Puncturised

I got a puncture on Tuesday night. Luckily, I was doing laps of a circuit around the local area, which I do so that it is not too far from home in the event of well, a puncture. Because of this, I ride light with no spare tube in my pocket or pump on the frame.

I went a round a sharp corner, which is pretty much a U-turn and found myself sliding sideways down the slope at the back wheel so I pulled-over and there it was. The good thing was, I was at the actual farthest point from my apartment, about 4km, so I hoisted the frame onto my shoulder and started off on the trudge home. After about 300m, I thought 'bollocks' and decided to call it in and wait for the support car to arrive.

Later, I checked-out types of punctures on Sheldon Brown's website and it seems that had a twin-hole 'snake bite' type, which is apparantly typical of an under-inflated tyre hitting a stone. So I learned something new yesterday.

Afterwards, I made some hotdogs.

New shirt to the test

Luckily, Atsushi’s weather report did not forecast rain on Friday so I joined him and John for a ride again. This week another of John’s friends was there, too. We will call him Dr. Mitsura PHD, general practitioner of medicine. So if any of us was ever going to crash badly, that was the night to do it (except for Mitsura, of course).

This Friday was the night of pseudo-classification outfits- I showed up in my brand spanking new second-hand maillot jaune, which I picked-up for 945 yen.

Sporting a rather lovely white and red polka dot cap, was Atsushi. Unlike me, he justified his with a fine display of uphill riding to cement his position as king of the mountains.

John, on the other hand, proved himself to be to be king of the socks.

On the left we can see the bike line-up. The picture is not clear, obviously but I think that, more importantly, it captures something of the the mood of the ride, time and place.

We can also see a close-up of Atsushi's machine here. Note the black leather pedophile-style gloves, which he mistakenly thinks resemble sniper ones. Perhaps we can find him some that are a little more 'him'.

Anyway, we had a good old session, got to shout at a few dickheads (ie- people who are not us) and Mitsura, ironically the only one of us not wearing a helmet, clocked in a whopping 43.2 kmph on the final sprint to take the glory and cause all the excited girls to gasp “And he’s a doctor?!”.