Tire Tribulations and an Outhouse

In retrospect, Tuesday’s tire tribulation was the turning point for my week. I had a solid plan for running. The alarm was set for Tuesday morning, and I got up, had my breakfast, got out the door earlier than usual and had an awesome run on what was a dreary and almost rainy morning. Everything was right with my world. And then I noticed the tire that was almost flat.

Now here is where my mental processes tend to go a bit wonky. You’d think I’d be rather happy to catch a flat tire in the garage, at home, where we happily have more cars than drivers. This should only be one level up from a blown light bulb.

But not quite. In my mind, I recalled how I recently drove around with a leaky tire and a bike pump in the back seat for about a month until finally getting around to buying a new set of tires. New tires are supposed to hold air. This was a violation of contract. How could the tire do this to me? Tires have evil intentions, I know it.

And then I think about the remnants of the old outhouse sitting next to the driveway. They were supposed to be hauled to the dump a couple weeks ago, except I needed the truck for something else while the dump was closed, so it all got emptied out. A few weeks went by and I never got around to hauling them to the dump. In fact, I had blissfully forgotten that this chore even needed to be done.


So it’s not just a flat tire, it’s a history of procrastination and suddenly seeing all the things that need doing. How am I ever going to stick to my running plan with all these other things that need procrastinating? I need to spend lots of time worrying now, don’t I? Therapists make a living off of this kind of thinking.

But wait! Here’s an opportunity to have a calm and rational reaction to the situation. An opportunity to begin building a new habit of sticking to an original plan while making reasonable adjustments, if needed, as things come up. Okay, in that moment, it was really difficult to see opportunity.

But on Wednesday, I tricked myself by adding “remove flat tire and replace with spare” onto my running plan. Now I’m not dealing with a hassle anymore, I’m exercising. I like exercise; it makes me healthy and optimistic. And it turns out that jacking up a car on a cold morning is so much easier when your muscles are loose and you’ve already worked up a bit of a sweat. And as it turns out, there was an easy to see nail in the tread. Should be a simple flat repair. Toss the flat into the back of the truck and go on with my day.


On Thursday, I ran some intervals, and took the flat tire back to NTB for a free flat repair.

On Friday, which was a planned rest day, I loaded the outhouse remnants into the truck along with some other trash and hauled them off to the dump (oh, excuse me; it’s now called a “transfer station”). After getting up early for hard runs on Tuesday and Thursday, it was positively delightful to sleep in until 7am and take a leisurely side trip to the dump. As a bonus, since they had to weigh my truck before and after, I now know that my pickup truck with an empty bed, half a tank of gas, and me driving weighs an even 5,000 lbs.

So not only did I stick to my original running plan for the week, I handled an unexpected tire problem and also did a task I had been procrastinating on. Forget the cardiovascular benefits of exercise, simply creating a plan and sticking with it as other things come up feels awesome.

What a great week! The irony is that without the flat tire, I probably would have stuck with the run/work/sleep routine and not gotten the outhouse bits to the dump. So it was a better week because something went wrong and I rose to the occasion, and then kept going. Now if I can only do that without the bit about the flat tire.