Welcome to saiklr
This is the site where I write about my ostensible cycling adventures. There is some ostensible positive psychological component to having a site solely dedicated to my riding activities rather than posting on my regular accounts. So I opted to register a simple domain, slap together a simple web site, and go live with my writing.
Interestingly I find it quite refreshing to write some small updates for each ride I log in Strava. This is almost therapeutic, and I have been doing it for quite a lot of my rides this year. Unfortunately Strava is not the right place for engagement around cycling writing, hence this site, the twitter account, and instagram pics (evil facebook ownership notwithstanding).
Why saiklr?
Why did I opt for the name saiklr for this site? Well, quite frankly, all the obvious domains are already chewed up by people who hit the domain gold rush early on in the dot com bubble. Nowadays you need to be somewhat creative when coming up with the name and domain for a web site.
Since the domain cyclr.com was unavailable I needed to muster up a bit of artistic skills to come up with something apropos. Here we are, and the name saiklr is essentially a combination of three main components:
- It begins with the first letter of my given name – Scott – which seems like an obvious ingredient considering this site is all about my cycling trials and tribulations more than anything.
- In Japanese, the word saikin – 最近 – means recently in English. Since I am a relative beginner with road cycling, having only truly started with the sport in Spring 2020, this felt like a good method of conveying my amateur-ishness. In the grand scheme, I really did just recently begin a full fledged cycling-focused lifestyle
- I needed a word to convey cycling, and a variant of cyclist seemed like a good idea at the time. So I opted for a bit of web 2.0 naming nonsense and thought cyclr sounded right, even if the domain was unavailable.
This is the basic story behind the domain saiklr as opposed to something more traditional.
Cycling History
I have always been interested in riding but never really embraced the sport. In 2013 I purchased a single speed bike and rode that bad boy all over Tokyo, not really logging a whole lot of kilometers in the grand scheme of things. Fast forward to 2020 when the world was in COVID-19 chaos, and I was working all. the. damn. time. Although I was hitting the gym almost every day, I needed a better outlet to relax and destressify. Out of the blue I started riding my single speed, but quickly realized it was not the right bicycle for what I wanted to do.
A month and a half into my cycling resurgence I hit a local bike shop renown for selling Trek. I hemmed and hawed, but ended up pulling the trigger on a Trek Domane SL5. It is a beautiful bike, really comfortable, and made to ride long distances. I put roughly 6600 kilometers between April 2020 and May 2021. Then in May I pulled the trigger on a hellacious upgrade, opting for a Specialized S-Works Aethos. Here I am, almost every day, riding up and down the Tama River, logging kilometer after kilometer, on morning meditative pilgrimages.
Check out my full gear history.