Sometimes It’s The Little Things

Leaving for work yesterday morning I found the rear tire partially deflated. While I can’t equate the lesson strictly to riding a bike, one thing I’ve learned from my time in the saddle that sometimes little setbacks have a purpose far beyond being a nuisance.

My assist in the rescue of Acorn the Jindo last July near USC pretty well illustrates that.

So while I don’t look forward to flats with anything resembling unchecked glee, I understand when they happen there may be a bigger picture involved.

In this case, nothing remotely heroic resulted from the delay. But the deflation probably saved me a future flat from this teensy fragment of glass I unembedded in the tread of my tire (that’s the edge of a dime in the back there):

See it turns out the flat wasn’t caused by this fella. It wasn’t until submerging the re-inflated tube under water and searching for the hole that I discovered the wee breach on the inside of the tube near the base of the stem, probably resulting either from a defect on the rubber or from basic wear/tear, or both. But had that flat not happened I might not have ordered up an inspection of the tire’s tread and found this potential culprit.

So the other lesson is that it always pays to get your eyeballs and fingertips close to the treads just as a regular matter of course, because you never know what’s gonna get stuck in there to eventually push itself through to make the tire go pssssssssssssh! at a later date.

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Will

Will Campbell arrived in town via the maternity ward at Good Sam Hospital way back in OneNineSixFour and has never stopped calling Los Angeles home. Presently he lives in Silver Lake with his wife Susan, their cat Rocky, dogs Terra and Hazel, and a red-eared slider turtle named Mater. Blogging since 2001, Will's web endeavors extend back to 1995 with laonstage.com, a comprehensive theater site that was well received but ever-short on capital (or a business model). The pinnacle of his online success (which speaks volumes) arrived in 1997, when much to his surprise, a hobby site he'd built called VisuaL.A. was named "best website" in Los Angeles magazine's annual "Best of L.A." issue. He enjoys experiencing (and writing about) pretty much anything creative, explorational and/or adventurous, loves his ebike, is a better tennis player than he is horr golfer, and a lover of all creatures great and small -- emphasis on "all."