Monday, December 19, 2011

Oh, Holey Ride... (OR Mom, He's Poking Me!)

Aborted Ride Day
Run Day
time- 57:33
distance- 6.1mi

It was going to be a good ride. The weather sucked at home so Sean and I decided to meet down at the airfield for some repeats or, better yet, some good distance. Or, as it turned out, stopping twice because my front tire was allergic to air. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the Time of the Flats continues. Yesterday was a double rear tire flat ruining my ride. Today that stayed nice and tight but my front tire attracted the glass slivers. If you click on the charts on the link you can see where it happened. I think my favorite pieces of information are the little heart rate spikes while I'm not moving. Know what those are? Those are, "Get on the rim you little...." or, "I know there is glass in here somewhere! Here it is! Of course, too tiny and dug in for my chewed down nails to reach. I shall now dig a hole in my tire!" And once the integrity of the rubber is compromised, fuggetabotit. Now every tiny little suggestion of debris is going to cause Massive Catastrophic Damage to the tube. You know what the most annoying part is? Yesterday, when I went to The Bike Factory to grab some new tubes and CO2 I looked at GatorSkin tires. But at $45 each I passed. Don't need 'em yet, I thought. Sucker. Guess what I'll be buying later today?
Sean was very helpful during the first flat, giving me pointers on the best way to seat the tube and tire, helping check for glass, and talking me through using the CO2 cartridge the first time. Thou Shalt Not Explode the Tube. But after the second flat, wherein I found not one but two shards of glass in different places, I decided to call it a day. And Sean decided to point and laugh at me. And video tape me. And take pictures. Because he's a good friend and that's pretty much what I would have done had our positions been reversed.


Little bastard
Letting Diesel Dirtbag know he is Numero Uno! 

Sean let me borrow his patch kit and I patched up the tire and we rode back to the cars. He decided to keep riding, which turned out to be a mistake because Puncturana, the Goddess of Tire Integrity, got his ass too. But she got him via a bee sting. Sean's allergic to bees. Benadryl to the rescue!
I needed to workout when I got home so off went the bike gear, on went the Bikilas and running shorts, Rush into the headphones, and we're off. Nice and easy run. The weather was mostly cool, which was nice because I left my water at home. Foot got a little sore near the end of the run, not really sure what that's about. Probably just that a lot of my recent runs have been on trails to pounding the pavement wore on after a while.

3 comments:

  1. If you do the math and put a value on the time savings of not be completely pissed off whilst tube changing, the Gatorskins are worth the price. The Vitoria Zaffiro tires are pretty good training tires too, with the "X" line for durability and "Y" line for price crossing roughly at the same place that the Gatorskins do.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have gatorskins on my road bike... never had a flat on with them. Prior to that I was getting flats every week when I was commuting and training. I am considering getting than for my tri bike.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sorry for the errors... that's what happens when I post from my phone. LOL!

    ReplyDelete