The worst ride ever...

We finally got a nice day. This week it's supposed to be warm and may even get up to 30 C on Thursday. Today I was looking forward to riding in some warm weather. Jamie Grant and I decided to do a ride together and while I was waiting for him I realized that I had no spare tubes. I lost my last one on Saturday's ride when I rode over a super bumpy road and it fell out of the rear seat straps that were holding it. I also lost another water bottle at the same time.

I ended up patching a couple of tubes while I waited for him and it was a good thing I did because by the time I got to Jamie's house, which is only a kilometer from my place, I got a rear flat tire. I fixed it and then 30 minutes into the ride my front tire went flat. I fixed that and then 10 minutes later it went flat again. 

As I was fixing my 3rd flat tire I realized that one of the reasons the tires were going flat was because I had put the patches on upside down. Duh!!! I ended up calling Alice to pick me up and as I was waiting I decided to try and patch one of the tubes again and it worked good enough that I was able to ride home. Later this evening I checked the tire and it was flat again. I think that gives me 8 or 9 flats so far this year alone.

I figured the problem is that I have put on over 2000 kilometers on those tires since February and they weren't the best tires to begin with. They have pretty soft rubber and have lots of little cuts on them. Before my next ride I'm going to put on my racing wheels and they have brand new tires on them. With only 3 weeks until my first race it is probably a good thing to try them out and make sure all the gearing works well. I'm also going to go down to MEC and get some new tires for my training rims and I'm going to make sure they are as puncture resistant as possible.

Unfortunately with all the delays I was only able to get about 70% of my ride in. Having the flat tires set me off a bit, and I've been feeling a little down regardless, and couldn't hold myself back from having some beers. For the rest of the evening Alice and I had drinks outside and then moved downstairs to the bar. It was a bit of a late night.

A positive today was that I ate really well and even after some beers, although I would have loved some KFC, I didn't eat anything. It is also the last day of my weight loss challenge with my imaginary friends on Twitter and I didn't want to sabotage myself.

Bike - 1:20:17 / 38.27 km / 28.6 kph

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