Wednesday, May 5, 2010

The Ride from Hell

A simple plan for Tuesday's ride. Three (3x) 20min intervals right at or slightly above FTP. Turns into an epic exercise. It starts before I even leave home. My rear tire is flat. I patched this tube last Friday. I think this is a slow leak as it gradually went flat over the weekend. I toss it in the garbage. I hate finding pinholes. New tube, and out the door I go.


I get through the first interval feeling quite strong. This provides good correlation to my recent threshold test. My training really is working! As I round a bend the bike feels unusually twitchy. Bouncy almost. I look back and... I've got a rapidly deflating tire. I quickly change it and off I go. I'll use the flat change as my rest interval. As I start out my tire catches in a gap along the sidewalk where I was reparing my tire. I fall. Not hard. No injury. Just a scraped up calf.



"Rub some dirt on it Princess!" I tell myself. I wind up for the second interval. Less than five mintues in... another flat! Sad times...



Hmm.. Maybe there's something in the tire. This time I caaareeefully inspect the tire for anything stuck. I don't find anything. I'm out of tubes. But I do have insta patches. I carefully locate the leak, apply the patch .

The bad luck streak isn't over. I snap a tire lever putting the tire on.




Searching for the non-existant puncture source, and patching a tube takes a while. I'm on a short time schedule. My plan is to ramp back up, complete one more 20min interval and call it good.

About four, maybe five mintues in... I start to have that "not so fresh feeling". Am I bonking? I push for another minute or so. Yup. I'm bonking. Light headed. Unclear thoughts. Nausea. Whole thing. I'm a bit confused. My nutrition was good today. I brought a carbo-loaded sports drink on board, consumed about half of it to this point. No reason to be bonking but I can't deny what I'm feeling. I quickly douse the half bottle of sports drink and head for the house. Softly. Impishly. Pedaling as lightly as I can. Making matters worse.. my tire is losing air! It's a race between my rapidly bonking legs and a flatening tire. Why all the flats? I suspect there's a problem with my rim tape.

The score for today: One (out of three) 20min interval successfully completed. Three flats. One broken tire lever. One fall. One bonk. The result... one day off of the couch and riding in the sun. Even when it's a bad on the bike... It's a good day of life!

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