Time to Retire
Category: Cycling/Running/Fitness...
Posted Tuesday, October 04, 2005 at 03:02 PM [GMT-6]

No, I'm not that old, but take a look at this photo of the front tire on my Gold Rush Replica 'bent. See those bulges...it looks like a snake that just swallowed a mouse.

I rode the last seven miles of my workout on Saturday with the tire in that condition. I was cruising back into town with a nice tailwind, doing 20-22 mph, when I began to feel (and hear) a rhythmic rumbling that (1) wasn't normally part of my cycling environment and (2) didn't seem to fit into the mental checklist of Good Things That Occur During A Ride. Reluctantly -- one never wants to stop with a tailwind -- I pulled over and immediately saw the problem. It looked and rode ugly, but the bead seemed to be holding and I decided I could make it home...probably.

I'll forego the suspense. I slowed down a bit and made it back without incident. The handling was a little squirrelly in the corners but the bead held and disaster was thwarted. The bike shop has a new tire waiting for me, one that I had actually special ordered a few days earlier after experiencing a series of flats on the front tire and noting some frayed threads in the inner casing of the tire. Yeah, I had a warning, although I've never before had a tire herniate in quite this fashion. I tried to buy a new tire a month earlier, but it's impossible to find a narrow high pressure 20" tire in Midland, even though the number of recumbents is steadily increasing.

The good news is that it's the front tire. Changing the rear tire on a recumbent is not a task for the faint of heart or the short of patience.