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I haven’t posted anything for a while. I’ve either been working, spending time with my family, or biking.

Over my several years as an adult bicyclist, I’ve had very good luck with my tires. I have gotten six flat tires the whole time! The good news is two of them were in my driveway. The bad news is three of my flats have been in the last two weeks. During the first one, the tube blow-out was caused by a slit in the tire, which was caused by the wheel falling off the top of the car and bouncing down the road behind me. Yes, I realize that is a better story than a few flat tires, but it was embarrassing, as it happened right in front of a barracks on the weekend with a lot of soldiers lounging around outside, so you’re not going to hear any more about THAT one.

Anyway, the first flat. I was lucky because the owner of the local LBS was there, and he can change a flat in no time, and there was even someone with a spare tire for me to borrow. I always carry a spare tube, but who expects to discover their TIRE is busted at the start of the tuesday night group ride? Watching this free tire change, I learned how to remove a tire without tire irons, surely a handy skill.

Unfortunately, I learned a few days later that changing two or more tires at once in this manner gives me a nice big blister on my thumb. I suppose I could practice changing bike tires a few times a week, and then my hands would be tougher and I could change lots of tires without getting a blister, but, well, no thanks. I had bought replacement tires from Chain Reaction and was putting them on the wheels. I guess this doesn’t really count as a flat, because I only had to change one of the tires; I chose to change the second tire so I’d have a matching set on my bike. I will count it as a malfunction, because while pumping my tires up from this flat, the head of my bike pump self-destructed!

The last flat occurred the very next morning when I was about to go on a ride with my neighbor. I went over to his garage just before we were supposed to leave so I could borrow his floor pump. I pumped up my two tires, then got on the bike to make sure the gears and brakes were still properly adjusted, and POP! went my front tire. I had to use tire irons to get this one off, due to the big blister I got changing them the night before.

I hope that’s the last of my flats for a long while!

I knew I was in trouble when Joe started tinkering with his bike computer’s cadence pick-up just as the Chain Reaction Thursday night ride crowd was starting to roll out. We quickly caught the slowest riders on the short warm-up section of the ride, but we were so far behind the main group, which doesn’t usually split further until three or four miles in, there was really no chance of us catching them. At one of the turns we caught up to four riders who had stopped to fix one guy’s flat, and figured we’d hang on with them to catch back up to the group. Wrong! They were poking along at about 26 miles per hour on a false flat, much faster than I can maintain for any distance.

Now that I was good and winded, with a nice burning sensation in my thigh and calf muscles, from trying to keep up with people much faster than me, I entered the “long slog home” mental state. Not a good place to be 10 miles in to a 30 mile ride! There’s a little extra hill you can do in Appling, but we skipped it today, hoping that would get us back in front of a group we could ride with.

We rode about another 10 miles by ourselves before we were passed by the fastest group. As they went by, I had a nanosecond to fantasize that I was going to catch on to the back of this group and coast home, but they were clearly going too fast for me. A few minutes later, another group passed by at a pace we could handle, so we caught on to that one instead.

Of course there were a still a few hills to endure before the hurt (the good hurt mind you) could stop. On one of those hills, Joe discovered he needs to ride more than once a week, as he dropped off the pace like he was jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. At that point I was doing my time at the front of the little group. I only realized he had gone when I finished my pull, drifted out of the line to the back, and noticed he wasn’t there anymore, in fact he was back far enough I couldn’t see him anymore. We were close enough to the end and there were enough riders behind us now I just due to the short-cut that I just kept hanging on.

I want to do a 165 mile weekend in October, so while these short, fast rides are fun, I need to start putting in some distance on the weekends. I think I’ll ride from home up to the park for the saturday morning rides; that’ll add about 18 miles to whatever I do with the Chain Reaction group.