L2P – Day 3 : Bum Sore

I am a Muppet … to those not familiar with the expression , it is a polite way to say a person is an idiot .
Imagine you are going on a long ride/hike/run , a sensible person will make sure he has as many things he can arrange to make the journey as painless and as comfortable as possible right ?? Well , apparently I don’t .
In all my planning and preparing I did not account for a padded shorts or padding on my saddle , So by day 3 even the thought of placing my bum on the seat gave me shivers of pain .

During the night i managed to charge up my phone so I can use the tracker software , or so I hoped , but as I started in the morning , the cloud cover was so think that the App just couldn’t get a Satellite signal and I had to shut it off.
We had a staggered start this day , meaning slow riders leave early while the faster riders can leave about an hour after , I opted to start early , so I will not be the last to arrive to the hotel that night ,relative to the other days this was an easier day , we were riding via rural France with small villages and not too many big hills , after about 30km I felt an odd roughness on my rear wheel , and knew I was riding flat . I stopped at the side of the road and saw everyone passing me by as I fixed the flat .
When I put the tube in, I decided to save time and use one of the compressed air canisters I have to pump up the tube, it went great in the first 10 sec and then there was a loud pop and all the air was out again – it actually burst the tube – creating a huge hole in it.
So I had to start it again and this time I used the manual pump to get me road ready.
Once that was sorted I started moving again , I noticed two riders closing in on me and as they passed I started Drafting them, I think that was the best decision I made the whole day , as they kept a good pace and at some time we were averaging 38Km/h and going up hills with a fast pace I was not even noticing it was hills .
We covered a long distance , past the lunch stop and then we hit a hill where my chain fell off , and I lost the guys .
I fixed it and kept on , but the pace was slow and the rain decided to come back again .
In one of the villages I saw a couple of the riders stopped at a Cafe , and joined them for a hot Chocolate , which was a good thing as it warmed me up just enough to give the boost to cycle to the hotel , but unknown to me at the time was that my chain was bent and due to that it kept on altering the gear during the ride , and I had to do 14 km with gears rattling and shifting with out my control .

When I got the hotel I handed the bike to the mechanic and only in the morning we found this issue .

Total distance covered today 107 km

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