Coaching at Bath Track
I booked myself onto Matt Eaton training tonight and which was going really well until my front tyre kept going flat about 3 laps into the warm-up. Basically I hit the first jump and the front tyre felt a bot weird and by the time I hit the flat after the jump it was really flat and it almost washed out causing me to almost crash! I managed to unclip and get my ffot down to avoid the crash but I was super pissed off and over-reacted and threw my bike over the fence from on top of the second jump.
Luckily Matt lent me his bike so I was able to finish the training all be it on an unfamiliar bike with flat pedals on it!
I really enjoyed the training and I also really enjoyed riding the 20″ again! I felt so much faster than the cruiser and also felt so much better in the air too! I am definitely thinking of getting a 20″ again once I have sold all my other bikes to pay for it!
Then I got home I removed the Tubolito tube and found that the valve had come unscrewed a bit so I screwed it back together and pumped the tyre up and left it for 30 minutes hoping that this would have resolved the issue but it hadn’t!
I have decided that my trial of Tubolito’s on the BMX is going to be put on hold as my front tyre lasted exactly 2 rides! And at £30+ a tube, the cost out-ways any performance gains the tube has at the moment. I am trying to save money for next season’s bike and I am planning to give carbon rims and ti spokes a go so I may well revisit using Tubolito’s then when losing rolling resistance makes sense! I am also going to keep on using the Tubolito in the rear wheel until it breaks and I will then replace it with a conventional tube!
I decided that as I was going to replace the tubolito tubes with a normal tube I might as well swap the Tioga Power block 24×1.75 tyre for one of the S&M track mark 24x 1.75 Kevlar folding tyres that I have had in the cupboard for about a year! The track mark was a nightmare to get onto the rim compared to the Power block but once on the tyre seated perfectly and as its a high pressure rated tyre I will be able to up the pressure to about 110psi which will be different.
I then removed the rear wheel and put on the other Trackmark tyre on the rear. When I get the tyre on the wheel and refitted it I noticed that the wheel was rubbing on the frame due to what I thought was my old tyre being 24 x 1.60 and the new one being a 24×1.75! This turned out to not be that case and the wheel was buckled from me throwing it 20-30ft off of an 8ft jump 😣
I now have to take the wheel off of the bike and get it to Crucial BMX early tomorrow to see if they can fix it before I leave for Gosport for the National racing this weekend! I hind sight now throwing the bike was a bad idea! Although it felt so good at the time 🙂
I then tried to get the bearings out of my Profile Elite rear wheel as the bearings are getting pretty grabby and need replacing and I bought new bearings last month but haven’t got around to swapping them out! This proved to be near impossible with the tools that I have on hand so I am going to take the wheel to my parents house tomorrow to try with some bigger tools!
All in all a crappy end to a great day!
Looking back I got a lot out of the training as I learned to use the lights instead of the beeps which is faster anyway as your brain reacts faster to light than sound. Also, the last National that I raced at Gosport, I had issues hearing the beeps as they are really quiet and the commentator was really load so this should help a bit! Matt had also been to gates at Gosport at the weekend and had reset the speed of the our gate to mimic that of the Gosport gate to help to make the practice as relevant to the National as possible. He also did a bit of training with music on to drown out the cadence as well, which really helped me to focus on the lights and made it way easier to learn! I pretty much hit the gate all but my last 2 gates which was partly due to the speed of the gate compared to normal and partly due to being on a 20″ instead of the cruiser but I think that it has really helped. For one thing I no longer lose balance when I lift my head up like I did before the training so that is a massive step forward!