9 items to pack on every ride

Tire boot

Besides the obvious (bicycle, water, appropriate clothing, etc.), there are 9 things that I never ride without. In priority starting with the most important:

1. Mirror. I use one of the little wire jobs that clips on to the temple piece of my glasses. I love my helmet (it has saved me from serious head injury on more than one occasion), but I would sooner ride bare-headed than go without my mirror. Once you get used to a mirror, you will never want to ride without it. Here’s a little test for you. When you get in your car tomorrow, cover all your mirrors with tin foil then go ahead and make your drive. If you don’t feel completely vulnerable, then you shouldn’t be on the road in the first place. That’s the same feeling you’ll get if you forget your mirror once you’ve gotten used to it.
2. Helmet. A good helmet should be almost un-noticeable after a few wearings. Riding without one is not only bad judgment; it’s probably bad karma as well.
3. Cell phone. Some riders think they are too heavy, others feel they betray the self-sufficiency required of a bicyclist, but mine has come in so handy on so many occasions that I won’t ride without it. Don’t be boorish, though, and feel you have to answer every call that comes in or use it to chat up friends and business associates while you’re riding. I ride as though I didn’t have it with me, only resorting to it in emergency situations. Although a cell phone is not really an adequate substitute for carrying ID with you, it has the same effect if you are seriously injured.
4. Spare tubes. I pack two, although, based on one 7-flat ride years ago, I used to carry three. Last summer I gave one of my two tubes to a rider who had experienced her second flat of the day on the Peak to Peak highway between Ward and Estes Park. I figured my karma would be good for months on end, so imagine my surprise when that ride turned out to be the first two-flat ride I’d had in years.
5. Tire irons. No use packing tubes if you don’t have irons.
6. CO2 inflator. The inflator is so much easier and faster than trying to coax sufficient pressure out of a portable pump.
7. Money. Between the cell phone and money, you should be able to weather nearly any emergency.
8. Ibuprofen. Vitamin I can make the difference between finishing and bailing. But use it with care, especially on hot days when it can obstruct kidney functions and might increase your chances of hyponatremia, a potentially serious condition.
9. Tire boot. I learned the hard way (twice – nobody ever said I was a fast learner) that carrying a tire boot is a really good idea. A tire boot is a small piece of flexible plastic that can be positioned inside the tire to mitigate cuts and holes in the tire that would otherwise cause the tube to protrude to such an extent that it would burst. On one ride in the Black Forest area years ago, I was screaming down one of the hills when my back tire seized. It just stopped rolling and I was all of a sudden in a slide for my life. I thought I was going down any number of times, but I kept counter-steering against the skid and managed to stay upright. Within a few seconds, that felt like minutes, the skidding rubbed a huge slit into the tire and the tube blew immediately. That made the handling even more sketchy, but the bike finally came to a sliding halt with me still upright. I did not have a tire boot with me, so I endured a long odyssey of hitch-hiking, cabs, phone calls and friends before I got back home. The debacle was my own fault. I had lashed my wind breaker under my seat bag, but I didn’t strap it down tightly enough, so it popped out onto the rear wheel where it wedged into the fork causing the wheel to seize up. A tire boot would not have made me feel any less stupid in that situation, but it probably would have enabled me to get to a bike store where I could have purchased a replacement.

I come from the Boy Scout school of preparedness, so there are lots of other things I tend to schlep around with me, but these are the nine I never ride without.