Words and photos by Mike Rice
Japanese love celebrating the New Year on January 1st and have a variety of traditions attached to the week surrounding it. Many Japanese begin the year at the local shrine, where they brave the crowds and freezing cold to plea for the favor of the gods. Other ancient traditions include eating buckwheat noodles – to string the New Year to the last – or having a Shishimai puppeteer bite them on the head for good luck.

There are also newer traditions such as a live competition pitting the best female singers in the country (clad in red) against the best male singers (dressed in white) which ends at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.

The tradition that enthralls the entire country on January 2nd and 3rd is called the “Tokyo-Hakone Ekiden”. It started in 1920 to determine which university had the strongest distance runners. Qualified universities put up their top 10 guys for a relay averaging over 20km per leg. The course covers 109km from the center of Tokyo to the mountains of Hakone on the 2nd of January before coming all the way back on the 3rd. Primarily following historic Route 1, the course is lined by half-a-million cheering supporters with millions more watching live at home. Talk about pressure on the runners: if a single guy pulls a muscle or bonks and has to drop out, he has failed not merely the entirety of his team but his entire university and the many thousands supporting them! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakone_Ekiden


A more recent Ekiden tradition is for hundreds of cyclists to ride the route ahead of the runners just before they block the road to normal traffic. This is where my Neil Pryde Alize comes in! The runners are averaging nearly 20kph with their non-stop police (and TV crew) escort. If you want to stay ahead of them on a bike you had better average well over 30kph between traffic lights or risk getting caught up in the road closure and having to wait for the entire event to pass you by before you can continue. No problem on the flats… but when the race hits the mountain pass the runners don’t slow nearly as much as a bicycle does. Most of the cyclists riding just in front do not make it to the top of the 864 meter pass before the runners. I for one was determined to make it over the pass ahead of the race!

I left just after sunrise to ride about 40k from my home to catch Route 1 in Yokohama some 30k into the Ekiden. It was such a rush to ride this historic route lined with tens of thousands of people waving flags, some of whom were even cheering me on. I felt like an opening act for the main performers! I made good time and was averaging a higher speed than most car traffic around me. I was able to get far enough ahead to take a half-hour break at a convenience store just before the final stage, the ascent from sea level to the Hakone pass. It felt good to fuel up after nearly four hours of non-stop riding in the cold, yet my body felt amazingly fresh. It was there that I met up with some guys from the Tokyo Cycling Club and together we headed into the big climb. We had a few close calls with police detours as they forced the car traffic off the route, but most of us were able to get up ahead of the race. I actually went over the pass and descended about a mile before reversing course so that I might watch the runners reach the race’s high altitude point. The viewing there was great. It really is an exciting race but I was freezing – the sign read 3C – after sweating so much on the climb.

My ride time exceeded five hours with over 1,500 meters of climbing and about 120km. of distance …and this was the first day of a four-day tour for me. You see I have another New Year’s tradition: riding around Izu peninsula with my friends to start off the year. This was my 3rd time to do this, but in past years I had taken the train to get there. This year with Alize under me I felt up to riding all the way on my own and the Hakone Ekiden got me halfway there from Tokyo!

Izu peninsula boasts some of the greatest coastal views in Japan. Especially the breathtaking sunsets from the mountainous west coast that is inaccessible by train. I met my friends where the train line ends in Shimoda at the south end of Izu and we spent two days taking lots of photos along the west coast. The last two years I had been on a road frame that retails in Japan for nearly four times what Neil Pryde’s Alize costs here, so I thought it would be a good chance to compare performance. We climbed about 1,000 meters each day with very gusty high-speed descents, but I must say I was very impressed: It was the easiest and most enjoyable time I’ve ever had there!