[bike] New state for tire failure

[dmaze]

The bike plan for today (arranged somewhat stealthily and on short notice, perhaps) was to recreate the route from Somerville into Rhode Island that we did shortly before the 90-mile Climb to the Clouds working up to narya's PMC ride two years ago. There were in fact PMC route signs all over the place, especially southbound in the Medfield-Norfolk area. The end trip for me wound up coming in over 83 miles, in somewhere under nine hours. Route map

Things started off fine. We stopped 20 miles in in Dover, and had just crossed into Rhode Island and were looking for someplace plausible for lunch (past the 40-mile mark) when my rear tire suddenly gave out. Sometimes these are subtle things where you spend ten minutes trying to find where the puncture is; the half-inch gash across tire and tube a sixteenth of a rotation from the valve was not subtle at all. The tube went on fine (and the CO2 inflator worked as advertised), except that the hole in the tire was not particularly happy, and in fact the tube was starting to bulge outwards there.

Franklin was about 6 miles away so we went there; the Eastern Massachusetts map showed two bike shops there. The nearer one was closed. The further one was a little ways out of town, but they in fact had the exact same tire, and thus it was that money was able to solve my problems. (I am not asking the Internet how much less money it could have been if I didn't need it right now).

After that, and depositing nuclearpolymer at the Franklin commuter rail, we picked up the pace a bit, but enough to totally drain me by 10 miles from Franklin (around mile 60). I ate the rest of my food, added more sunscreen, drank the rest of my water (hmm) and we started up again. We wound up finding a happy medium of moving reasonably quickly but not so fast that I died (15 mph on flat sections worked well). The group started to dissolve around Watertown Square -- fredrickegerman made a light that I didn't, then mb got ahead of me and appears to have taken the "follow MA-16 to glory" directions a little too literally at Alewife Brook Parkway -- but I assume everyone made it home okay from there.

Comments

[76trombones.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, why the stealth? Surely all the pokey people were appropriately scared away by the ride a month ago. And last week provided precedent for advertising both a slow-people mob and a hard-core mob. (Did something bad happen last week?)

[dmaze]

Lack of organization? Indecision? Not a good reason.

[narya.livejournal.com]

I don't think the "pokey" people were scared away. The people who are disposed towards lots of stressing about possibly being the slowest person were.

[76trombones.livejournal.com]

It's true, there are different ways to react to the people around you stressing about how slow the group is going. (For example, "if you needed to be back by a certain time, did you check with the organizer to see whether he thought it was at all plausible??" Of course, maybe the answer was yes, and maybe the answer had been yes, but I suspect not.)

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

Mostly it was waffling until Saturday, and then deciding that no one else would actually still have their entire Sunday free.