What do you think...faster....or slower!?

Have you ever had that sinking feeling.....seriously, like when you notice something isn't quite right?  You can truly feel it.  The sound the tire makes, that gentle hum has just a little different pitch.  Each pedal stroke feels just a little harder than it should.  You feel like you're your riding a low rider that's slowly getting a little lower!

Yep, you've got a slow leak in a tire on the morning commute.  So, it's evaluation time, eh?  Just how slow is that leak?  How long did it take you to notice?  And now after that critical evaluation, what to do?

In my case, I'm riding a large 700c tire, meaning it holds a ton of air and takes quite a while to go flat.  If I was on my road bike with a 23mm tire, it might go down in less than a minute.  So I chose not to stop and patch, but rather ride out the last 3 miles as fast as possible.  Now this poses another question, if you're really close to flat, can you ride fast?  Flat tires don't tend to roll too well!  If you got a little more pressure left you can dig deep and push as hard as you can to make it in time. 

In my case (as shown above), I was fine.  Even when I got to work the tire still has 20-30 psi left in it.  I found the single tiny goat head and determined it was just barely leaking....in fact, this has probably been going down for a couple days.  Once removed and patched it should be good until I find the next pokey object!

So, to answer the title question......I had a faster ride with my slow leak, but only because I was too lazy to stop and patch it before I got to the office!