Let the Drama Begin

I flew to Kentucky today, got to the hotel, got my bike out of the box and everything looked groovy. Then I immediately screwed that grooviness up. How? Well I took a hand pump to my newly mounted tubular tires that have a valve extension on them; all I wanted to do was top the tires off with some air so I could get my training ride in before the sun went down. Bad idea as it turned out.

At first I thought I had accomplished that goal of inflating the tires and went to jump on my bike only to discover a squishy front tire. LOVELY. And like I mentioned before, it’s a tubular tire so its not like you can just put a tube in and go (for those still learning all the weird ins and outs of the cycling world…., i.e. MOM, …a tubular tire is glued to the rim of the wheel).

So here I am in the hotel, no one is around, I have a flat and I need to train like nobody’s business. What’s one to do? No, not call the pizza delivery guy and just jump into some PJ’s, but instead call a reliable mechanic in Utah of course!! Word was that I needed to mess with the valve extender to see if it needed tightening and it seemed like it did. Yes!! So I tried pumping the tire again and this time when I got done, the tire went completely flat. Guess that didn’t work. So I start messing with the valve extender again trying tighten it and it wasn't grabbing at all so I tried something that I hoped wasn’t going to happen and I pulled up on the valve extension...... and it ends up coming straight off the valve- I didn’t even have to unscrew it. Not good.

But I refused to believe it was broken so for the next 40 minutes I am sitting in my hotel room floor completely dressed for a ride watching the sun go down with each passing minute and trying to fit the valve extender into the Reynolds rim hoping to get it screwed back on there somehow. But every time I thought I got it screwed on, I was able to pull it right back off with one motion. It took a while for me to figure out that it wasn’t supposed to be that hard to do and what really had happened was somehow the valve on the tire got stripped.

Well that sucked because that meant there is no chance of getting air in the thing for the moment. A very fixable problem but that meant I had to set up the trainer in the hotel room for a few hours of spinning. Ugh. I am not that adverse to trainers actually but I was really looking forward to heading out on the streets of Kentucky and exploring. Oh well. All's well that ends well.