Thursday, April 9, 2009

Flat Tires and Laziness

So in the past two weeks I have developed no less than 4 flat tires. Yes, 4. Normally, I will see maybe one or two a YEAR. Luckily none have been while riding my bikes.

Flat 1 was a slow intermittent leak in the front tire on my commuter. I tracked it down to a faulty bond on the opposing side of the tube where the valve stem is. A large patch took care of it. Instead of immediately fixing this I pirated the front wheel off my race bike and just brought it into class with me everywhere - kind of a pain. Eventually I stole the front wheel from my fixie and put it on my commuter, since the fixie was not getting ridden due to me recovering from VT.

Flat 2 was a verrrry slow leak on my race bike front wheel. I noticed it AFTER finishing the VT RR. It was slow enough the wheel stayed rideable for a couple hours. I just threw this tube away since finding the leak would have been nearly impossible.

Flat 3 was the front tire of my fixed gear WHILE IT WAS ON MY COMMUTER. Pumping it up and the tube blows out around the valve stem. I kinda flipped out at this one, this is where it was getting ridiculous. I then stole my spare race front wheel and threw that on my commuter, and went back to the "bring the wheel into class" routine.

Today I went and bought a couple new tubes of a different brand and fixed all of the above flats.

After I did this and put my commuter front tire back on the bike, I noticed that the F*CKING REAR TIRE WAS FLAT!! I very nearly pitched the bike off our 3rd floor porch when I saw this.

I have a couple more tubes of the type that I think is giving me problems... I'm not sure what to do with them now. I don't trust them at all, obviously.

BEING LAZY

I have not ridden at all this week. It took me through Wednesday to really recover from VT, and then I just didn't really feel like riding. I did my mountain biking class today and rode back from that, so I got a few miles in. I rode the fixie to get the tubes, and I felt really good. Spun out on Gorman doing about 35+ mph approaching Wade Ave. That's the fastest I've ever been on that bike - normally I've got stuff in my pockets that prevents me from spinning up much above 120 rpm or so.

I should have ridden Wed and done hill repeats, but meh. It's only collegiate racing. I don't want to burn out or stop having fun. I'm going to focus on strategy this weekend. Like I said in my last post, I think I finally figured out how to win now.

1 comment:

anna said...

Oh dear, flat tires. While I didn't have any for the past few years this year I already had seven (!), two of them last week on my front wheel. I guess this has something to do with material fatigue. Anyway, I bought new inner tubes now rather than patching the old ones for the 5th time. Unfortunately I cycled through glass today. Hopefully nothing happened..