10 Second Anime - Yowamushi Pedal - Grande Road - Episode 14

Yowamushi Pedal - Grande Road - Episode 14

Kinjou abandons the race. Sohoku carry his feelings of not giving up forward as they chase Hakone.

Heh.

Did you know that there were girls in this show?

 

Who knew?

 

Dammit Kinjou. You just had to give me man tears, didn't you?

 

One thing that made Kinjou's moment of hope awesome, in my view, was that his spark of never giving up came from within. And it wasn't your usual excited cry, it was almost a whisper, "don't give up yet." Kinjou is a man who never gives up and it wasn't based on pride or some other external force. It's who he is. It's what's inside him. And he built an entire team around him just like that. The exclamation point on Kinjou remembering his spirit was Onoda being the first to catch him. I've been waiting since last year to see how Onoda would pick Kinjou up if he started to fall, and the emotional payoff was enormous. Click that link to see how important laying hands on a cyclist's back is. It's a big deal.

The other guys get a death montage. Kinjou gets deathbed scene.

 

I liked how even after Kinjou got off the bike and he gestured toward his teammates, he did his yellow glow powerup as if he were unleashing his final attack. He gave his power to his team. All of it.

The omake keeps trying to give Fukutomi some personality.

You know it means he's going to get his own death montage. I still crack up over the picture of Toudou on a fan.

 

Hmm.

Kinjou gave his three juniors the words of encouragement they needed to hear. Imaizumi has always had an issue of confidence when he gets near a limit he set on himself. That comes from the careful planning he's always used in training and racing, but we've seen that he used to be more reckless because he wanted to get away from the noise of the other riders. Kinjou asks him to grow. Imaizumi needs to push past his self-imposed limits and embrace his personality on the bike - the angry guy who needs to be out in front so he can find some peace.

 

Kinjou tells Naruko to be flashy. He's been disciplined in riding with the team so far, but that's not his personality from his earlier career. Kinjou tells him he has 20 kilometers to make the crowd remember him. Put on a show Naruko! It's no surprise that we're going to start seeing things from the freshman welcome race again. What's even better is that these kids are much stronger than back then, and Naruko's sprinting climb is even going to impress Makishima.

 

Kinjou's advice to Onoda sounds boring compared to the others. Just ride. But the important thing Kinjou added was "reach the finish line." We've also seen before how Onoda always follows Kinjou's orders, going so far as to bring Tadokoro back to the group on the second day, so I'm interested to see how he interprets this last order near the end of the race. For Onoda, he's in the best position he could have hoped for. He's riding with both of his friends in the mountains, like he wished for during the freshman welcome race. All those little hopes and dreams from the first season are being carried into the finale for our Big Three 2.0.

 

I'm not sure where Makishima lies in a story focused on the juniors. They are all riding to protect him as if he were the designated leader. We also know how good he is in judging his teammates' riding, so he can make orders on the fly too. He's no longer surprised by anything Onoda might try to do. This is where I want to see the story go next - what happens to Makishima and Fukutomi? But first, the Speedman of Naniwa has to make a bunch of new fans in catching up to Hakone.

 

Cycling Porn.

 

This week's cycling porn features abandoning a race and how the sprinters make their own team when their climbing behind the main group. Cyclists are tough. Endurance athletes in general are tough because their efforts are mainly pain management for several hours. So when a cyclist quits riding because of pain, you know it's going to be something really, really painful. In Kinjou's case, he tweaked something in his knee, causing tendonitis. This kind of injury can be puzzling, because you can ride on a hurt knee like that for a couple of hours, but after a certain time, boom. The injured tendon is slowly getting inflamed during this time and at a certain point it finally swells to the size necessary to press on all the exposed nerves around the injury. There is no rehab for tendonitis other than time. Anything else, like cortisone shots, is just to keep the injured parts from swelling and causing debilitating pain.

 

The sprinters Tadokoro and Shinkai formed their own little gruppetto. This is the nickname the pros call the group of big men and sprinters who end up at the back of the pack during a climbing day. Their job was to get their team to the base of the mountain, and then they just have to make it home before the time cut. There's a lot of camaraderie among that pack because they're not racing anymore. They can just hang out, share snacks and have pleasant conversation.