My wife and I recently started living in Porto, Portugal and I took up cycling for physical and mental health. I had been doing a lot of road cycling during COVID, but work and life stress had railroaded that and I found myself overweight, drinking too much and with a number of stress and lifestyle health challenges.
I’m 49, and was quite out of shape so I grabbed a Trek Powerfly 4 e-bike to help me with the hills in Portugal. As I biked more and more, I found. 10 day, 900 km bike tour in Japan (Tohoku, northern Honshu) from Nasu to Aomori. I decided to take a leap and booked it with a month to train.
I began pushing myself pretty hard, getting up to 65 km days with 400 meter climbs. These were hard, and I studied how to manage nutrition and hydration but still found myself exhausted and sore most of the time.
For the tour, I asked for an e-bike. Everyone else was an experienced cyclist and I found myself on this pretty solid electric assist bike, much lighter than my beast with the Bosch battery.
The tour was incredible. Japan is beautiful, and we stayed in many old ryokans. Ending the day with onsen soaks and Kaiseki meals was perfect.
What really made the difference was a few seasoned cyclists who took me under their wing. When I was struggling on flats because my motor was capped at 25 km/hour they showed me how to draft and motivated me minute by minute to push myself harder than ever had in my own. They shared ointments, tips on group dynamics and so much knowledge. It was a paradigm shift.
It was an e-bike, but I went from my longest day being 65 km to 110 km days. I went from 300 m climb max to 1000 and more. I never bonked and found reserves in my I did not know I had.
Now I am excited to get a non e-bike and take my newfound fitness ever further. I know e-bikes are a complicated topic. But it allowed me to do a tour I never could have done otherwise. And I did not slow down my group. Now, thanks to some amazing mentors and new friends, I am motivated to do more and go further.
by TepidEpiphany