Frustration

I has been a really busy week and I have really been looking forward to a break and some personal time doing the stuff I like to do such as; riding my bike. I made plans to ride this morning. The only thing between me and my bike ride was switching out some tires. My road riding these days is done on a mountain bike because my road frame I have is broken. A problem I intend on fixing later this season with a purchase of a new road frame. However, in the interim I was planning on just riding my slicks on the DEAN, which are currently on my Surly for commuting to work.

I could just ride the UST tires I have on my DEAN, but they are practically new and they are not a cheap tire to replace. I could have ridden my Surly, but the group was doing a road ride and the single speed was not appropriate. So, I opted to take the slicks off my Surly and put them on my DEAN. The swap was going as planned until I noticed the tire bead of my slicks was not sitting properly on my UST rim.

Ten minutes of fighting the bead and I could feel the frustration growing. At that point I walked away for a couple minutes. I came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth stressing about and I would just order some new slicks that will fit on my UST rim, which meant I wasn't going to ride with the group today. A hard pill to swallow as I was looking forward to the ride.

I walked back to the tires and wheels I had pulled apart and started putting things back together as they were. The Surly got the slicks back and the UST tires fit very nicely on my UST rims, once again. However, after an hour of mucking around I was officially right back where I started an hour ago. Very frustrating!

Did I at least learn a lesson? Sure, I did the right thing in walking away when the frustration started to well rather than trying to force the situation to work. And I'm going to start planning a bit better for my riding needs and getting the equipment I need to avoid these situations and the frustration that follows.