I knew I was good at getting flat tires.
I knew it was a special talent of mine.
But this is ridiculous.
It's not just the one and only time I make a specific point of very
carefully examining the tires and pressure on a borrowed mountain bike
that there were four flat tires that day (which is huge for a group
that size riding a trail that tame) and all happened in my vicinity.
It's not just the time that I managed to get a flat while sitting in
the bike shop having a conversation. The rim tape on a newly built
wheel wasn't seated properly and I got a flat without doing anything.
It's not just that by the time they patched that flat and more tea was
drunk and laughing happened and it was time to leave that the
previously undiscovered pinhole in the rear tire had let out enough air
to be noticed.
It's not just that I managed to do a self-supported 300km weekend
without a single flat, until _after_ I met up with the bike club and
promptly got two pinch flats in one kthumpthump that was bad enough to
cause a pinch in my TIRE.
Or a flat caused by tacks deliberately scattered in the road near a
repair stand.
Or a later flat caused by a thorn finding the one place in my tire that
was unprotected. With that one happening when I'd hidden the bike off
by the side of the road so I could take some pictures.
Or the ...
And the ...
You get the picture. I have an astonishing number of flats. While
many of them are purely preventable pinch flats that are in many ways
my own fault for not checking pressure or for checking pressure and
being too damn lazy to do something about it cause I don't like my hand
pump and would rather wait til it's convenient to stop at a place with
an air compressor, there are lots of flats that, it seems, could only
happen to me. Because when I'm not getting flats, people who are
riding near me, or who have recently mocked my amazing flat tire talent
are getting flats.
But this, this, this, this is RIDICULOUS!!
My personal bikes arrived back in Haikou Wednesday afternoon. Since
the six of us took eleven bikes to the race in Sanya and I'm not biking
all next week due to being a translator in the race office for the Tour
of Hainan I got stuck on the end of the assemble bikes list. There is
no reason I couldn't take a bus or a moto-taxi or even ask my boss to
have a car pick me up, except that my friend and former classmate Tim
has a tolerable mountain bike that he let me borrow and I'm an addict
who has to get her fix any way possible.
The rear wheel is a recent replacement and is all quick release,
schrader valve, Shimano cassette, my bike geek friend got me to go to
the pro shop to fix something. With the exception of the fact that
it's mostly true the front wheel, however, is a different story. Even
if I knew how to remove and remount a wheel without QR, I don't have
the tools. Nor, since it wasn't my bike, did I have my seatbag and
pump. Nor would my pump have been able to deal with a Woods valve.
So, at 10:30pm, when I got off work and went out to the parking lot of
an international Tour and discovered that the front tire had
miraculously managed to go flat between breakfast and now I had no
personal way of dealing with it.
I could have called my friend the mechanic who is working Neutral
Support. The chances that he would have a patch kit, or a mountain
bike tube, or an adaptor for a Woods valve were pretty slim and I
decided not to.
I could have called my boss (or his boss) in the Race Office and tried
to arrange a car to send me home. Of course this would preclude the
majority of the cars not having left an hour earlier in a convoy to go
to the airport and pick up Important Guests. And, given the size of
the cars one of the sponsors has provided getting the bike home would
have required one with a bike rack, like say ... one of the Team Cars,
and did I mention it was the non QR front wheel of a 35 pound mountain
bike?
Someone in the General Office managed to arrange a ride for me with two
guys from the Haikou Public Security Bureau. While they weren't
technically working the race and probably shouldn't have been putting a
grungy mountain bike in the back of the luxury SUV that belongs to
their director, at least I managed to get home.
I moto'd in to work today.
-M