what's going on Japan - Two Wheel Cruise here
and you'll never guess who's back in Japan
my wife! Thuong-chan!
unfortunately today she's not gonna be joining along
with the cycling although she does have her momma cherry right now we had a
little party with our Japanese study group but I'm about to head out for a
ride with one of our friends nice to do my son he's one of the people who helped
Jones on start get into cycling when we did our Lakeview ride last year so if
you haven't checked out that video I'll link it up ahead anyway today we're
gonna be going for a nice ride it's beautiful sunny weather here not humid
at all just really nice beautiful skies and I'm really excited I'm gonna be
testing my new GoPro Hero 6 this is the first time I'll be using it in the
daylight right now I'm recording on my GoPro Hero 6 and hopefully the audio
sounds get on this and I thought along the way I'll be talking a little bit
about some stuff related to cycling motivation setting some goals and stuff
like that recently I haven't been racing or anything it's been over a year since
I last entered the race but I'm thinking about entering a race this year we'll go
into that story along the right but anyway
come along join along we're not sure where we're going yet but it's going to
be a nice long beautiful ride in the eastern side of not going out the
Japanese mountains let's get going so I'm out there
I understand funky returns how I each in each eqg kiddo
I mean you're not going
so I mentioned today's theme is going to be on the topic of motivation and
cycling this is something I've struggled with for the last few years a big reason
being I used to race at a pretty high level for our domestic pro in the US and
just I don't know once you reach a certain point and you realize you're not
gonna get back to that point you kind of lose your motivation at least that's how
it wasn't me and this last year I haven't entered any races I haven't had
any motivation to train but I'm going through this cycle where I'm starting to
get motivation to come back and the big reason is I just really want a goal
something to work towards it doesn't necessarily have to be the same level I
used to be at before but just something to work towards something to feel
satisfied that you're reaching that goal so right now we're on our way to Togo a
pass we just made a video about this cycling road and one of the more popular
mountain passes here at an Eastern Nagoya Japan I set a goal here two years
ago to reach eight minutes and the closest I got was eight minutes and
eight seconds so I got really close but I didn't push past that last little bit
to get over eight minutes and here we go we're at the base of the climb right now
right now I'm not in that great of shape I'm at about nine minutes we're gonna
see how I do today we're about to start the climb some time to start with some
suffering
my wife and I recently did our Taiwan cycling trip so two weeks riding around
Taiwan and just riding around everyday on that trip really started to bring
back my motivation to ride and ever since I came back to Japan last week
I've just been in a good mood with some solid motivation and started going to
the gym started doing some squats started riding my bike more so I'm
trying to ride at least four times a week putting some decent efforts and
we'll see where this goes I'm thinking to enter some of the cyclocross races
told myself I was too busy didn't have time to do it I had other priorities to
focus on my main job building this channel working on some other websites I
build and on top of that trying to maintain a training schedule it's really
hard but I just found if you make the goals you'll end up following through
more than you would if you didn't make goals so that's what I'm trying to do
right now make some goals and follow through going back to the topic of
goal-setting I found that it's really important to set measurable goals so
goals that you can track that you can tell you're improving for example my
goal to climb that mountain I want to get under 8 minutes so I can track my
time last week out of 9 minutes this week I did eight minutes 50 seconds so I
can track my improvement I can tell if my efforts are paying off you have to
keep in mind though that for example if you do that right after
Jim day so if I do squats for example the next day I'm not really not gonna
have as much energy so you got to keep that in mind but if you track this data
over time eventually you should see some progress if you don't see any progress
you need to change something in your routine make some changes to make sure
that you can get those goals so what am i doing what are my goals like I
mentioned I'm going to the gym I'm doing squats I started doing nitrides Tuesday
nights we're doing sprint workout at the local park I used to do this a few years
ago when I was motivated when I was racing and I found not something that's
really important is having people to train with so you see right now today
I'm with nishijima Sun and if it's just me out here it's really hard for me to
get motivation to push myself on these rides but if you have someone with you
pushing you along motivating you to workout it helps so much I used to have
a good friend here Bradley og and he'd be the guy ride with me every weekend I
have a really bad habit of sleeping in and wanting to ride in the afternoon but
most of the serious riders here the fast riders all wake up early they're
disciplined will wake up early and get their ride in I don't have that
discipline mostly just because I'm doing so much
other stuff I'll stay up late editing a video and I'll just kind of sleep in
because I'm tired from the week so it's great having someone to ride out today
it's great having something to push you it's great having people to come on our
weekly night rides that were starting up here in Nagoya so in addition to having
measurable goals having some sort of support network someone to help push you
and make sure that you are following through on your goals doesn't matter
what you're doing if it's sports if it's studying having measureable goals is
extremely important and I'm climbing up this eight ten percent rating right now
while trying to talk so quick break
taking a quick combini break one of the other goals I'm setting is on nutrition
so I used to have a really bad ice-cream addiction and I'm gonna try and eat less
ice cream so we're avoiding ice cream today just gonna get some healthy sports
drink
akari sweat lots of temptation here they've got a new haagen-dazs flavor the
caramel truffle but we must resist the temptation I really really like this
though but we still got some climbing to do today so let's resist come on Cruz
you can do it oh man this looks good - that's a good-looking ice cream here as
we enter the fall seasons here we've got a lot of good food items coming out lots
of different niku Mon fear lots of different flavors pizza and so on curry
and also it's Oden season but we're not gonna get anything right now we're gonna
save the food for after we finish our work up
back on the road let's go
redlight love hotel let's go taking a quick little break
here at Joe Kochi station one of the more beautiful spots near by where I
live here in Japan we've got kind of this like rundown train station stop by
here quite a few times on the blog and beautiful River down below we're about
to go through one of our last big climbs of the day the Joe Koji killer it's
super steep and it's super bumpy we've got a lot of rain lines down below
all right we're not gonna take too long for break let's go get on the climb
nobody myself
ah
ah that's a killer hot legs are full lactic acid right now
especially since just started training and not used to this lactic acid feeling
right now especially tough huh this area is especially beautiful in the
fall we're almost centering the coal season or the autumn leaf season I wrote
here last year did a nice autumn leaves video I'll add the link here so go check
it out if you're interested we're at Joe Koji Park there's actually a lot of
trails here you can actually do some mountain biking here so maybe we'll come
back here in the near future I'll show you guys some of the mountain
bike trails whoo I gotta catch my breath
Morty must stop it's got it that Boise may see don't go just finished with
today's right but good ride 74 kilometers 1,000 meters of climbing and
did some pretty good efforts on some of these Strava kom some of the hill climbs
mountain climbs nearby and I'm pretty proud of myself I resisted we didn't get
ice cream during today's ride and at the end of the ride I chose to go the
healthy option so I got my protein drink here maximizing recovery and before we
end today's video I just want to close with a few thoughts
today's theme so setting goals setting measurable goals this is really
important and it's also really difficult to manage this yourself so it really
helps to have some sort of like coach or someone to just help support you with
these kinds of things and that's where you guys come in so you guys need to
check in on me if you guys see me slacking if you guys see me eating ice
cream or something yeah just if you have any encouraging
comments leave them down below and the first cyclocross race here is in the
first week of November so I've still got a few weeks to trade and get in shape
for this and actually I might be sandbagging the first race because you
used to not have to register for the National Cycling Association to race
cyclocross here in Japan and so I used to race I got upgraded to count one I
was racing those races I didn't have to register or anything and it was great
because the registration process here is a pain you have to mail everything in
and it's just like ancient and I didn't want to deal with that and you usually
have to associate with some sort of team and I don't have a team so there's just
all these like reasons like where I don't want to deal with this and now
they seem to have changed the rules so now from category 2 and above you have
to register with this and pay extra license fee and the kicker is this
expires at the end of the year so if I buy it now I'd only be able to use it
for a month or two and then I'd have to buy a whole new license so I think I can
race cat threes without having to register for this license which means
I'd be sandbagging a little bit but considering I haven't raced in over a
year and I haven't really been training much lately it might not be as easy as I
think anyway I'm training her at cat 3 race and I'll probably stick there until
the end of the year and if I do well I might upgrade the cat 2 and pay for my
license for the next year anyway things that I'm working on I'm aiming for 8
minutes on the climb on the togoyev climb I've got a few other segments
nearby Strava is really good about this it's really good for setting a goal
setting of time you don't necessarily have to get the kom but you just choose
the time that you're aiming for what is your current time how much do you want
to improve Strom is huge it's a great motivator and it's a great bar to set
and all the data is there for free you can always see your performances over
time it's a really great tool I use it all the time and highly recommend it if
you haven't been using it I'll also be exercising in the gym so I'll be
recording my weight I'm lifting so on the squats how much am i doing if I do
leg press how much am i doing and just trying to gradually improve those over
time anyway I hope you got something out of this video maybe you decided hey I
need to decide on some goals so make sure they're measurable goals though so
goals that you can improve over time in track we're gonna end today's video here
and I'll probably make some more videos in the future about my training about
tips for training about how my training is going and stuff like that things you
should do things that you shouldn't do and so on I'll probably make a couple
videos about those as I get more into the training routine I hope you guys
like the new style of video today so I tried talking more using just the GoPro
this is a lot safer for me I'm not sure how good the audio quality is right now
but I'm planning to get an external microphone and record that in sync the
audio later which should get me some really good audio the problem is the mic
I want is about $200 so it's a it's an investment in the channel I guess so
speaking of investing in the channel or supporting the channel we didn't start a
new early access program on our patreon so a big thank you to all of you guys a
couple of new people have joined us on patreon recently and
we have a few spots left on our early access program so for only $2.00 a month
you can get early access on all of our videos there's limited spaces for those
we have about five spaces right now and then after that it goes up to $3 which
will be the normal price so if you'd like to help support the channel and
help me be able to afford new equipment so we can improve the quality of the
video and audio on this channel feel free to go check out our patreon that's
gonna be it for today as always thanks for watching we'll see you in the next
video