Flat tyres are the curse of my cycling life. There are few things less pleasant than having to stop on the side of a busy road, in bad weather, to change a bike tyre which is covered in who-knows-what-toxic-road-sludge and all because some drunken moron (who will probably run me over in a month's time) threw his empty beer bottle out the car window. At one point I was getting a puncture every couple of weeks until i) I got into the habit of regularly inspecting my bike tyres for sharp objects which were stuck in the rubber but hadn't yet caused a puncture, and ii) got myself some tyre liners from Slime. Slime are the folks who make those fancy tyre tubes filled with some goop that is supposed to be self-sealing if you get a puncture. I'm not sure exactly how the goop works but I imagined that it could glue a tube to a tyre, or leave you with a slow leak that couldn't be patched afterwards of something. The tyre liners, however, are nice and basic --- a thin(-ish) strip of some flexible plasticy stuff. It feels sort of soft if you poke it but it seems to stop things making their way into the tube if they puncture the outer tyre casing. I've had a pretty good run with the slime liners so far, a few thousand kms cycled with no flats --- though I've still had to replace a couple of tyres when they got so cut up that they started to split. But even then, the tube stayed fine --- until last Thursday when I was cycling home down the side of State Highway 2 heading into Wellington. I felt that dreaded squishy feeling coming from my rear wheel. Luckily, I was on the part of the road where it is possible to climb over the barrier on the side of the road and use the track/cesspit/official cycleway to change my tyre, with an extra couple of metres between me and the cars. I couldn't see anything obvious stuck in the outside of my tyre. (I've learned to always look for things after replacing a tube only to have the new tube be punctured by the same piece of glass still stuck in the tyre.) The slime liners still looked fine too; but there was an obvious hole in my tube, running along a thin line. It seems that where the ends of the slime liner overlap the upper-most end had been pressing slightly into the tube (I try to keep my tyres at about 120PSI) and had pressed all the way through. So --- a puncture from my puncture protection. I'll stick with the tyre liners anyway though. I've certainly had far, far fewer punctures since I've been using them. It's just annoying that I don't seem to be able to get free of this problem of flat bike tyres.
I see it's almost a month since I last posted something. What have I been doing with my time? Not so much of interest it seems. Though I did run the last two races of the Wellington xterra trail running series.
The third race of the series was held out at Belmont regional park over a nice trail which climbed to an open ridge, descended a reasonably steep & rocky track then followed the Horokiwi stream (I think) for a bit to give the event a real off-road feel (and some chilly wet feet) before a final climb near the finish. This was the only race from the series with good weather. The sun on the top sections of the course and the views over Wellington harbour made it hard not to pause and admire the scenery --- maybe I can attribute my place of 6th to too much atching the views and not enough running; though I placed 3rd in the open men's division which sounds more respectable.
I'd been increasingly slack about training for these races, which, given that I started them without much training in the first place, means not much training at all. Training for the Belmont run consisted of a single trip to Central Park in Brooklyn and running up the hill there a couple of times. Still, that's one more run than I did in the three weeks between the third race and the final race, last Sunday.
The series finished with a (not-very-much-) starlight run at the Wainuiomata mountain bike park. The trail there was supposed to be pretty much the same as the Wainui Mountain run which Erich and I started with in May. A gale warning, and heavy rain meant the course was changed at the last minute, replacing 5km of exposed trails on top of the hill for an extra 5km loop of the mountain bike park. The track was slippery enough the first time round when I was only about the fifth person running on it, but for the second loop, once runners from both the short and the long courses had been over once each, things were slick enough that it was impossible to run up some of the steeper slopes. I had a couple of good falls. Both of the probably due to the fact that my head torch was pretty feeble. I'll blame those falls for loosing at least one of the two places I lost over the course of the race. I was happy enough with my final placing of 8th. The appalling weather meant there were fewer runners than races earlier in the series, but the medium and long races had been combined so I feel that I was running against some people who were used to running double the distance of the course, and doing it quickly.
The real test is now in three week's time: the mukamuka munter. I know I told Erich that I wouldn't do any, but perhaps I should do some training for this one.
Congratulations to Dmitri (Pictured below, intently discussing football at the Southern Cross) who successfully defended his PhD on "computational tooling".
Erich had been pestering me to enter the Mukamuka Munter run with him and the Wainuiomata Mountain Run, at the start of May was well timed as a warm up (for the originally posted date for Mukamuka). I'd done no real exercise since coming back from Melbourne so I was a bit surprised to come in 6th of the 23 guys in the 12km race, at 1:07:11, six seconds behind Erich.
While we were out for the Wainui run, someone had tucked a flyer, for the Xterra trail running series, under the windscreen wiper on the car. By now, the Mukamuka race had been postponed until late August so I needed something to keep me training in the meantime. The Xterra race locations sounded nice, I'd just enjoyed the uphill part of the Wainui run so I entered the four race series.
The first race was on the hills above Wellington's south coast. The 12km track headed up to the radar dome at the top of Hawkins' hill and then down to the coast at Red Rocks, coming back along the beach.
The run seemed pretty busy --- about 270 entrants in total, and 69 in the 12km male course. This time I didn't bother about trying to pace myself early on and slogged my way up the hill at the start. It seemed to pay off since I finished 10th with a time of 1:05:27. Erich came in 15th with 1:09:12 giving me a lead of 3:45 after two races.
The three minute lead must have been enough to demoralize Erich, because he didn't want to enter the second Xterra race. This one was in the Rimutaka forest park and involved the McKerrow ridge track. It rained pretty heavily until the start of the race, so the track was nice and muddy under foot. The first half of the decent was particularly fun. It followed a tramping track down the hill with plenty of dodgy sections of mud, tree roots, branches and sharp corners. I passed more than one person who slipped down a bank or lost a shoe in the mud (I did check they were okay as I passed). The last part of the descent was a thigh-burningly steep 4wd track straight down a clay slope. Here, the challenge (for me) was to slow enough to stay in control and let my feet keep up with the rest of me which seemed to be in free-fall.
I can't have lost too much time on the downhill, since I managed to come in 5th from the 35 guys running the medium course --- 1:27:51 this time. The guy come came in fourth just managed to pip me on the flat before the finish line. There wasn't much I could do about it either --- my legs were like jelly by this point. I felt a bit better about losing 4th place when I found that the (lanky) guy who snaffled it from me had won the previous race.
Hopefully we"ll see you again soon; either in NZ or Germany
