« Intellectual property, part V | Main | Silliness »
October 09, 2004
Puncture
This morning near Baberaz on the way to Chambery, I rolled over something sharp in the road and punctured my rear tire. Whatever it was left a visible hole in the tire, not just the tube. I wonder if I ought to buy another tire.
Luckily, I'd taken Rob's advice and had an inner tube and little pump in a bag underneath my seat. My tires are clinchers, so I deflated the inner tube and used small steel tire irons to remove the back tire. I learned there that I need softer tire irons. The steel ones scratched my rim a little.
Good thing I had a second inner tube. It wasn't until this morning that I noticed the glue in my patch kit had all dried up inside the tube.
For the pump, I need to replace the CO2 cartridge. To use this pump, you first inflate the tire a bit by hand to verify everything, then use the cartridge to inflate the tire to full pressure. Inflating the tire to full pressure by hand with my tiny pump doesn't look feasible, since full pressure for racing tires is about 120 psi. The guy who sold me the bike told me the way to avoid knocking the rims out of true and breaking spokes is to keep the tires fully inflated, so I don't want to ride without being able to do that.
Since I didn't get a long workout, I decided to charge the hills going home. By charging the hills, I mean riding up each hill in a gear just higher than the highest I can do without slowing my cadence, and then trying to keep the cadence anyway. After the first hill, my leg muscles were suffering. By the last little rise outside Barraux, I almost cracked. Your heart and lungs also get a workout when you ride like that.
Posted by Mark at October 9, 2004 11:36 AM