Front flat tyre.
I suspect a punch and release on the front via my nemesis; the winter thorn. I thought I had survived the English countryside hedge cutting season this winter, but just on cue, a flat hit me as I rolled out of Tesco.
I had to embarassingly push my rig to a bench the on the Clowne Greenway, and quickly realized that I could get away with a top up pump, and maybe make it on the way home. God bless Gatorskins. I had to do two more top ups via my micro pump, then hop and skate – flat, and repeat. Add that to another embarassing wave to a local villager whilst parking on Skinner Street, and that was it – Clowne man shuffled through the front door.
Road side repairs are truly the evil bane of any cyclist. Especially in the cold wet English winter. It’s disgusting finger numbing work to repair one, but luckily the 25mm Gatorskins made me home.
That makes it two flats in a week.
I’m not surprised, because I had a dream about this over the weekend. In the dream, I remember experiencing two flats at the same time on my favourite Vernon Barker steel rig.
A twin evil flat bane that was as horrible in the dream as it was in real life.
In the dream the flats occured on dirt tracks, and as far as I could tell that cognitive flat was on the Archaelogical Way. I love pushing my 25mm Gatorskin tyres to the limits, but I think even after 8000 miles or more, even Gators are getting sick and tired of hitting gravel everytime I cosplay my Vernon Barker road bike as an MTB rig.
So yea, this was a premonition turned live action.
The dream world happened in real life. Sigmund Freud would be mad that I didn’t spasm out sealant liquid had these tyres been tubeless. That’d have been one helluva wet dream. So now might be a good time to try out some Schwalbe Marathons, probably on 28mm rubber.
Gators are awesome, but they do have limits especially on thorny dirt and trails.
So now the current Skins on VB will be swapped to my fixed gear ride so that I can fully skid them out to the bone.
Even after eight thousand miles.
Maybe I’m a penny pincher, but I hate wasting anything.
These Gators gunna have to be used down to the glue for me to throw them away.
8000 miles ain’t nuthin’ yet for my Skins.
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