Fantastic ride this morning. A large group left Lowdham for some summer fun.
Brilliant company. Lots of laughter and banter. A nice steady pace throughout with the usual Farndon effort thrown in.
You can tell it's summer. There was an amazing feel-good factor on the ride. Everybody looked like they were enjoying themselves apart from Simon 'Two-Tubes' Stanford when he punctured.
Moe, Larry and Curly went back to help Simon change his inner tube. After about 15 minutes, I rode back and the others said they'd wait. They didn't!
Good job really it was like a vaudeville comedy watching 3 blokes trying to change an inner tube! You've got to laugh.
A guy in a van even stopped to offer assistance. It was almost embarrassing. Four of us standing there.
I observed for 5 minutes and offered sage advice but no-one listened. The valve on Simon's inner tube was far too short. The threads for the valve cap were protruding no more than 5mm past the rim. No-one had a decent pump (I'd forgotten mine - I've not had a puncture in over 5000 miles on the same bombproof Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres!). Someone had a pump that was about the length and diameter of a pencil and that wouldn't connect properly.
Mick managed to produce an inner tube with a long valve. This is where I took control. Whipped the old one out and put the new one in no time and we were away. They'd still be there otherwise.
I used Ed Ward's sage advice which is to work from the top down pinching the tyre of the bead and applying downward force to work the tyre on quickly and more importantly without tyre levers. This works even with the tightest of tyres. Luckily Simon's tyre was quite supple to it was no trouble at all to get back one.
All in all, I reckon 20-30 minutes were expended on that tube change. At least the weather was glorious.
I think they thought I was some kind of magician. Anytime chaps! All great fun.
I've seen it before where someone only has a short valve spare tube for a deep rim. Check what you carry!
It was good to see so many riders out. We had quite a large easy group as well. It was very steady, but new man Mike is still getting into it and we had to ease back quite a few times.
The easy group is there to encourage new riders. It is always rewarding to see riders progress from struggling in the easy group to being able to enjoy a faster group. Sadly, some of us are just trying to not slide further down the slippery slope!
I had intended to go out with the easy group yesterday because I am racing today.
You will recall Ed that I spent over a year with the steady group when I returned to cycling back in 2015. Not especially because I didn't feel capable but because there was no particular benefit of moving to the faster group what with the weight of the Dawes to keep the training load higher than those experience on lighter bikes.
I enjoy the steady and many do. It's all valuable miles however fast you get from A to B.
Karen has come on really strong over the winter with her training regime. I did note that. It'll be exciting to see her go under the 30 minute barrier on a 10 in the near future - will it be this Tuesday? She hopes to ride so fingers crossed.