Here we are on a nice, hard, slow, windy ride.

Or, for at least my part of it, it was slow. There was nothing to the route. It was one of our most standard courses. I just couldn’t build anything up today. Three days of legs and my legs, I told myself, were exhausted. And before I get too far into this story …

Dr. Joel Wong is the chair of the counseling and educational psychology department in IU’s School of Education. We had a delightful conversation on gratitude, and things to try to keep yourself in good spirits and keep the morale up on the home front.

It’s an interview I wish I could have recorded three weeks ago, but it’s one valuable in all seasons. So give it a listen. And head on over to your favorite podcast provider and subscribe to “On Topic with IU.” You can now find the show on Apple, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn and Anchor.

Back to the bike: it was kinda breezy. It wasn’t a headwind-in-every-direction day, but it was a headwind-from-several-nonsensical-directions sort of day. And, look! Here is today’s barn by bike:

We ride by there frequently. The sun is almost always in that same spot behind the building. I should ride by, on some far off day when it gets warm here, in the morning, just to see a little more detail on the east-facing side of the barn. It’s in a nice location. The gentle fields in front and back are always just grass. It never seems like much of a pasture. There are houses close by on both sides. I wonder what they use the outbuilding for.

We pedaled down to the lake, and there’s a turnaround down there, which meant I finally saw The Yankee again, since she was well ahead of me, because I was moving slow. She met me going the other direction and she met me much sooner than I’d hoped. I am sure it showed in my body language. She didn’t go all the way to the lake, she said, but turned short of it at another prominent spot. So I continued on, and I decided to make the trip the whole way down. This meant riding past a colleague’s house, and so I call out his name as I do every time I go by, just to amuse myself. And then there’s the last big left hand curve and you get to the turnaround.

I turned around, and in that same big curve away from it, my bike started wobbling. So I stopped in a safe spot — right in the turn — to check things out. Oh, my back tire is getting low. I carry a small hand pump for just such an occasion! Pump it up a bit, send a note that I’ll be noodling, even slower, on the way back in (on account of my tire) and set out once more.

And I made it about 250 yards or so. Bike wobbles again. Tire completely flat.

So there I am, in the cold and not-quite-dying light, standing in some nice people’s yard, hoping they don’t come out to ask too many questions of me as I change the tube. I had just one extra tube in my little bike bag. So, lever off the tire, pull out the old tube, pump it a bit to see if the tube has any chance of being nursed back to the house. It does not. On goes the new tube.

And now a word about tube sizes. I normally ride a 700 x 23-25 tube. Standard stuff. The 700 is a notation about the wheel’s diameter. The second number has to do with the width of the tube, in millimeters. My extra was a 700 by 18, for some reason. Now, that’s just five or six millimeters, you say. And, sure enough, you’re basically correct! But that’s also reducing the size by about a third! So this is going to be small, inside the wheel’s rim and the tire. Why did I even buy a tube that size? The other issue is that my hand pump doesn’t generate enough pressure to really fill it. So I’m going to be riding on a too-small tube for some reason, at a drastically reduced PSI. But it’ll get the job done, which is the point. I’ll go slow, not a problem today. First I just have to get out of these people’s yard with enough daylight to steer by.

There was plenty of light. I just happened to be standing beneath a tree line. And it was chilly. Here’s my “I can’t believe I’m still wearing jackets in mid-April” shadow self-portrait to prove it:

I’m not wearing those sleeves because it’s such a breathable piece of kit.

The next issue I’m considering while also appreciating the art and the majesty of vulcanized rubber on industrialized aluminum: topography. There’s one significant little hill to get down on my route back to the house, which is about 5.6 miles away from my tube change. It requires speed or braking, or both, because at the perfect bottom of the hill there is a 135-degree turn back to the right. It’s easily manageable when your bike is behaving up to par, and only a concern if there’s a lot of traffic. Traffic isn’t a problem lately, but this tire and tube thing means I won’t be riding at full ability just now.

So I must plan a different route. One with no hills because I, for a change, want to avoid any zippy little descents. Only there’s no such direct, and flat, route of which I am aware. So I went an indirect way, negotiated one little downhill (easily, as it turns out, with some help with the USPS guy who patiently held a few cars behind him without knowing the sort of favor he did for me) and added a few extra miles, which is fine. I need the miles anyway. Grateful for those. Miles are miles, but I’d prefer them under ideal circumstance and not, as I later learned, at 40 PSI on my back tire. I usually ride my tires at 110 PSI. So that’s why it wobbled constantly, I was floating on spongey, foamy rubber and not riding a rock hard ridge.

I know it was 40 PSI because I inflated the tube with a floor pump that has a gauge on it. I went back out to ride the neighborhood road to see if that solved the floaty, bumpy sensation I’d been feeling or if I’d inadvertently damaged the wheel. And that second tube promptly exploded. POP! A crisp firecracker going off a few feet from your ear.

So I’ll go buy more tubes tomorrow. That’s something I’ll be grateful for, too, Dr. Wong.

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