Is this an advantage or disadvantage of a narrow tire?
I was coming home from work last night via one of my more direct routes (Hawthorne Bridge -> Division -> i205 path -> Springwater Trail -> Johnson Creek Blvd -> Springwater Trail -> 17th -> Bybee) and when I was sailing down Johnson Creek Blvd at ~25mph, I got the chance to switch back onto the Springwater Trail at 55th. I’d been sailing along without fuss, muss, or bother, but when I turned sharply left to get off Johnson Creek (there’s the crest of a little hill just east of 55th, so you don’t see cars coming west until they’re almost at 55th) it suddenly felt as if the rear tire was sliding on ice.
So I stopped when I reached the Springwater Trail and took a look at the rear wheel, and discovered the rear tire was completely and absolutely flat (when I looked at it at home it appeared to be a pinchflat, so I must have ridden over a sharp-edged pothole at some point on my trip back home.) When did it happen? Beats me. The Springwater Trail was recently repaved, and a large chunk of Johnson Creek has also been repaved, so there’s not much there in the department of potholes.
I don’t think I lost air on Division or the i205 path, because there are fairly sharp turns from Division to the i205 path, and then from the i205 path to the Springwater Trail, but was I running for 3 miles on the Springwater Trail on a dead flat tire?
Fortunately the sidewalls of the tire don’t appear to be at all mangled, so it doesn’t really matter, but I’m not sure if it should be encouraging or distressing that I can sail along – at what is for me a really high speed – on a flat tire for any distance at all without even knowing it (the xtracycle, with 28mm tires, lets me know in no uncertain terms when the tire goes flat – if the tire gets too low, it feels like the rear end is sliding even when I’m rowing along a tangent. 25mm isn’t that much smaller; maybe it’s the tires?)