Saturday, I went for a good long bike ride before it got hot, making it all the way to the end of the Erie Canal portion of the bike path. There's a "detour" that takes you to further path via some dirt roads, but I opted instead for the quiet stretch of path along the canal, that dead-ends at some railroad tracks.
It was a good choice, because I got to see a blue heron in flight along the path. They're really remarkably graceful birds, and, for the record, can happily cruise through the air at 14 mph.
Sunday's ride got off to a good start, and I was farther down the path than I've gone before, all the way into Cohoes. And then, the little bit of glass pictured above wrecked the whole day. At least, I found this sliver of glass buried in my front tire after it went flat, so I'm going to blame it.
Happily, I had my cell phone with me, so I called Kate to come retrieve me, and walked the bike back to the town park in Colonie. I'll get the tire fixed sometime this week-- it's probably for the best, because there are a few other things that probably need doing with the bike, so I'll just drop it off at the local bike shop and let them tweak it up for me.
Ride stats below the fold:
Saturday:
Total distance: 25.98 miles
Average Speed: 13.76 mph
Maximum Speed: 22.16 mph
Sunday, on bike:
Total Distance: 14.49 miles
Average Speed: 16.10 mph
Maximum Speed: 32.01 mph
Sunday, on foot:
Total Distance: 3 miles
Average Speed: 4 mph
Maximum Speed: 5 mph
Year to date, on bike:
Total Distance: 127 miles
Maximum Speed: 32.01 mph
Repairing a flat bicycle tire generally isn't that big a deal if you've got a repair kit and a portable pump with you. (They make pumps that you can carry under the horizontal bar of your bicycle.) If similar misfortunes happen to you with any frequency, you might want to look into that.
They also make repair kits that are like an inch square by a quarter-inch deep or so. Grab a couple, they're absolutely worth having.
Or carry a fresh inner tube with you and simply replace the whole thing when it gets a puncture. Then you don't need to faff about with repair kits.
14 mph? Aren't you supposed to be a Physicist? Metric, torwillsmitheyallbarbarians, metric! 6.2 W/N!
"Happily, I had my cell phone with me, so I called Kate to come retrieve me, and walked the bike back to the town park in Colonie. I'll get the tire fixed sometime this week-- it's probably for the best, because there are a few other things that probably need doing with the bike, so I'll just drop it off at the local bike shop and let them tweak it up for me."
Just to pile on: if you can fiddle around with your fancy physics equipment, you can fix a flat. I'm just a physiologist, and even I can fix flats.
To clarify: I'm certainly capable of fixing a flat tire. I am not, however, MacGyver, so I can't really rig up a tire patch and pump out of mud and fallen leaves and the elastic from my socks.
I'll probably get a patch kit of some sort when I get the bike fixed, but I didn't have one with me. I didn't really expect to have a problem on the bike path, which is never all that far from civilization.