Todd Versus Forest Park

This year, I want to shave off 5-10 kgs and hopefully I can get some results this year - to be honest it has been a goal of mine for a while. In December I was seriously mulling over the idea of joining a gym here locally. The problem with that plan is that a sports gym is so darned expensive here. It could cost me between 7000-8000+ yen (meaning $7o.oo to $80.00 roughly) which to me seems like a huge commitment. A couple of my students mentioned that a coworker of theirs had lost weight by simply riding his bike around Forest Park once a week. Well I am about 4 kms away from there, so I thought I would try for a second time to make it out to the park.

This time I set out on my MamaCheri (Mama Chariot= an old woman's bike with a big basket in front) towards the park. I managed to make it to the point I got stalled at last time, the Shrine (or temple) in Miyaguchi that I walked around and blogged about before, with no problems and continued on up what I hoped would be a short hill. About 4 minutes in I was feeling a little dizzy and out of breath and stopped. I haven't been riding in a while and was probably a bit dehydrated from only drinking coffee in the morning and not water.

The place I stopped interests me. There is one main freeway that connects Tokyo and Nagoya known as the Tomei highway. The govenment has been building a second highway ( I will call the Tomei 2) to help ease the traffic strain the Tomei has on busy days ( I guess). The interesting thing is how long it is taking to build the thing- they were already working on it when I first came here 5 years ago and seem no closer to being finished now then they were then. Here is an empty looking highway bridge...
Seems like a ghost highway.

I restarted my endeavour to climb the hill and eventually got off the bike and pushed it up the steep parts of the hill. I had to make Forest Park this time! Finally, I made it to the sign, but there was no sight of the actual park. My head hadn't cleared very much so I had to sit down and gather myself and turn around. But I made it to the sign this time!
Next time I will make it up the hill all the way! Either way it was good conditioning for future riding. I had felt that a shorter, steeper ride would be easier for me to handle than a longer ride, but I am simply not ready for this task yet! Well, at least I ended up riding about 12 kms, so I did get some exercise out of it.

Today I am going to ride my bike out to a shopping center called Ito Yokado and have a coffee there and study a bit of Japanese. The good thing is that it will be about 22 kms round trip, should be good exercise for me!