More on Improving Your Biking Performance

In this video, you'll learn many new things that can improve the cycling part of your triathlon race.

Alright. Typically, if you go above a 110 psi you don't need to go any higher than that. If it's raining or something then I would like to have it below a 110 psi, because then you have more contact when it's wet, you have more contact on the road. So, you have the tube and you take out the old tube which is pretty simple to do and I still, I am going to leave this on like this, okay because there is no sense of taking the whole tyre off, you don't need to. Alright, you can just still leave one side on and now what you want to do is you want to make sure you got a flat. You want to see where do the flat occur, was it a thorn, was it a piece of glass or something like that. So what you want to do is just look through the tyre and look for where you think the cut is. If you don't see the cut then what you do is you take your hands and gently, because you don't want to rip yourself on a piece of glass to your fingers but you gently feel the inside of the tread of where it came through and typically here is where you are going to see the thorn or you are going to feel the piece of glass somewhere right on here. Alright, so you see the thorn, you feel the thorn and you pick it out. It's very rare that with a flat tyre the whole sidewall be cut or something like that or you can't use the tyre again. So that's why we don't take spare tyres with us. And in Ironman you might want to take a spare tyre, the actual tyre. See this is the tube and this is the tyre, alright. If there is a slice in there where let's say, if there is a big slice and I start pumping up the tyre again, what's going to happen? The rubber is going to come right through the hole and so you don't want that to happen because you are just going to pop it again. So, if you have a patch kit or something like that you can put one of those piece of plastic things in there of the patch right in there where the hole is. I have put a dollar bill in there, I put grass in there, find anyway anything around that's soften that and that's going to patch that hole and prevent the tube from coming out when you blow it up, alright. Okay, so ideally when you have taken out whatever the sharp object was or whatever caused the flat then you want to put in the new tube and what I would like to do is blow it up a little bit. I don't have that much harder or do I folks? How many of you use CO2, how many of you have CO2. So you are going to use CO2 cartridges, that's a little bit different. CO2 cartridges in somewhere instead of having to pump your tyre up, you can puncture this cartridge of CO2 and then you can just let the air out like that. I would, if I were you practice it before race situation, so you know where it's like and you know how much air you let in and stuff like that. And also train the way you race. I will drill that in your head all weekend, train the way you race so that on race day nothing seems new. Practice in aero position on the bike. So, it's race day and something comes along and if you are just riding in normal standard handle bars a whole time and you get an aero bar on race day, here you can ride on like this for three months and all of a sudden it's like oh, race day I better get in a aero position, it save time and so you ride like this. What happens to my hamstring and my butt muscles? You are using different muscles they are going to tighten up, you get a cramp. Not only on the bike but it's going to affect you on the run. So train the way you race. We are going to talk about that with swimming and all that stuff. Be used to something, be used to the flat tyre or anything so that on race day it seems like, oh I have fixed a lot of flats, it's no big deal. And all comes down to the fact folks that you have trained, you have spent a lot of hours, you sacrifice a lot of family time in order to race well and you don't want something like a mechanical error to hold you back, alright. There is no excuse for a mechanical problem on the bike. Your bike should be ready to ride and should not have a problem. The only thing we will be having a flat tyre, you know that's something you can't control. With the exception of, before race day you should be checking your tyre and making sure that you don't have any cuts before the race starts and if you do have cuts then you change the tyre. Typically because I had a tyre sponsor, I be change my tyres like every second or third race. If I saw the slightest cut I am like I do not want to have that to be a problem and so I change it. And for those of you that want to race in three or four times a year you will be looking at your tyres the whole time and making sure that you don't have cuts in it. Okay so, put the tube back in and then now a days with the way tyres are, you have the tyre on it to help, but you usually don't need it until the very end or you might not need it at all. And you just start putting the tube around or you start putting the other sidewall in, so you are going to have both sidewalls in. And the reason why I want to fill it up with a little bit air so that this doesn't sag all the way the way down, you want to kind of keep it going around the tyre. Typically, you would like to start where the valve is, because you were to start over here and then you get to where the valve is, the valve might be pointing at this direction, so you won't have the valve pointing straight up, alright.