The Soggy Finale

Waking up at the late hour of 8AM on Sunday, the final day, I felt like I'd been blindfolded and beaten with a sack of doorknobs sometime in the night. The futon I slept on was woefully inadequate to support my back for one thing, but mostly it was the combined feeling of having my wheels banged up worse than a junkyard Yugo and the current weather conditions of rainy and cold with an 80% chance of utter misery. I ate breakfast hurriedly and took some advice from my Miyazaki cycling friend, Guy, to try and bend the rim back with a crescent wrench, which took me a while to track down. The wrench offered me much more leverage than the pliers and screwdrivers I'd tried using before and worked in reforming the stiff aluminum walls back into shape...sort of. The braking surface of each wheel remained dented outward and with some rough patches, so I could expect my brake pads to be shredded by the end of the ride (they were on the right side), but I was back in business!

Still, by the time I'd wrestled my wheels back into a bare minimum of functionality, done some repairs/triage work on two other bikes, gotten myself together to ride (no time to take a shower—gross) and brief the volunteer drivers on the day's course, everyone had left the cabins, some as much as an hour before and I was pissed.

I put a good sized pass at the beginning of the day between Yamakuni and Kusu and it wasn't until I was cruising down the backside that I finally caught and passed a pack of riders. From there on out I didn't see anyone for the rest of the day, but even if I did pass someone it'd be virtually impossible to see them in the driving, blinding rain. While passing the Yatsushika sake factory in Kokonoe I contemplated popping in for a “tasting” and just finding a nice dark corner to collapse in and drink the day away. Truth be told, I will ride in the rain if absolutely necessary, but the double-whammy of getting my bike's components all wet and thus susceptible to rust leading to my trademark Complete Bike Disassembly and OCD Cleaning compulsion, plus my general hatred for being anything but dry (especially when the undies get wet!) usually pushes me to find alternate means of getting from point A to B or into shelter. The problem for this particular day of riding was that I knew this road, route 210, all too well from countless drives and rides towards Oita City—I knew its roadside luxuries and havens. Any of several hot springs, ramen shops and conbinis were sending out their Siren's Song.

From Kokonoe I began the final climb of the day and of the ride: the eight kilometer rise to the Mizuwake Pass. At the top my spirit broke down and I stopped for a fifteen minute power lunch at the junk food stalls run by an army of grandmotherly types and grudging teens. Reheated takoyaki and fried chikuwa were on the menu, the latter being comped by the employees impressed by where I'd come from that stormy day. While I ate one of the other riders, a Japanese man who had joined us only for this final day and I think had wanted to use his non-fatigued body to take the lead spot, showed up at the stalls and asked me if I was the “top shooter”. I told him Owen was probably ahead of me by a ways at which point his happy face sunk a bit, perhaps in the realization that though he may overtake me he could never catch the leader. Another day, another spirit crushed.

Cresting Mizuwake, I knew, was the big milestone for the day, because from here to Oita is entirely downhill or flat with reading off the “Oita City, Xkm” signs as they tick by being the most work a rider really has to do. The outskirts of Yufuin, Shonai, Hasama—their unremarkable roadside facades blow by as I barrel towards Oita and the Nanasegawa Nature Park goal. Still being pelted by rain I arrive a the park to find a lot empty of support cars or other riders, as usual. As I ride past a car and lean my bike against a tree to make a call to the lead support vehicle to check their position (I'd like some dry clothes after all) some lady and her insignificant other emerge from their car and come towards me. “You hit my car” she says. “No, I didnt” says I. “I heard a sound, a bump” she tells me. Her eyes are full of hate as I tell her I didn't touch her car again. She checks where she thinks I impacted, but naturally there's nothing there. Quietly the two jackasses get back in the car, never taking their hateful eyes off me for a moment while I make the call. Truthfully, I didn't get that close to her car—the lady's full of shit. One of the most annoying things about being a foreign resident in Japan is that people stare at you as if the Ghost of Christmas Past was hovering about in front of them and it quickly becomes uncomfortable. That these two are boring holes into my brain is getting to me more than usual and fearing that I might just lash out with a “What the fuck are you two people looking at?!” and actually start to bash in their car I leave to nearby Wasada Town for a post-ride, nerve-calming cuppa joe. Standing outside Starbucks I call Owen and find him at the Mos Burger a few doors down. Turned out he finished about fifteen minutes before I did, or about the same time it took me to eat that horrible junk food at Mizuwake. Disappointing, but you know what they say about getting that bear...

From the rolling grasslands of the Kuju Highlands to the breathtaking shading bloom of the cherry blossoms in Oyama to the Maple Cycling Road in Yamakuni, there isn't a minute that goes by on trips like this that I don't realize the splendor of Oita's natural world. How I'll miss watching it from the saddle of my bike come July when it's time to depart. Of course, I'll have the playgrounds of Marin, Napa, Sonoma, Santa Cruz, Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco Counties to keep me fit and challenged, so it's a restrained sort of 'boo-hoo.'

And now I'd like to raise a glass to the cavalcade of extraordinary people (that can carry a good or bad connotation, of course) and/or their bikes that galloped or hobbled their way to the goal each day, and some of those that didn't make it.

• Ryan, the ride coordinator, who officially is the most unlucky rider I've ever known and has bike trouble every year (last year I believe he went through two bikes) flew over his handlebars twice this trip, the first being while we rode from our parked cars to the meeting point at Nanasegawa. The second time, in Oyama, resulted in him nearly being crushed by a big rig and his rear dérailleur ripping itself and mounting from the frame. Short of welding it back on his bike is done for.
• Single-Speed All-Star (SSAS), a man whose name I forgot, insisted for months before the trip that he was a serious track bike rider and his little fixie could handle all the ups and downs of the course. Part of me wants to chuckle about how each time I saw him on the road he was either walking his brakeless bike downhill or walking his gearless bike uphill, but in the end I congratulate SSAS for his tenacity in making it the entire 250km.
  
• Tommy, a tiny, wiry tattooed man-boy ALT from Kumamoto Prefecture obviously didn't bother to train for this trip and brought a hopelessly horrible bike with beyond-help brakes that rubbed on the rim no matter what adjustments I made. On the final day he got lost and ended up drinking tea with some Kusu obasans while the volunteer cars looked for him for about two hours.
  
• Tomo is a Bob Sagat-loving Japanese travel agent that did the entire three day trip on a mamachari bike! These are the throwaway bikes you see the majority of the people in Japan, China, Taiwan, etc. riding that can be had for as little as 2000-yen used. The funny thing is that his Soviet battle tank of a bike had absolutely no problems the entire weekend. Major props to you, Tomo, and hope to see you in California when you come to give frightened Japanese tour-goers bus rides in LA.
  

--Matt