The Tuesday after Paris-Roubaix weekend, I was out for a ride with a friend and I got a puncture. As I sat on a conveniently placed bench and calmly changed an inner tube, I had a moment’s peace to reflect on the fact that this was a very different affair from the punctures that had defined Roubaix events as they crossed Northern France in a torrent of cursing.
There are many, many varieties of puncture. When I started to think through all of them, I realised there is a whole matrix of possibilities: fast or slow, frightening or just annoying, the dull, even the mysterious.
At one extreme you might find very fast and very frightening in combination, as when two of my friends were descending a Welsh hill at 100 kph during a tandem race and had a front-tyre blowout. There was a bang followed by several seconds neither of them will forget. My main witness was the stoker: “I figured my mate would cushion the impact. I wasn’t looking forward to the crunching noise that was going to make, but I thought that sacrificing himself for others was very much his sort of thing. Also, he chose the tyre.”
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But you can also have fast and boring. A few seconds before the start of a time trial a few seasons ago, the rider behind me said, “What’s that?” and pointed at my back tyre. It was a phenomenon I’ve never seen before or since – there was a small hole in the carcass, and the latex inner tube was gradually extruding through it as we watched, until it was a thin column the size of a cocktail stick. After about ten seconds it very quietly went “pop”, the tyre deflated, and that was the end of my race. It was both novel and dull.
Even the best Tubeless sealant offers little protection from the fast puncture, but it does offer the enhancement of “unbelievably messy”. I’d have said there was nothing worse in cycling that the fast and terrifying puncture, until I’d experienced an added sealant enema. With old-school fast and terrifying, you’re pleased to survive. With tubeless fast and terrifying, you’re slightly sorry that you did.
Mid-speed punctures are less exciting. In a race, they are just annoying. On a club run, they are just annoying. On a solo ride they can occasionally be quite pleasant – a chance to take in the view, listen to the bees in the hedgerow, peer into your saddle pack and idly wonder where your spare tube has gone, whereupon the experience becomes annoying again.
Slow, on the other hand, can drive you nuts. Can you get home? If you stop and inflate it, where on the curve of energy-expended to tyre-pressure-achieved do you maximise average velocity? How many times will you recalculate this before admitting defeat and fixing it?
Of course, as an alternative, the slow puncture can remain undetected until after you get home. And there can actually be something oddly satisfying about seeing your bike sitting on a flat tyre an hour after getting home from a long ride and realising that it looks as old and tired as you do.
There are many other punctures. There is the phantom puncture – you’re convinced you can feel it going soft, but it vanishes if you stop to check. There is the intermittent puncture – when you re-inflate the tyre and find it stays blown-up, while the puncture retreats and awaits a sinister moment to re-appear.
Ironically the one puncture that isn’t really a puncture at all is the Roubaix version. A true puncture entails an element of misfortune, and a legitimate feeling of being hard-done by.
A Roubaix puncture, in contrast, come from riding over big, sharp, uneven rocks at 50 kph on lightweight racing tyres. Honestly, it’s like kicking a wall and complaining that your foot hurts.
