Bike couriers vs commuters

I like to think that riding to work every day makes me a bit healthier and maybe even a little tougher. My co-workers even reinforce this idea. There are days when I get to work and people say, 'Dude, you are HARD CORE!' meaning that it was sprinkling outside and I must have gotten wet. This is obviously more of a statement of how easy it is to avoid going outside rather than a reflection of my inner Grizzly Adams. If you ride daily you are going to have days that are uncomfortable and, yes, sometimes really unpleasant. The unspoken secret among year round commuters is even the lousy days can be fun because...you are riding a bike. But I digress.

The true hard core folks in my mind are the bike couriers. These are professional bikers although they don't have the tight pants and workout coaches you are thinking of. These are people who haul stuff on their own two wheels, year round, hours a day, come rain, shine, or hail. If they have been in the job for a while they tend to look like a Grizzly Adams who has spent a few years living at your local bus stop.

This is a bit different in Minneapolis. Probably the most common courier you will see here is the Jimmy John's sandwich delivery guy/gal.

They ride year round but seem more numerous in the summer. These people often look like a cross between  a fixie-riding hipster and your typical midwestern college student.  This is probably because they are fixie riding midwestern college students. Still, they are out there in all kinds of weather delivering small orders of sub sandwiches. It is probably busy during lunchtime, quiet the rest of the day, and I can't imagine what kind of tip you get for delivering a sandwich and a soda. So, from a bike commuter: you may not be leathery and scarred, Jimmy Jane, but you are still a bike ridin' hero to me.

No tire will stop that

I ride with tires that claim to have some type of teflon material embedded in the rubber to help prevent punctures. This presumably works since I haven't had a flat since last fall, about 1500 miles ago. The difference between the winter and other times of year, however, is people. It seems that no one is out smashing beer bottles in the winter (do they just bounce?) or shingling their roof. This must change in the summer since this is the time when I get flats. Meet the enemy:

I don't know when I ran this over but only heard a click...click...click coming from the back of the bike. I didn't see anything stuck in the spokes and figured a flat would eventually make itself known so I kept riding. I made it over the Lake street bridge and up the hill on the St Paul side before the back end of the bike started giving me the classic wobbling feeling of a flat tire. I pulled over and started to remove the tire when I saw the nail was so far into the tire that it poked through the rim tape and into the underside of a spoke nipple. This got me thinking: what would the best way be to demonstrate how good is a tire's flat protection? You really don't know until it fails. In this case, probably only the solid rubber tire of a tricycle would have stopped it. I wonder if they make those in 700c wheel size?