RT66 Day 7: 3rd FLAT! Should have gone tubeless!
Twenty miles on the interstate, big, wide open skies, and then a crash. When things start to go wrong...
Day 7: Albuquerque, NM to Grants, NM; 59 miles, 2,723 feet elevation gain (Part 1) | (Part 2)
22.6 miles on I-40
Day 7: Planned on Ride with GPS
Intraday Stops: Laguna 66 Pit Stop (27 miles), Villa Cubero (11 miles), Phillips 66 McBride Rd (14 miles), Grants (6 miles)
I expected it would be hard to get back in the saddle after a rest day, but surprisingly, it wasn’t. In fact, I feel invigorated by moving for most of the day. Maybe our bodies really did evolve to stay in near-constant motion and then collapse into deep, uninterrupted sleep at night. If that’s true, though, why doesn’t modern culture embrace it? My only real discomfort seems to be temperature regulation. It’s hot. Perhaps that’s the downside of living in the Bay Area.
One thing worth noting about riding near Albuquerque — and New Mexico in general — is that it’s windy as hell. According to the fine folks at REI, springtime in April and May is especially brutal because of pressure gradients caused by major atmospheric temperature differences. Those winds usually blow west to east.
By March or April, the polar jet stream has started migrating northward, but can still often influence the southwest U.S., such that wind speeds increase dramatically with height. Meanwhile, the sun angle is getting higher in the sky and creating greater heating near the surface of the Earth. The heated surface air rises to a greater depth of the atmosphere during these spring months, often to a height between 7,500 and 10,000 feet above the surface. The rising air mixes with stronger winds aloft, resulting in stronger and turbulent winds mixing down to the surface. Strong surface pressure gradients can enhance surface winds. High wind events across New Mexico can also occur with strong surface fronts, especially those that race through the eastern plains. —NOAA, National Weather Service
Now, I realize September technically isn’t spring, but there seemed to be an unusual amount of wind today anyway. As part of my daily ritual, I screenshot the weather and wind forecasts every morning to gauge what kind of ride I’m in for. Today’s prediction called for 8 mph winds, but light precipitation pushed them closer to 12 mph. It should have been a relatively easy 60-mile ride, but instead it felt like pedaling through mud all day. Oddly enough, though, my body still doesn’t feel sore. Yet.
But I digress.
In chronological order, here’s how the day unfolded.
As usual, the interstate riding was harrowing. A few miles after finally exiting the freeway, I discovered my third flat tire of the trip. So far, every flat has come from tiny steel reinforcement wires shed from shredded tractor-trailer tires. At this point, I’m fairly convinced I should have gone tubeless and have already resolved to switch when I get home. Thankfully, I was only two miles from a gas station when it happened.
The view as I changed my flat, not bad.
I know I sound like a broken record — and wow, what an anachronism that phrase has become. How many people even own turntables anymore?
Still, this stretch of Route 66 is astonishingly devoid of services compared to the Chicago-to-Oklahoma City portion of the trip. Sometimes you just want to sit somewhere, eat a sandwich, and take a nap, but there often isn’t a decent place to do that out here. Also, there are tarantulas.
Occasionally, I’ll pass a place that looks wonderful and feel disappointed I don’t actually need to stop there. Take Villa de Cubero, for example. It looked incredibly inviting. I bet the restroom was immaculate.
The skies out here are so wide and the cloud formations so strangely uniform that the landscape can feel unsettlingly placid — almost artificial. Like a painted backdrop or something out of The Matrix, where the sky might suddenly dissolve into a digital grid and reveal that aliens are farming us. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend hours biking alone with nobody to talk to: your mind starts wandering into bizarre territory.
Unfortunately, my wandering mind came with consequences.
While distracted, my tire lost traction on a gravelly shoulder, and I completely ate it. Hard. And the truly painful part? I was only nine miles from the end of the day.
Honestly, I didn’t even mind the crash itself that much. What bothered me more was my watch.
Before this trip, I bought a new Garmin Fenix 7 Pro after reading obsessively through product reviews — well, technically just one reviewer, but he’s THE ONLY SMARTWATCH REVIEWER YOU’LL EVER NEED. The guy is absurdly thorough and aggressively Type A. Honestly, after reading his reviews, there’s no reason to consult anyone else. He’s basically one of the original internet gadget reviewers and has apparently been doing this for more than fifteen years.
Anyway, modern smartwatches now have these wild features where, if they detect an “incident,” they automatically contact your emergency contact. So there I am, sprawled on the side of the road with my cycling shoes still clipped into the pedals and the pedals still attached to the bike, lying on an eight-inch shoulder while my watch starts shrieking at me that it’s about to notify my husband unless I cancel within ten seconds.
At that moment, all I wanted was for my very expensive glorified step counter to stop yelling at me.
My watch has a mind of its own.
The resulting message apparently confused my husband because it first texted him: “I’m OK,” followed by GPS coordinates indicating where an incident may have occurred.
In the end, I escaped with some bruises, road rash, and the knowledge that my watch is an absolute narc. Honestly, the most annoying consequence was that the crash detection stopped my activity tracking and forced me to restart everything manually.
Still, in the grand scheme of things, I’m grateful I walked away mostly intact.
Nine miles later — somewhat bruised and slightly rain-soaked — I was sitting with my dad eating a warm cup of noodles.
