On the Pine Trees stretch of the Kona coast there is a dive site called "Freezeface." It's called that because there is an inshore cave that, if you stick your head into it you get a firehose draught of icy fresh water upwelling from the accumulated rain that works its way down through the porous igneous rock of the Big Island and into the sea.
This peculiarity is a metaphorically apt description of one of the multitudes of mishaps that I ended up picking my way through today on my bike ride up the Kona coast.
Many of you who know me are aware that I attempt to be multiply-redundant in my preparation for adventures. If we're on a dive boat and you find you have a bad O-ring, I'm your guy. Similarly, my bike spares kit has every possible remedy for any mishap a couple times over. But I've never had to use virtually every backup tool and resource I've carried around in my bike for the past 45 years...until today.
One of my guidelines for diving safety is that I have a three-irregularities rule: If three things happen that are a hard break in the normal flow, even though I may have solutions for each one, all three together in kitting up for a dive means I thumb the dive. Broken mask strap? No problem, I have a spare. Dead computer battery? No problem, I have a backup computer. Leaky regulator hose connection to first stage? No problem, I have O-rings for that too. But all three together...that's a sign from the universe that I should go home and play solitare or get lost in Youtube videos aboout guys who like to make movies of themselves being stung by scorpions.
I have that same rule for cycling, but often, in fact most of the time, mishaps mostly happen to you after you're already out on the road/trail/desolate rockscape.
The first unusual deviation from normal was that my rear-facing radar refused to come online. I noticed this as I was preparing to roll out of the parking lot at the harbor where I start. OK, I thought, I rode for 50 years without radar, and am perfectly capable of just looking back to see if the road is clear. This is important when you are attempting a left turn on a busy road. Anyway, the next four unfortunate surprises happened to me while I was already out on the road.
Last week my friend Laura told me she had picked up a staple in her tire and got a flat. Bummer. Next day I picked up some radial tire wire and flatted. So we commiserated.
So when, today, I heard the little tick tick sound of something stuck in my tire, stopped and found a staple sticking out of my rear tire, I thought, "hey, a coincidence...I'll have to tell Laura the staple demons are still out making mischief."
This was a completely normal flat repair situation, one that I've repeated countless times. My regular riding group at one point started timing our repairs, and if it took more than 10 minutes you were fair game for ridicule.
I had a half-used CO2 cartridge alread screwed into my Lezyne cartridge thingy, and it filled up my newly installed tube almost all the way. But I felt I needed to just pump it up a bit further because right now there is a lot of nasty debris on the shoulders of Big Island roads. Unclipping the pump everything looked fine. I screwed the pump hose onto the valve core (a potential risk of unscrewing the valve core from the tube when you take the hose off), and started pumping. Oooops, the pump fell apart in my hands. Seems the connecting ring that holds the pump handle to the rest of the pump shaft had unscrewed itself and everything fell in pieces onto the asphalt at my feet. That's two things.
From that point the flow chart had an added process: put the pump back together and secure it well enough to get some more air in my tire. That job done, I topped off the tire, folded up the bad tube, collected all the rubbish off the road resulting form the repair, put the wheel back on and secured my pump to the bike. Off we go, wheee!
During my repair process a couple of riders had stopped and asked if I needed help. "Nope, I'm good," and they took off. I caught up with them and we chatted a bit before I went on ahead.
From that point I enjoyed five blissful, mishap-free miles until there was a steel bar that I didn't see lying across the wide shoulder of Queen Ka'ahumanu Hwy just south of Kekaha Kai State Park. I rode straight across it, and my rear tire, already a bit low because it's hard to hand-pump a tire to 100 PSI, went immediately flat. It was a snake bite puncture from the tube being caught between the rim and the hazard I'd hit.
Two flats is not uncommon, but it's always a drag because you aren't out there repeatedly to bend over your bike in the hot sun taking your tire apart and doing the flat-repair drill. Fortunately, I carry two spare tubes, one in my pocket and the other in my spares kit. So I dug the extra tube out of my spares kit and put it on the wheel, put the second bad one in my pocket and got out my one remaining CO2 cartridge to inflte the tire. OOOps, upon screwing the cartridge into my Lezyne inflator thingy it exploded through a side seam spraying freezing CO2 all over my face (Freezeface) and hands. That's three things.
So, good thing I have my recently repaired hand pump (the process flow chart is getting more boxes) and I'm thinking about the movie The Martian. Just have to math your way through this, even thought there isn't a lot of math involved in fixing bike malfunctions.
This is all happening on the side of a road on which cars and trucks go by at 60 mph. A big truck has a massive bow wave, and I was getting blown into the lava rocks each time one went by. It was like being blown off underwater rock faces by heavy surge while diving, an annoying thing that had happened to me yesterday.
Where was I? Oh, unclipping my hand pump from the bike and screwing it onto the new tube valve to inflate the tire the old way. I'm down with that. I'm trying not to drip sweat on the drive train of my bike as it lay on the shoulder of the road. It takes a little while to pump up a tire with a frame pump because they have small capacity. But after a while I noticed that the tire wasn't inflating. Checked the connection and the pump; it was all good and working. Deduction: my last spare tube was defective. More boxes slotted into the flow chart, and that was four things.
When you are out of good tubes you have to repair one of the bad tubes you have. Fortunately I have a patch kit with everything I need to repair a punctured tube. I pulled out the patch kit, opened it, and picked out the tube of glue. I had a sinking feeling when I noticed how squishy it felt. Yep, glue was all dried up. I don't count that as a thing because dried up glue tubes is operator error, not random fate.
OK, but I have some handy no-glue patches! I dug them out and put everything on the side of the road to organize what I needed to do. Immediately a truck wooshed by and scattered all that stuff into the lava rocks. Ha ha.
Problem with patching a tube on the road is that it's hard to find the hole. What I did was attach the pump to the tube and drape it over my head so I could maybe hear the sound of air escaping from the tube. Also, you can feel down the length of the tube to maybe feel air coming out. Both of those strategies worked and I found the hole. Now you have to not lose its location while you dig out the repair stuff. I opened up the no-glue patch bag and pulled out the abrasion tool, rubbed it on the tube over the hole and put on a patch. Next, I needed to unscrew the pump hose from the tube valve. I did that but it pulled out the valve core from the tube valve shaft. Dang. That's the valve core and tube I need to get back on the road Problem is that now the pump hose has a valve core jammed into it, making it inoperable, and my patched tube doesn't have a valve core. That's five things.
Fortunately, I have a tool that will extract a valve core from the pump hose connector. So I was able to get the valve core out of the hose connector, screw the core back into the tube I'd repaired, get the tube into the tire and pump it up, ready to go. Did the no-glue patch work...seemed that it did.
Meanwhile, many riders stopped to offer help, including the two who had offered help the first time I was stopped 5 miles back. "No," I said, "I'm OK." But after a while my response morphed to, "I think I'm OK." One guy said, "I'm turning around about three miles up the road and I'll check on you on my way back." That was comforting, but I felt pretty good about my chances to get back to my car. I still had food and water, and more no-glue patches in case of more silliness.
How great it felt to be back on the bike and rolling down the road. I elected to turn around at the first easy place to do that, which was at the bottom of the hill I was on. I didn't want to tempt fate when I was down to no-glue patches.
I ended up with a decent ride, even though it took an hour and a half longer than it wouled have had I had no probems. But multiple redundancy and a fluency in flow charts enabled me success and a safe return to my car. While packing the bike into the back of my car I thought about the feeling of relief of getting back to the dive boat despite underwater mishaps or freshening current making the swim back a hard slog. It was pretty much the same feeling I had today.
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