Slow puncture

On Monday 31st May I headed off for a long spin (c.120km) before heading off to the Olympia to see Crowded House put on a stellar performance in front of a packed audience. The lead singer Neil Finn had a good gag about cycling around Dublin and encountering a manhole cover he described as like cycling into a bike rack!

With plenty of kms and climbing in the legs early on in the week I knew that Tuesday night could possibly be a little tiresome. About 4km into the training spin I started to feel the pebbles on the road reverberate up through the saddle and into my body. Around the same time I noticed that the power I was exerting on the peddles wasn't having the desired effect. This can only mean one thing, a puncture! Akin to the one I experienced a week earlier in fact. With the help of "Triple A" (Asher the Australian Animal - as I fondly refer to him because of his athletic prowess on the bike) I patched the hole in jig time.

I was able to get a decent amount of pressure into the tires with the handpump but when I jumped back on, and for the remainder of the spin, the bike's efficiency on the road had dropped off quite a bit. Over the next 3 hours we managed around 4,315 ft of climbing. Sounds like a tidy bit of vertical cycling for a Tuesday evening, but when compared with Les Dix Alpes it is less than half the height of most of the climbs! I will have to do twice what I did last night, per day, for 10 days, in the heat, and at altitude. It's a scary prospect.

Ash is just back from the Pyrnesses so he was in really good form on the bike, that just compounded my misery. He's a great motivator and I really enjoy the challenge of cycling and trying to keep up with him. On July 25th he's taking part in Ironnan Triathlon Switzerland. I would like to wish him the very best of luck for that. I have no doubt that he'll annihilate the course...

Here is the Garmin readout of the spin. (Notice the very low Average Speed!!)