Distance: 48.1 mi, Climbed: 2,598 ft
Completed: 1,126.5 mi, 58,836 ft
Are you superstitious? I am not. But maybe I should be…
Today, Joanna and I had a 48-mile ride through Kentucky farmland. The ride had a good number of hills. In fact, it had just enough hills to complete our second Everesting. That is, we have now climbed enough hills to equal climbing up Mount Everest twice. Crazy.
The ride started innocently enough going up and down some rolling hills. About ten miles in, we noticed the clocks change. We have ridden across the Eastern time zone and have now reached the Central time zone. The good news is that gives us more time to get dinner tonight. The bad news is that we will need to get up earlier to get our rides in as the sun will be setting an hour earlier on the clock. Sigh.
As we started up another climb, I could immediately feel something was not right. Damn, another flat tire. I had my fourth flat tire of the ride. This time it was the front tire. Another thorn. The good news is I am getting used to changing these tires and was able to quickly change the tire and get on our way.
If you are keeping score, that is four flats for me and no flats for Joanna. I use traditional bicycle tires that have a removable inner tube. If the inner tube gets a flat, it can either be replaced or patched. Joanna has tubeless tires. That is, no inner tube. The air is put into the tire itself. The tire is filled with sealant, so if a puncture occurs, it is automagically sealed by the sealant and the tire remains rideable. Tubeless tires can go thousands of miles requiring little to no maintenance. As we were getting back on the bikes, I said to Joanna that maybe I made a mistake going with traditional tires. I should have gone tubeless. She said, “Now you jinxed it.”
We finished riding to the top of the hill, and we were treated to a glorious two-mile downhill. I sped ahead down the hill. What fun. That is, until I got to the bottom of the hill, and my phone buzzed. A text from Joanna; she has a flat! She was right. I jinxed it.
I rode back up the hill a bit to help Joanna fix her flat tire. She had sealant oozing out of both tires, so she must have had a puncture in both tires. Fortunately, the sealant worked perfectly on the front tire. We added a little more air, and it was good to go.
The rear tire had lost about half of its air. I inspected the tire and was not able to find the puncture. I thought maybe it had sealed as well. We tried adding air. We normally run Joanna’s rear tire at 60 psi. When we hit 40 psi, we could hear air hissing and could see the sealant bubbling out of the tire. We now knew where the puncture was, but we still could not see the puncture itself because it was so small.
I tried every standard trick I knew to get the sealant to hold. I spun the wheel. I put the hole near the ground to use gravity to direct more sealant to the puncture. Nothing worked. I wanted to plug the hole with a special plug designed for that purpose, but I could not find the hole to plug it. In the end, we had to remove the sealant and put a standard tire tube in the wheel. Back to old school.
With two flat tires and one that took a bit to figure out, we were again running late and had to race the sun going down. No more time to stop and take pictures of the beautiful scenery we were riding through. We eventually decided to take a short cut. We traded eight miles on beautiful back roads for four quick miles on a highway with a decent shoulder. While not as pretty, it saved us about thirty minutes and helped ensure we did not have to finish in the dark. Success.
