As a long­time writer and cura­tor of this web­site, I have always been under the impres­sion that this site has had a total of three read­ers. The first is of course myself, the sec­ond is Alex Guichet (who has this site demon­i­cally imbued with the evil dark shadow gods of twit­ter so he can see when­ever I make a post), and the last of which is Owen Kue­merle, who likes to leave the occa­sional com­ment on the site, write lengthy posts on his own site crit­i­ciz­ing my movies, and who attempts to “update” my theme from time to time but fails mis­er­ably even though he is a com­puter sci­ence major in col­lege. While I was per­fectly sat­is­fied with cap­tur­ing the atten­tion of these three two read­ers with my end­less rants on cycling, movies, soci­ety, etc, it appears as if my fiery prose and witty dic­tion has cap­tured the atten­tion of an unprece­dented fourth third reader, An Nguyen.

Now An is spe­cial for three rea­sons. One, her name is short, easy to spell, and rhymes with the word an. Two, she’s the smartest per­son at Mater Dei and is one of the fabled few to make it into UCLA. Lastly, she is a female which is a huge gain for the web­site con­sid­er­ing my shame­less chau­vin­is­tic behav­ior, and my com­pul­sory demand that every female in exis­tence make me a sand­wich. An’s read­er­ship shows that the site is really hit­ting some unsus­pected demo­graph­ics, and that my writ­ing is really reach­ing out and touch­ing the hearts of more than just the two guys that pay for and main­tain this web­site. But I digress, hav­ing a female read this site isn’t always a good thing. Like most females, An likes to go and make com­ments that are absolutely ridicu­lous. One time she remarked how my use of to word “Where”  was inap­pro­pri­ate, insin­u­at­ing that “Where” should have been switched out for the word “Were”, because “Where” sig­ni­fies a loca­tion of some­thing, whereas “Were” sig­ni­fies some­thing that occurred in the past. Another time, An remarked “it seems like you get a lot of flat tires when you ride your bike”, to which I responded, “Yeah, because I actu­ally do”. Now know­ing how females works, An’s com­ment about my flat tires wasn’t just a sim­ple off the cuff com­ment in the midst of a con­ver­sa­tion, no, it was a care­fully crafted and metic­u­lously con­structed  time bomb which she embed­ded within my brain in order to launch a men­tal ter­ror­ist attack when the time was right. Yes­ter­day, An’s men­tal IED-timebomb-suicide bomber-jihad– finally went off when I received yet another flat tire.

The day started off absolutely per­fect. The weather was clear and crisp, in the mid sev­en­ties, the sun was bright, and my legs were feel­ing good ( note the proper usage of the word “were”). Because it was such a nice day, I decided to try some­thing unprece­dented in my bike rid­ing rou­tine, I attempted to inte­grate two major climbs into my ride. The first climb was the one up Jam­boree, which I elab­o­rated on in my pre­vi­ous post about cycling, and the sec­ond climb was about five miles east, down Por­tola, which is a climb that I usu­ally tackle when I choose to ride “the hilly route”. Now I knew inte­grat­ing both climbs into my ride would be chal­leng­ing because my rid­ing and gen­eral level of fit­ness has been incon­sis­tent due to the spring break and Easter fes­tiv­i­ties. How­ever, I also knew that I badly needed the chal­lenge of two climbs to keep my car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem in shape for swim­ming, and thus I had no choice but to accept the challenge.

The first climb up Jam­boree was chal­leng­ing, but suc­cess­ful. I trailed what looked like an expe­ri­enced 30+ year old cyclist for the base miles of the climb, but once we hit the first major descent, I noticed that he was using the smaller ring. Because I absolutely hate every­one that uses the smaller ring when rid­ing a bike, I felt the need to emas­cu­late this cyclist, and thus I took off  and passed him using my supe­rior larger ring for the entirety of the climb. My legs where burn­ing, and my heart was pump­ing as I made the Jam­boree climb, but I was hold­ing a solid 14MPH which felt light­ning fast com­pared to the 8MPH that I had in the severe wind­storm a week prior. I turned around, made my descent, and headed down Por­tola to tackle the sec­ond of the day’s climb.

Por­tola is a beau­ti­ful road, in fact it’s so beau­ti­ful that I used it for the cycling shot in my Chap­man Appli­ca­tion. How­ever, it’s also a road that is dif­fi­cult to gauge one’s speed on. It’s hilly, bumpy, and some­times sus­cep­ti­ble to the wind, which means that it’s hard to tell whether one’s going fast because they’re in good shape, or if they’re going fast because they hap­pen to be rid­ing down a hill. Like­wise, it’s also hard to tell whether one is going slow because they are out of shape or are tired, or whether they just are going slow because they hit a bumpy patch of road, a small climb, and a gust of wind. I hap­pened to be on the slow side of the spec­trum, and thus found it frus­trat­ing that I was exert­ing a lot of energy to still travel rel­a­tively slow down Por­tola. The good thing was that I was get­ting a great work­out, and that my heart was pump­ing, but as a cyclist I gen­er­ally pre­fer to go fast with the least amount of per­ceived effort exerted.

I hit the climb at the end of Por­tola and did sur­pris­ingly well. I rode the base of the climb at a solid 17 MPH, and even­tu­ally declined to a steady 13-14MPH as the climb got steeper. I reached the top of the climb and was instantly relieved that the dif­fi­cult por­tion of my ride was over. Every­thing was quite lit­er­ally down hill from the top of the climb, all the way back to home, and thus I looked for­ward to cruis­ing for the remain­der of my ride. More than that though, I also felt accom­plished. I had tack­led two of the biggest climbs in my imme­di­ate area, with rel­a­tively strong form, and thus I decided to make my route a sta­ple of my rid­ing cat­a­log. I called the route  the “Great McNally Transverse”.

Because both the City of Irvine and the City of Tustin suck, I noticed a large amount of road con­struc­tion through­out the ride. Two lanes, plus the bike lane were closed off at the start of my ride which made rid­ing to the trail pretty scary, as cars where try­ing to kill me. The bike lane was also closed on the descent down Por­tola because the City of Irvine believed that one of its newest roads in its least pop­u­lated area needed re-pavement even though hardly any­one trav­els down it because it leads to nowhere.  Know­ing that such road work was tak­ing place, I decided to use an alter­nate route in order to avoid the hos­tile cars that would inevitably try to kill me. How­ever, I had to think twice about using the alter­nate route because I once got a mas­sive tire punc­ture from choos­ing it months prior, so I promised myself that I would keep a close eye out for erro­neous bike debris that could cause a flat.

Thus I made my way home, mak­ing great time, and bask­ing in the accom­plish­ment of com­plet­ing the first ever “Great McNally Trans­verse”, all I had left to do was to com­plete the last few miles of the 30 mile route. About five miles away from home, I began to feel a weird bump­ing in my rear wheel. At first I thought it was the pave­ment, but then I noticed that it got worse, and as it got worse, I got slower. I knew imme­di­ately that I had another flat tire. I stopped at a nearby side­walk and felt the rear tire notic­ing that it was quickly leak­ing air. Being so close to home, I decided to call my brother, because it wasn’t worth wast­ing a CO2 car­tridge five miles away from home. My brother agreed to pick me up, and as I waited, I began fum­ing with hatred for my bike’s tires. They had allowed flat, after flat, after flat and this was only my 47^th mile since chang­ing out the tube from a pre­vi­ous flat. This flat tire had ruined the great accom­plish­ment of com­plet­ing the “Great McNally Trans­verse” and it would inevitably cost me more time and money in the way of buy­ing tubes, wait­ing to be picked up, and hav­ing to repair the tire.

I got home and imme­di­ately decided to change my tires. I con­sulted var­i­ous bicy­cling forums, and con­cluded that I needed to pur­chase a pair of Con­ti­nen­tal GP 4000’s. These tires had a whole slew of tech­nolo­gies for pre­vent­ing flats, and best of all, they where a high per­for­mance race tire that a lot of pros used. The only prob­lem that they had was the fact that a pair of them cost upwards of $120, and while I am usu­ally the first per­son to put down $120 for any­thing bike related, espe­cially if it’s going to pre­vent the dreaded “flat tire”, I didn’t believe that putting down so much money was jus­ti­fied unless I had tried and failed at an alter­na­tive solu­tion. So I descended to the depths of my garage to look for an alter­na­tive solu­tion and for­tu­nately for me, I had found one.

My dad’s old road bike, which still suf­fered from chronic blow out prob­lems despite my attempts to repair it, had a pair of 25MM Con­ti­nen­tal Race Ultra’s that were still in good con­di­tion. Iron­i­cally, while every­thing about my Dad’s old bike was bad, it was slow, had trou­ble shift­ing prop­erly, had bad ride char­ac­ter­is­tics and han­dling, the one thing that it did have going for it was the fact that it never got flat tires. This is espe­cially impres­sive con­sid­er­ing the fact that the wheels weren’t true, which means that if any­thing, the bike should have been espe­cially prone to flat tires. I con­cluded that the tires were the rea­son for the bike’s great track record with flats (400 miles with­out a flat), and I fig­ured if those tires could pre­vent flats on an old bike with ter­ri­ble wheels, they could def­i­nitely pre­vent flats on a new bike with great wheels.

Now I had mostly given up on try­ing to fix my Dad’s old road­bike. I spent a lot of time and money try­ing to fix it, and at the end of the day, the front wheel still kept pop­ping. What really pre­vented me from attempt­ing to do any­thing else to fix it, was the fact that the Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra Race tires were an absolute pain to mount. I spent three days straight try­ing to mount the tires. I did every­thing from pulling on them in order stretch them, to leav­ing them out in the sun in order soften the rub­ber, but despite my efforts the damn tires wouldn’t mount to the rim. One day, after half an hour of metic­u­lously using my mom’s blow dryer to soften the rub­ber, I some­how man­aged to pop the Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra Race tires onto the old rim. Excited at the prospect of fix­ing my Dad’s old bike, I mounted the wheel onto the frame and  hur­riedly pumped it up, only to have it pop on me again. After that instance, I had vowed to never again touch my Dad’s old road­bike because I had con­cluded that if the tires were that hard to mount then the damn bike just didn’t want to be fixed

How­ever, I real­ized that my Dad’s old road­bike had some­thing to offer me, and that I had some­thing I could offer it. I needed the old roadbike’s Con­ti­nen­tal Race Ultra’s, while my Dad’s old road­bike needed the crappy Vit­tora Rubino Proslick tires that my new bike had. The Proslicks where prob­a­bly the eas­i­est tires in the world to mount, and I could often use my hands to mount them to my roadbike’s rim. Whereas the Con­ti­nen­tal Ultras where a pain in the ass to mount (hence the exten­sive use of a blow dryer, and three days time, to get them onto the old roadbike’s rims). If I gave the old roabike my Rubino Proslicks, I could prob­a­bly mount them to the old bike’s rims, which in turn would give the bike another shot at being saved. Like­wise, if the old road­bike gave me the Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra’s, I had a chance at sav­ing myself $120 on new tires.

Thus, I went about swap­ping a great deal of tires. First I took the front Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra tire off of my Dad’s old road­bike, and mounted it onto my new roadbike’s rim. Sur­pris­ingly, the Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra slipped right onto the new rim with­out too much trou­ble, and I was actu­ally really relieved that I didn’t have to man­han­dle the tire like I did when I was try­ing to get it onto my Dad’s old rim. I then put the Rubino Pro Slick on the front tire of my Dad’s old bike, but sur­pris­ingly, the tire was hav­ing a hard time mount­ing to the rims. Frus­trated, I decided just to leave the Rubino Pro Slick, par­tially mounted, vow­ing to com­pletely mount it, after I had got­ten the Con­ti­nen­tal Ultras onto my new bike. I then took the Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra from the old roadbike’s rear wheel, and I mounted it onto the front wheel of my new bike. This was actu­ally really emo­tional because the front wheel of my new bike had sur­vived 1000 miles with­out hav­ing a flat, and thus, I felt like I was tak­ing it out of the game before it was ready to retire. How­ever, it was some­thing that had to be done because hav­ing two tires that don’t match is pretty ghetto. The Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra slipped onto the new rim pretty eas­ily, and I began to pump up both of my newly mounted tires in order to give them a test ride.

As I was pump­ing up the rear tire, I noticed a mas­sive bulge per­me­at­ing from the side wall of the tire. If I kept pump­ing up the tire, I was con­fi­dent that it would blow, and thus I slowly, and cau­tiously released the air from the tire in order to save the tube from pop­ping. Upon closer exam­i­na­tion, it appeared as if a cut in the side wall of the tire was allow­ing the tube to slip out through the side, which in turn would inevitably cause a blowout due to the bulging tube either hit­ting the break pads as it spun, or the side wall cut pinch­ing the bulging tube as more pres­sure was applied to it. I imme­di­ately real­ized that it was the tire caus­ing all of the blowouts on the front wheel of my Dad’s old bike, not an exposed spoke like I had pre­vi­ously thought. Real­iz­ing that I had found the solu­tion to fix­ing my Dad’s old road­bike, I imme­di­ately mounted the Rubino Pro Slick to the rim of my Dad’s old road­bike, and I pumped it up to about 100PSI. To my glee, the front wheel did not pop, mean­ing that I had essen­tially fixed my Dad’s old roadbike.

How­ever, I still wasn’t done with my tire woes. The Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra on the rear wheel of my new bike needed to be replaced, and tech­ni­cally my Dad’s old road­bike still needed new tires because the Rubino Pro Slicks would be espe­cially prone to flats  on those old, untrue wheels. So I decided to take a trip to my favorite place in the world, my local REI, in order to buy a new Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra tire, and a new tube to replace the one that was lost in the flat that I had incurred rid­ing the “Great McNally Tran­se­v­erse”. I con­cluded that if the Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra’s didn’t give me the flat pro­tec­tion that I needed, I would put them back on my Dad’s old road­bike, and buy a pair of GP 4000’s. If they did pro­vide me with the pro­tec­tion that I needed, then I would just leave them on my new bike, and buy a pair of punc­ture resis­tant tires for my Dad’s old road­bike when I took it into REI to get the wheels trued.

I attempted to mount the new Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra onto the rear wheel of the new bike, and imme­di­ately bad mem­o­ries began to hit me. Because the tires were new, the rub­ber hadn’t stretched at all, which in turn made them a pain in the ass to mount. Fur­ther­more, my thumbs had blis­ters from mount­ing, remov­ing, and remount­ing tires about eight times through­out the course of the day, which made mount­ing the Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra a lit­er­ally painful expe­ri­ence. After about an hour of try­ing to mount the new Con­ti­nen­tal Ultra,  my fore­arms, and fin­gers where tired, my patience  was at its end, and yet, the damn thing still wasn’t on the rim. I con­tem­plated giv­ing up and wait­ing until the next day to mount them, but I promised myself that I wouldn’t rest until I had at least one bike that was ride-able, and see­ing as how my Dad’s old bike was still miss­ing a tire on the rear wheel, it meant that I had to make my new road­bike ride-able. I took the tire into the house and used a secret weapon for mount­ing tires, my mom’s blow dryer. After a cou­ple of min­utes of using the blow dryer, and hav­ing both of my thumbs’ blis­ters pop in the process, I got the tire onto the rim. I mounted the wheel to my new road­bike, pumped it up, and promptly went back into my house to go to sleep. I was done with bikes for the day.

I still haven’t rid­den my bike with the new tires on it. It’s a par­tic­u­larly windy day, and my thumbs and fin­gers are so sore from work­ing with tires so much yes­ter­day that they are reluc­tant to touch any­thing bike related at the moment. While this process was phys­i­cally painful, and time con­sum­ing, it yielded a great merit. I learned a ton about bike tires, and I am now con­fi­dent that I can mount a tire in my sleep. I also res­ur­rected my Dad’s old road­bike, which is some­thing that I plan to use in col­lege, so I am really excited about that as well. After read­ing all of this, my three read­ers are prob­a­bly won­der­ing what the moral of this story was. While I sure a lot of mean­ings can be derived from such a lengthy post, I think the main mes­sage of this post can be summed up with the state­ment  “Don’t Lie.”

I apol­o­gize because it’s been awhile since I last made a post. I actu­ally meant to make this post last Sun­day when the expe­ri­ence was still fresh in my head but the rig­ors of an upcom­ing Eng­lish paper, and of course swim prac­tice, made me think twice about stay­ing up until 12 to write a blog post. Regard­less, a lot has hap­pened to me cycling wise and I think it’ll be nice to explain how my out­look on cycling has changed with this post.

Because the swim sea­son is now in full swing, I haven’t had as much time to get on my bike. For me, this has been hard to grap­ple with. On one hand, the train­ing and psy­cho­log­i­cal ben­e­fits that cycling offers trans­lates really well into swim­ming,  plus I just straight up enjoy rid­ing my bike. But on the other hand, stay­ing off of the bike also ben­e­fits me by grant­ing the phys­i­o­log­i­cal rest that I need to recover from a long week of swim­ming and it also spares me the inevitable embar­rass­ment of get­ting another flat tire after rid­ing only a few hun­dred miles on a pre­vi­ously replaced tube. Because of this, I have approached bike rid­ing a lot dif­fer­ently than I approached it in the past. Instead of wor­ry­ing about dis­tance, I’ve decided to focus on inten­sity, choos­ing only to ride “the hilly route” and hop­ing to avoid get­ting any addi­tional flats in the process of doing so. I’ve also turned towards focus­ing more so on tech­nique which means train­ing with one pedal inter­vals, and low gears to help improve my ped­al­ing form.

In the name of improv­ing my fit­ness and over­all tech­nique, this past Sat­ur­day I decided to take “the hilly route” up to one of the most dif­fi­cult climbs in my area, Jam­boree Road. Jam­boree Road is actu­ally one of the best roads to ride a bike on, it has bike lanes, beau­ti­ful scenery, and most impor­tantly hills, but what makes the ride so great is the fact that it’s very chal­leng­ing. The road starts off with a fairly mild gra­di­ent, which makes it great for pick­ing up speed, but a few miles down the road there’s an incred­i­bly steep climb that lasts for what feels like half a mile, and then an even longer and steeper climb that imme­di­ately fol­lows that. After reach­ing the top of these climbs, rid­ers can choose to go down what I con­sider the most chal­leng­ing cycling route that I’ve rid­den on, San­ti­ago Canyon Road, or they can turn back around and enjoy some fun on some really long descents.

On this par­tic­u­lar Sat­ur­day, I decided to do the later because I was meet­ing with my fam­ily at the local Cor­ner Bak­ery for break­fast. The ride started out like most of my usual rides, I went up north along my local bike trail and then planned to join Jam­boree road once the trail ended. How­ever, towards the end of the trail it felt like I was mak­ing rel­a­tively slow time, and it felt very dif­fi­cult for me to climb the mild gra­di­ent that is found at the end of the trail. I imme­di­ately real­ized that it was because huge gusts of winds were pick­ing up, which in turn was mak­ing it tough for me to pedal. Now peo­ple who aren’t cyclist usu­ally don’t notice or even mind when its windy, but for many cyclists (me included), it’s the bane of my exis­tence. Wind makes rid­ers feel slower, makes it harder to pedal, and in gen­eral just makes things dif­fi­cult and uncom­fort­able. On the plus side, rid­ing in the the wind is a good train­ing tool and any rider who can hold his own in the wind is one that needs to be admired, but on this par­tic­u­lar day, I just didn’t feel like bat­tling the elements.

As I slowly reached the end of the trail, the ques­tion came as to whether I should join up with Jam­boree, or sim­ply turn around and meet up with the fam­ily for break­fast. Given the wind, I imme­di­ately wanted to do the later, but I also knew that I didn’t want to be known for being TOO much of a fair weather cyclist, and so I decided to go for the chal­lenge of climb­ing up Jam­boree. I made way onto the first cou­ple miles of Jamboree’s mild gra­di­ent and instantly felt how bad the wind was. I usu­ally aver­age about 20 MPH down that stretch of road, but on that par­tic­u­lar Sat­ur­day I was doing my best to hold 14 MPH, and that was before the climbs. I hit the fist climb, and imme­di­ately shifted to the sec­ond low­est gear pos­si­ble. Even though I was in such a low gear, the shear inten­sity of the wind, and the steep­ness of the hill made it nearly impos­si­ble for me to pedal. I aver­aged less than 8MPH and was on the verge of tip­ping over due to the low cadence that I was ped­al­ing at. I knew I had to do some­thing to make the climb eas­ier, or else I risked top­pling over or hav­ing to stop due to fatigue, and so I decided to do some­thing that I never do when I ride my bike, switch over to the small ring. For me, using the small ring is the ulti­mate mark of being a sissy when rid­ing a bike. Most bikes nowa­days have around 18 speeds, and they are usu­ally sep­a­rated with 9 speeds on the big ring and 9 speeds on the small ring. On the big ring  3 of the low­est gears are ridicu­lously easy, 2 of the high­est gears are pretty hard, and the rest are prac­ti­cal for every day rid­ing. On the small ring though, every­thing is easy and only some­body who has absolutely no fit­ness or leg strength chooses to ride on it for nor­mal use.

Because I was in a bit of an extreme sit­u­a­tion though, for the first time in my year long tenure as cyclist, I felt that the ridicu­lously easy gear ratios of the small ring where nec­es­sary, and thus I shifted down into it. The shift itself was hor­ri­ble, the small ring  took a lot of ten­sion off of the chain which made the bike really loud to pedal with, plus it didn’t feel as if the small ring was grip­ping prop­erly. How­ever, the small ring did allow me to pick up my cadence, which in turn helped me con­quer the first climb. By the time the sec­ond climb was approach­ing, things were get­ting really bad with the wind. Bru­tal gusts were hit­ting me harder than ever, and about half way through the sec­ond climb, one gust was so vio­lent that it nearly top­pled me and a cyclist in front of me over. At this point, I was pretty scared. I had never expe­ri­enced such dan­ger­ous con­di­tions while on a bike, and given my fatigue, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it all the way up Jam­boree. I just kept say­ing to myself “Come on God, come on God” until I even­tu­ally made it over that sec­ond climb. On the ini­tial descent before the point in which I usu­ally turn around, I shifted back up the big ring, and was imme­di­ately relieved at how smooth and pow­er­ful the ped­als felt in com­par­i­son to the crappy small ring that I was forced to use. I was exhausted and the wind was still pretty bad, but know­ing that I all I had was an easy descent until I reached the Cor­ner Bak­ery, my adren­a­line kicked in, and I flew down Jam­boree. I aver­aged about 35MPH with­out even ped­al­ing due to the fact that the wind was so strong, and I kept my eyes fixed and focused on the road in front of me. The last thing I needed was to get a flat tire at 35MPH and with ridicu­lously fast winds. By the time Jam­boree lev­eled off, I was still cruis­ing at 30MPH due to the fact that I was ped­al­ing in my largest gear, I wasn’t bat­tling a hill, and adren­a­line was still surg­ing through­out my body.

By the time I reached the Cor­ner Bak­ery, I was as happy as I could pos­si­bly be. I had pushed myself, I over­came a great chal­lenge, and I ulti­mately made it home safely, there’s sim­ply not much more that I could ask out of a bike ride. But on top of that, I came away from that bike ride feel­ing changed. I hon­estly don’t know what it is that changed within me, but I feel as if I am ready to con­front more chal­lenges and push myself harder than I ever have before. I feel fear­less, and sub­se­quently I feel as if a lot of the things that I used to stress about in my life no longer mat­ter as much as they used to. I don’t know if this change is for bet­ter or for worse, but it def­i­nitely happened.