last year - so my goal this year is under 30min.
 
120km on Wednesday..... massive attack on Takao with another J Pro Tour Rider...... little bastardo dropped me with 200m to go and I clawed him back to 2 bike lengths just before the bridge. 36 vs 23....not bad going.

Thursday Sprint interval training and was very pleased with the return leg keeping at a constant 42km/h

Really feeling the burn today on my rest day.
 
A litre and a half of beer is like 3 cans! You can drink a couple of beers a night and still live an active lifestyle. Hardly like snorting coke James!

Of course you have to consider the calories. 3 cans will give you 600 extra calories. Which will take about 90 minutes of tempo cycling to burn off.

Depends how serious you are but I always think one of the benefits of cycling is that you can enjoy a beer or ice cream and not really worry about it.

Andy

www.jyonnobitime.com/time
 
Mate.... 500ml is pushing the boat out for me mate and you are seriously telling me you drink 1.5l of beer a day?


Now Ice Cream on the other hand!
 
What 'rest day' ?? haha! Git ur out there now! But all kidding aside - those JPro young guys are insanely fast up anything!

120km on Wednesday..... massive attack on Takao with another J Pro Tour Rider...... little bastardo dropped me with 200m to go and I clawed him back to 2 bike lengths just before the bridge. 36 vs 23....not bad going.

Thursday Sprint interval training and was very pleased with the return leg keeping at a constant 42km/h

Really feeling the burn today on my rest day.
 
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