The frontiers of tire deflation
Parked by the side of the road after fixing the first of approximately 100,000 pinchflats yesterday. I hit a stone that was large enough to pinchflat the front tire, then discovered that YET ANOTHER Zefal pump (this one is the one that came with my Trek 1000 decades ago) had reached the point where it didn’t have much puff anymore. And I’d just reached an 8 mile section of road that had been repaired(?) with freshly crushed and very jagged gravel. So thus began a sequence of not being able to get the front tire much above 30 psi -> chunk of gravel -> pinch! -> 30 psi -> chunk of gravel -> pinch! (with, after the first three, the additional step of spending 5 minutes visually inspecting the tire for the latest pinch so I could slap a patch onto it and pray that I’d found all the punctured parts) which meant that it took approximately 5 hours to get the next 20 miles down the road (it would have been almost as fast to walk; 4mph walking speed compares favorably to 12mph riding speed, then 0 mph repairing a flat speed.)