Did a long endurance ride last year called Chase The Sun. It’s a long ride from sunrise to sunset, kinda coast to coast of southern England, over 200 miles.
Love TrainerRoad. Especially during the horrible dark wet cold winter months. I don’t have to worry about icy patches, or charging lights, or checking at junctions, just get to the shed and do whatever is on the schedule. But endurance suits me. Not the sprint crit kinda stuff.
Entered the same ride this year with every intention of competing it a bit faster (using lessons learned about pacing and nutrition etc).
Arrived near the start and began setting up the bike. Checked the tire pressure and front inner tube just pops. Big sigh. Oh well I’ve got time to sort this and I’m glad it’s happened now etc. Quick inner tube change and inflation, same thing happens again. Ok, check the inner rim very carefully, run finger around etc. Put new inner tube in and inflate and same pop.
One of those instant decisions. I put bike back into car and drive home. It’s obviously not my day. I’ve trained pretty consistently for 8 months (and obviously thanks to TrainerRoad and Adaptive Training and @NateP and team, felt really prepared) . I’m feeling good. Weather forecast is reasonable with quite a headwind. But didn’t happen.
Not sure this helps anyone. But maybe it does. Maybe we only read the success stories. Or the narrow failures. Well this was a complete fail.
Going to have a think about what my next challenge should be. But there’ll be another one. (And I’ll be checking the rim tape etc, but I did an 80 mile ride a couple of weeks ago with the same set up so …)
Hope your ride went better!
