THE WRONG TYPE OF TUBELESS

I really should have learned by now but when the weather is great and you are quickly packing your bag for a local ride it can be too easy to forget or overlook something. The Pentlands are the perfect distance from Edinburgh to allow you to leap on your bike, get out into the hills and in the exuberance of the ride not consider everything you might need. On this occasion I headed out and in my excitement of riding some new trails managed to forget a tube. The frustration is you can go on many rides with no worries of a puncture yet quite often they will appear at a point that is most inconvenient. This was one of those rides.

I had planned to ride through the Northern parts of the Pentlands, taking in a couple of known spots and then head to the hilltops behind the Hillend Ski Centre to explore a scree slope that I have been eyeing up for a while. Unfortunately I didn’t make it that far and after a few runs at Bonaly I overcooked a corner and pinched. Like all frustrating punctures it wasn’t caused by a gnarly line, poor fitting or bad decisions. It was simply an unlucky coincidence that caught the tube just right.

Of course if I had been running tubeless in my tyres rather than in my backpack I would have been unlikely to have suffered the same fate but my woes with tubeless setups are a whole other story. Even if I had been running tubeless I should remember that the last time I rode here I had a tubeless setup, stupidly left a spare tube at home, rolled the tyre off the rim and had to do the same 2 hour walk of shame home. Fool me once…

Lesson learned.