There's a fundamental axiom of life that I've come to accept without question: If you ride a bicycle you're gonna get a flat. No ifs, ands or buts. Like the law of gravity, it's unavoidable. Even if your bike never leaves the garage, sooner or later your tires will go flat. There's no escaping the escaping of air.

In nearly 13 years of riding a bike over roughly 40,000 miles I've gotten exactly 51 flats. There's no way to predict when they'll happen. Old tires, new tires, it doesn't matter. I've gone as long as nearly two years without a flat. On the other hand, I've gotten two flats in the same day. Once, on a hundred-mile ride, I managed to avoid any problems until I was within a mile and a half of home, then POP, I flatted out. I've changed flats in the rain and on the side of a mountain, in the dark of night and under the pounding drumbeat of a cruel sun. I've set off on a training ride at 5:30 in the morning only to get a flat 500 feet from home. I've discovered a flat even before I could get the bike out of the garage. Most mysterious of all, I've gotten flats while riding on training rollers -- twice now.

The rear tire tends to puncture more often than the front. You would think the opposite would be true, since the two tires travel over exactly the same piece of ground and since the front tire is the first to run over an object on the road. But according to an article in Cycle Sport magazine about the arcane art of tire manufacturing:

"One theory suggests that as the front tire rolls over a flint or nail, it flips it so the point sticks up ready to pierce the rear; for certain, the rear tire usually carries more weight, rendering it more susceptible to the penetrative power of a sharp object."

Fixing a flat used to be a big production for me. But after all these years and all these flats, it's sort of like changing underwear -- something you do without giving it much thought. I learned the hard way not to pinch the inner tube when you're hooking the tire back onto the rim. You can always tell when the hole in the inner tube was caused by pinching -- it's forked like the bite of a snake. I also learned to run a finger around the inside of the tire before putting in a new inner tube. You never can tell when a shard of glass or whatever it was that caused the flat is still in the tire.

The one thing I've managed to avoid so far, knock on wood, is blowing out the front tire on a high-speed descent. That, I'm thinking, would not be a good thing.

originally posted 06.11.03

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