Beware Man with Torch

Anyone who has ridden with me more than once knows, I tend to attract flats. I think I'm actually a magnet for goat-head thorns and those nasty little chips of brown bottle glass. I went through a period where every (and I do mean every) ride that Bryan and I went on, I had a flat. I'm pretty sure there was one ride where I had two. I tried Panaracer, Avocet, Continetal, WTB, Kends, they all had about the same rate of flatification. One a whim I ordered a set of Schwlabe Marathon tires for the Miyata. After about 1 month of riding, I realized that I hadn't had a flat. So I got a set for another bike - same experience.

In the course of six or seven months, all four of my bikes recevied a set of Schwalbe tires. The fleet is currently set up as follows:

Miyata, 26x2.0 Big Apple - big, plush and reasonably fast

Rambouillet, 700x28 Stelvio - the fastest of the bunch & ride great, to my pea-brain they seem similar to a Roly-Poly. I only have a couple hundred miles on these so the jury is still out

Steamroller, 700x30 Marathon Slicks - these have been good allround tires, fast and plush. The tread is thinner than the regular Marathon so they are not as flat resistant

Trek, 700x32 Marathon - heavy duty, wear like iron, not bad speed wise (just don't expect to run them at your next criterium ;-))

I commute almost every day, and at 6:00 am I'm really not paying much attention to roads debris, and on the bikes with fenders I can't brush the tires anyways. The grand tally of air leak experiences since swapping over to the Schwalbes; one pinch flat (hit a pot hole at 40 mph on the Sierra Century) that caused a slow leak, a glass shard in the tread and a goat-head thorn in the side wall in the Marathon Slicks and one metal shard in the Marathons on the Trek (not surprising since I ride the bike through the machine shop at work). That shard caused a very, very slow leak, ten strokes with the pump were enough to get me home.

Now, for some people 4 flats in 6 or 7 months of commuting may be an unacceptable amount of flats, for me that's as close to trouble free as I could ever hope to get. The best thing is that they weren't instant loss of air type flats, they were the really slow leak, give lots of warning type of flats.

Another thing I have noticed about Schwalbe tires is that they wear like iron. It takes several hundred miles before the mold flashing wears off. I've heard stories of Schwalbe tires lasting 7, 8 9,000 miles or more, I'm beginning to believe that kind of mileage is possible.

The down side? These are not tires for the weight weenies, although the Stelvio's are a respectable 355 grams in a wired bead (28's aren't availabe in folding), the Big Apples run around 850 (!) grams a tire. But drop the pressure down to about 30 psi and, man, are they plush. They also tend to be a little more expensive than most tires, especially when Nashbar has Pasela's on sale. Availability can be a problem. Wallingford carries them (and they're a fantastic shop to deal with), Rivendell can order them (they carry a 650B Schwalbe) and, of course, Schwalbe will be happy to sell you a set. I'd expect that, as the word gets out, they should become more available.

If I really wanted to eliminate flats completely, I'd look at some of the Marathon Plus tires, however I can't get past the ~1000 gram weight in the sizes I run.

Overall, I've been very pleased with Scwalbe tires and highly recommend them (Schwalbe tube are great too).