Enough with the flats!

The rains late last week put a temporary end to the awesome trail conditions we've had for the last few weeks, so I headed out on the road bike Sunday to get a ride in after the last round of storms went through Saturday night.  The ride started out uneventful enough as I set out to explore some of the Death by Hills route that I skipped out on last month.  I've been on most of the roads the course uses at some point or another, but I set my sights on a couple roads I've never been on with only two wheels.  I've been on Melrose a lot, but heading west, I've always turned on either Ossenfort or Bouquet to start heading back.  This time, I decided to venture all the way to where it intersects Highway T.  That might have been my first mistake.  After I passed Bouquet, the road went down a steep, twisty hill that had a good amount of debris on the road from the recent rains.  It was not that fun to actually go down.  When I got to the bottom, I paused for a few minutes to gauge the traffic on T.  After I decided that traffic was light enough that I could probably make it over to St. Albans without incident, I made the left turn and pushed myself as much as I could until I could get back onto a quieter road.  Unfortunately, right as I was approaching the entrance to St. Albans, I noticed a weird noise coming from my front tire.  I pulled off the road and saw it was losing air.  Grrr!  Looking around, I saw a tree stump that I could sit on while I changed the tire.  Pulling out my spare tube, I started freaking out that I hadn't put a new tube in my pack when I saw that the one I had was dirty (I had never put a new tube in after my flat in January).  I then tried to call for SAG support (my wife), but I didn't have a signal.  So then I started thinking and realized that the problem with that tube was simply the valve stem had become unscrewed, so I calmed down, got the tube changed, and aired it back up.

Unfortunately, this kind of sucked the fun out of the ride and my goal now was just to get home without further incident.  Flats always make me nervous like that.  Across the street from where I changed my tire was Bassett Road, which connects up with Manchester, so I headed down that road, and almost immediately I saw some buffalo.  That was pretty cool, as you don't see those around Missouri very often (unless you're at Lone Elk Park or Grant's Farm (don't they have a few?).

Bassett had a pretty good hill to climb up, and then from the top of that there was a good downhill to Manchester.  When I got to Manchester, I had remembered that there was a monument very close to where I was that the St. Louis Cycling Club had erected in the early 1900's marking the county line.  I made the right on Manchester, and headed out looking for it, but as I headed further up the hill away from Bassett, I figured I'd missed it and turned around to head back.  Sure enough, it was almost back to where I had started from, so I swung around to grab a picture.

As I was doing this, the guy who lives across the street from this monument pulled out and stopped to tell me how he's been telling riders about the monument ever since he moved out there in the early 90's, then told me how he thinks cyclists shouldn't be on roads without shoulders.  Meh.  The only roads that get shoulders are busy enough that I'd be constantly breathing exhaust from cars, as I learned when I got back on Highway 100 and headed for home.

Before heading home from work today, I was trying to decide between pulling the road bike out again or hitting the trails.  I checked the GORC forum and someone had posted that Greensfelder was dry, which surprised me.  Then walking out to my car, the wind was still blowing pretty good, so my mind was made up.  Trails it was.  When I got home, I gathered my stuff and headed over to the trails, seeing my coworker's car already in the lot.  Since the last two times I've been out, I've run Declue clockwise, I decided to run it the more traditional direction, especially since I haven't ridden a couple of the reroutes that direction yet.  Everything started off almost perfect, I made it down to the Allenton Road crossing only putting a foot down once, and that was just because I swung a turn a bit to wide.  I was getting hung up a bit more through the switchback areas since they're more rocky and technical, but I was hitting a few areas that I've struggled with before.  I even got almost halfway up one of the sets up steps before I had to dismount, and that's when I crossed paths with my coworker.

Springtime on the trail

Unfortunately, the equestrians couldn't wait for dry trails to ride.

We both took a break for a minute before continuing on, but not 5 minutes after I passed him, I heard a hissing sound.  My front tire had gone flat.  I pulled it off and started trying to change it when I managed to break off one of the levers in the rim.  DOH!  That's when someone came up on me and asked if I had everything.  I told him what had happened, and he stopped and starting digging for his.  It turned out his were missing, but his multi-tool had a lever built into it.  With that, we managed to get the tube switched out, but when I started airing up the new tube, it wouldn't hold air, and I started to wonder if I was carrying another bad tube in my bag.  That will teach me to be more careful on my pre- and post- ride checks.  Thinking about that though, my last flat on that bike was noticed either at home or in a parking lot.  Surely I wouldn't have put a bad tube back in my bag if I wasn't on the trail, would I?  Since the guy helping me was on a 29er, his tube wouldn't work with my wheel, so it was hike-a-bike time for me.  Luckily, just up the hill from me was an escape route, so I hiked through the weeds, and walked my bike about a mile back to the car.  When I got back home, I got the tire changed in the comfort of my garage, and I'll have to head back out again tomorrow to see if I can end this string of bad luck.

After I started wrapping up, my wife came home with the kids.  It was getting dark, so she took J in to give him a bath, but K wanted to stay out with me.  She looked around the garage, and immediately asked, "Did you have a flat, daddy?"  I looked at her in amazement and asked how she knew that.  She pointed to the tire levers I still had out and said something to the effect of, "You have those out.  Those are for changing flats."  Wow, this girl has a memory!