Tweet!
As we went down to the garage this morning, this is what we found!
Crud and Double Crud! Pam used the opportunity to go back into the house for her long pants and long sleeves while I changed it. I’ve had such a run of flats lately that I decided to put a patched tube in it this time. I’m usually a little leary of using a patched tube at the pressure we run in the tandem tires, but there was one hanging at arm’s reach so I used it today. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it doesn’t cause us any problems. After a short delay, we hit the road for our standard morning tandem ride.
In the cycling themed cartoon movie “The Triplets of Belleville“, the grandmother whistles out cadence for her grandson when he’s training or racing. “Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet”. You hear that over and over.
Well, this morning as we were climbing out of the James River valley on Sunshine, I start hearing this “Tweet, tweest, twesstt, twessspht” (she doesn’t whistle well) coming from the back of the bike. It seems she had checked our average speed coming up the hill and didn’t want to lose any! Based on Pam’s “tweets”, we pushed pretty hard the rest of the way home.
I hadn’t felt particularly strong, but knew we had been pushing it as best we could the entire ride. As we started down the back side of Turners, we had a car turn out behind us, so we pedaled as hard as I felt we could safely go down the hill and around the curves to stay in front of him. We were pleased that we made it down fast enough that it probably didn’t inconvenience him to be stuck behind us the entire way. At least we were going fast enough that he didn’t feel compelled to try and pass us on the curves.
As we rolled into the driveway, Pam let’s out a sigh and says “We did it!”. Our average speed for the day was 18.5 mph, which blew away the previous high for the year, and may actually be our personal best for that hilly 20 mile route. It’s funny that both mornings we’ve ridden this week, we ended up with really good times without setting out to do so or killing ourselves in the process!
By the time I got to work, though, I could tell I had been riding hard all morning! It was all I could do to haul myself up the stairs. That’s a good feeling! The trip home from work was as uneventful as usual, and I made sure to lollygag along the entire time.
God bless…
TW
Tags: bicycle, Bike Commute, Cycling, Fitness, flat tire, tandem, Turners Station
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July 2, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Starting to seem like your streets are either terribly littered with debris or maybe it’s time for some Schwalbes
July 3, 2009 at 8:14 am
We do consistently ride about 6 miles round trip on the shoulder of Sunshine Street outside of town where it is actually Highway D. That’s usually pretty debris covered and is where we pick up most of our issues.
This one, however, was my own doing. Last time we had a flat out on the road, we weren’t sure if it was at the screw hole from the prior problem, so we put a dollar bill in as a boot. Thinking it wouldn’t hurt, I just left it there. Upon looking at the tube last night, I could see where we had actually worn a line through it in the outline of that boot. Lesson learned. Don’t leave a boot in indefinately!