Yesterday, I was excited to have my bike back from the shop, so I went for a ride.

I took the Pinellas Trail, which, I thought, ran straight from St. Petersburg to Tarpon Springs. That would be somewhere around 60 miles. I knew that I didn’t want to go that far because my longest ride ever was only 30 miles. My goal was to get to a grand total of 40 miles. By the time I got to 20 miles, I realized that I was pretty close to my parent’s house in Clearwater, so I figured I would keep going a little and see if I could get there.

It was then that I learned that the trail doesn’t run uninterrupted. I got to downtown Clearwater, and the trail suddenly turned into a bike lane on the side of the road. Then the bike lane disappeared also. At that point I was 23 miles into the trip, and I wasn’t even sure my little sister was home, so I decided to just turn around.

I was pretty tired and stopped at a couple parks to get some water and rest. Then I got to a point about 10 miles away from being home, and I got a flat tire! It was my back tire and the same one that I has been flat about four other times. When I got my bike back, the repairman told me that he took a piece of wire out of the tire, so I figured there would be no more problems. I was definitely not happy to have to change a tire again. So I had to ride the last 10 miles dirty and in a bad mood.

Other than my flat tire experience, I enjoyed my ride and was happy to go longer than ever before. I had a grand total of 45.5 miles. That may not be far for most bike riders, but it took me forever and I normally only go about 17 miles at a time while I’m training hard in the pool. I’m really going to have to figure out what’s wrong with that tire!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 10:16 am and is filed under robertmargalis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.