The Ride Report

I was riding out to Simi Valley this afternoon to have lunch with a buddy and was cruising through a long downhill sweeper on the freeway when things started feeling a little funny. Not funny ha-ha, funny wrong.

My bike gets this weird slow wobble when I’m going through a long sweeper like this one, and at first that what I thought it was. The ass end starts oscillating and the handlebars start gently wobbling and the whole bike feels like it’s weaving. It starts out slowly, gently, and it builds the longer I hold the turn until I counter-steer to stop it. This time, though, it did all of that, but bigger. And counter-steering didn’t stop it. So I backed off the throttle and that helped a bit.

But it did it even more in the next sweeper, and then I could feel the ass-end trying to track out sideways when I was going straight, and I knew something was wrong. I thought maybe I’d broken an engine mount, but when I pulled over I found that it was a flat rear tire. Another flat rear tire.

I’m a magnet for flats. Always the rear tire, though, never the front. But I’ve had more rear flats than anyone I know. This is my first one with this bike, but on my last one I got something like three flats in one year. It seemed like every time I turned around I was sitting on the side of the freeway waiting for a flatbed truck to show up.

And then there’s this bike… My buddy came with his truck and picked me up and we got the tire fixed, but as we were driving to the shop it occurred to me that this is the third truck my bike has been in the back of. Between broken throttle cables and work transportation issues and flat tires, my bike spends a hell of a lot of time in the backs of trucks.

So I offer these pictures, photographic evidence of how I and my bike roll: in the bed of a truck.