On Flatting

Tuesday November 2 was a bad day. Any day when a bunch of angry lunatics wins elections is a bad day. Tuesday was especially bad because my back tyre ripped wide open on Brimley road between Eglinton Ave. and Danforth Road.

So for anyone who might happen across this blog who is new here, I'm what might be called a lunatic myself, as in I am crazy about riding, my bike that is. Anyway I use clincher tyres, (tyres or tires that have an inner tube), as opposed to tubular (tube is sewn up inside the tyre) or tubeless (tyre has no tube and is glued to the wheel, like that of a car tyre).

Now one might think that with a ripped tyre it would still be possible to ride home, since the tube did not rip, except, when the tyre rips what happens is, the metal threads inside the tyre are now exposed and the tube is bulging around them, although come to think of it, even a clean rip the tube would still fail. If a person is ever bored on a rainy Saturday afternoon, take a cheap road bike tube and try to inflate it to 40 psi. Now normally road bikes should run at about 90 to 120 psi (sometimes even as high as 140psi), but if one were to inflate a free tube to 40psi, well it would not work, the tube would explode.

What happens is, inside the tyre the tube has no room to expand so the air simply becomes more dense and the tyre feels harder. But in the open the tube expands and expands, so that the equivalent of 40psi of air pressure makes the tube rather large and then kaboom. Well when a tyre rips, suddenly there is all kinds of space for a tube to expand into and kaboom. What I find really annoying, this particular ripped tyre had all of about 500km on it. All but the very thinnest racing tyres (of which this was not) should last 2000km, this was the second failure of that tyre too, the previous failure was at about 30km of use.

Anyway that failure seemed like a good invitation to stop riding and recover, in five days I commuted to work three days (so about 80km a day on Friday, Monday and Tuesday) and did two days of intense club rides (Saturday and Sunday). I think a couple days off is very much necessary, that said I think I'm going to do some core training, it will probably help.