the Way of the Turtle

Sigh... No Undercliff/Overcliff For the Turtle...
Monday, July 5, 2010

Every summer the Shawangunk Runners Club puts on a series of 5 XC runs on Monday nights, mostly held at the Mohonk Preserve and Lake Minnewaska Park Preserve... I ran three of the runs back in 2008 and had planned to do four or maybe all five this year, in part because it's a great excuse to visit a part of NYS that I love. In a couple of cases it will take some creative travel arrangements, like today when I was planning to drive to the first run, Udercliff/Overcliff, straight from Rochester... a plan which involved heading to Binghamtom first and then to Mohonk, in an effort to save roughly an hour or more of driving.

Except - as I was driving down I81 just south of Syracuse I heard a loud hissing from somewhere outside the car... it sounded like one of my tires had suddenly lost air. The handling didn't change but I still got off the road at an exit a short distance later and checked, to find one of the rear tires very soft (but not flat, fortunately... at 70 mph on the highway at flat would have been bad.) So I spent a few minutes putting on the temporary spare and saw that the original tire had lost air along the rim... probably a problem with the bead, aggravated by the heat today. That squashed any hopes I had of just adding air and putting it back on, and I ended up ditching my trip to the 'Gunks in favor of taking route 20 back to Albany... took a bit longer than the highway but I was able to keep my speed lower, which was a bit more comfortable given that if anything else had happened I had already used my only spare... and all of the garages I passed were closed for the 4th of July holiday.

On the plus side, it could have been a lot worse... had the tire gone completely I would probably been on the rim in a matter of seconds, and I got to see some very nice countryside as I took the slower route home. But it still would have been nice to run at Mohonk this evening. Oh, well.

JMH