juneathon day 3: a bicycle repair shop

…is what my back garden resembled for a large chunk of this afternoon. I took the day off work in order to take Mrs eatingtrees and SonNumberTwo out for the day – we spent the day at Knebworth Park in the sunshine but by 3pm, SonNumberTwo was shattered so we headed home. As I pulled up outside my house, the local postman walked up to the car, tapped on the window and handed me a package. It was the replacement tubes and a few little bits for the pushbike. Perfect timing as Hauling My Carcass and I have a bike ride planned for Sunday. We need to get some “training” (and I use the term in credibly loosely) done as we are doing the London to Brighton Bike Ride in 2 weeks and then, a month later are tackling the Dunwich Dynamo – a fearsome 200km overnight ride departing from a pub in Hackney on a Saturday evening and arrving in Dunwich on the Suffolk coast on Sunday morning. Some would say it is a ludicous and reckless undertaking to cycle further than we have ever cycled before, with no back up (it is organised but there is no support… you break down, you fix it or stay broken down), in the dark. And as it is overnight…you know how problems are always worse if you think about them late at night? Well, I can only imagine the horrors I’ll be having in the early hours, miles from anywhere, knackered and aching. Still, we said we’d do it so we had better train to do it as best we can.
Sundays training ride is to be approximately 75-80kms around a route that I have partly ridden before and partly made up in my head to bring it up to the required distance. The 55kms or so that has been ridden before is no problem but I want to top and tail this with a few… embellishments. The ride will definitely be at least 75kms but may end up being 90 or 100kms depending on how badly out my estimate of the imagined prefaced and suffixed bits are.
Anyway… to cut a long story short, I get the tubes out of the box and go to replace one of the tubes on the bike and realise that the tyre has been destroyed too… it has a 5mm gash right through to the carcass of the tyre which, when pumped up, gapes like some sort of horrific wound. I have to make a decision either to ride with a knackered tyre, call off Sunday’s trip or get myself down to the Local Bike Shop to get a new tyre. I reassembled the bike as best I could and cycled down to the shop, got my new tyre, cycled home and, for the second time today, took the back wheel off, tyre off, tube out, tyre on, tube in and wheel back on. All that was left was to test that it worked – so todays Juneatahon was 20.7kms on the bike.