This year’s National Sports Day (体育の日) was held on October 10th. It seems that the only time I’m ever going to actually celebrate it will have been my first year here, back in 2007 when I was on the news for unicycling, and this, my final year.

Last year some of my students who are into cycling entered a 4-hour mamachari (utility bicycle) race, eventually winning first place in the junior class… though only one junior class team entered. They also apparently finished 4th place overall out of I don’t know how many. Anyway, the brought their trophy to school, showed it to me, and I jokingly told them that I’d race with them the next time they do it.

Fast forward almost a year, and one day it suddenly hit me that it’s about time for another race to be held. I asked one of the kids in class if they were entering another race this year, and if they were how about I keep my promise. I was met with a confused look. Apparently he had forgotten that I said I’d join them this year.

However after consulting with the other three kids, we decided to enter together as a team of five–the four original members from last year plus myself. Luckily for us, my age didn’t bring the team over the 18-years-old-average needed to join the junior class. Junior class it is! Team Monster Garlic and their trusty steed, the Garlic号, was ready to roll!

The race itself is held at Ebisu Circuit, which is far more well-known for hosting drifting racing events, not mamachari races. Arriving at the track, I was surprised to see how much of a, well, race atmosphere everyone was putting on. The 30 or so teams, each with five to ten racers, plus the spectators made for a larger event that I was expecting.

Before the 4-hour main event, an exhibition sprint competition was held. Each team could choose one member to race in the ~200 meter uphill timed sprint. Even though four cyclists raced at a time, it was actually a time trial where the top time wins, regardless of who you raced directly against.

My team chose me to race in the sprint, and I ended up getting sixth. It was expecting to do better, but at least I didn’t do worse. Luckily for me, when the prizes were handed out at the very end of the day, I learned that the cutoff for prizes for the sprint was sixth place, so go me.

Following the sprint, the first riders for the 4-hour endurance event lined up on one side of the track with the bikes at the other. At this time it was a still a pretty jovial atmosphere.

Once the signal was given, the racers ran to their bikes and shot off. At first everyone was happy and smiling and full of energy. Our team decided on a system in which each rider would do two 2.1 km laps, pull into the pit, then switch out for the next rider. However we all soon realized that two laps on that course with a mamachari takes a surprising amount of energy out of you.

The track is designed (pdf) so that there’s a lot of climbing everywhere except for the long straightaway in front of the pit, which is downhill. Unfortunately for all racers, there was a strong wind blowing from west to east, the exact opposite direction of all of the climbing.

Not too long after the race started, my four student-teammates decided that two laps at a time was too much for them, so they started switching after only one lap. Unfortunately doing so and pulling into the pit makes it so you bypass the single high-speed downhill of the track. Furthermore, it makes the other team members have a lot less rest in between turns. I decided to suck it up and continue doing two laps at a time, though I was quite exhausted after each of my runs. There was actually one run where I completely forgot to pull in to the pit at the end of my second lap, forcing me to take a soul-sucking third lap.

Attached to each bicycle was an infrared emitter that was read by a sensor every time you completed a lap (the sensors are in the large white archish thing in the previous photo), and the announcers would periodically announce the current team rankings over the PA system. For the first two hours of the race, Team Monster Garlic (us) was leading in both the junior class (two teams) and overall (30ish teams).

Unfortunately somewhere between the two- and three-hour mark the team based next to us on pit row had passed us. Out of the entire four-hour race I personally passed a ton of people and was passed only twice–one of which was when I accidentally did a third lap and was dead tired, and neither of them were by our main rivals.

So it seems that the other team either passed us when one of the students was riding or possibly during one of our rider switches during a pit stop. Our pit stops took longer than theirs because of the wide range of heights of our team’s members. We worked out a system so that four of us would race with the saddle in the high position, we’d adjust the saddle down for the short guy, then we’d put it up back and repeat the system. While we got the system down quite well so we could adjust the saddle in just a few seconds, those few seconds added up over the course of a few hours.

At the 3 hour 58 minute mark the riders switched, and I was up for the final lap. The rules were that once time was called, you finish your current lap, then the winners are ranked in order of total laps completed. If two teams have the same number of laps, the team who completed that lap first wins.

In the middle of our final lap time was called, the checkered flag was waved, and I continued racing around the track to the finish line. Once I took the final bend and started on the big downhill, I got up to as fast as I could peddle (the bike is single gear), got into my best aero position to coast, and headed straight towards the finish line.

About five minutes before the finish line the rider from the team were losing to sped past me, thus officially completely lapping us. They were in the geared class, so he had been able to gear up and take downhill faster.

The final results were that we took first in the junior class and second overall. That’s not too shabby when you consider that we were a full lap ahead of the 3rd place team, plus the 1st place team consisted of obvious road cycle racers (not to mention they were in the geared class).

Overall it was a pretty damn fun day. It was vastly more exhausting than I expected a mamachari race to be, but it was pretty damn fun.

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