In 2003 I moved from Missoula to Bozeman, MT to attend college. It was that winter that I decided that I should get serious about bike racing. I bought the “Mountain Bikers Training Bible”, borrowed a trainer and set out to get fast. That winter it wasn’t uncommon for me to long four hour rides on the trainer. I just didn’t know any better. That mind-numbing work paid off though and I got the results that year to move from expert to semi-pro and then from semi-pro to professional. That trend of long trainer rides and bundling up with every article of clothing I owned to ride outside in the Bozeman winter continued until I graduated in December of 2006 and promptly moved to Tucson, Arizona. Ever since then I have split my time between Tucson in the winter and Durango, CO in the summer. I get the 70 degree temperatures of Tucson in the winter and the 80 degree temperatures of Durango in the summer and get to work on my tan year-round. Not a bad life. It was my second season of mountain bike racing. I didn’t know much more than what the older guys I traveled to the races told me. I knew that I should carry a tube, pump, and multi-tool with me when I raced so I had my tube and tool in a seatbag and a big pump clipped onto my bike. That is until I got a package in the mail from my uncle with a Genuine Innovations CO2 inflator. (You might be able to help me out with the name of the product. It was probably around 2001, the air chuck was plactic with a trigger to release the CO2, the nozzle was anodized blue, and it had a neon yellow container that the CO2 sat in). It was awesome. Having the ability to inflate a tire in a matter of seconds instead of all that tedious pumping with a hand pump was going to revolutionize the way I raced. And what was extra cool about it was that it had a yellow base that screwed onto the air chuck so you could buy those cheap threadless cartridges at Kmart that were made for BB guns. So being a young kid who survived on a meager allowance that’s exactly what I did. I was so enamored with the thought of inflating a tire in a matter of seconds that it never occurred to me that there might be a limit to the amount of air in those small CO2 cartridges. So, things being the way they are, after having never flatted in a race, the first race after I got my new CO2 inflator I flatted. “Not a problem,” I said to myself. “I’ll have this tire changed and inflated in a minute with my new CO2.” I got the wheel off the bike, pulled out the old tube, shoved in the new one, and with my hands shaking in anticipation of the power of my new inflator, pressed the air chuck onto my valve stem and pulled the trigger. After a brief but awesome rush of freezing cold air there was silence and my tire sat there, half inflated. I had emptied my cartridge and all it got me was a lousy few P.S.I into my tire and I had no other options. I sat on the side of the trail, my ego deflated just like my tire. Finally, a good samaritan tossed me a hand pumped and I got my tire up and running and finished the race. I learned some valuable lessons that day. Some may have walked away from CO2’s forever, favoring the good-old-fashioned hand pump. Me, I went the other way. I marched into the bike shop and bought the biggest canister of CO2 that I could find, which happened to be a “Big Air,” and haven’t done a race without one since. In fact, when I’m packing up to head to a race, I always run through a mental checklist of the four most important items to bring: Helmet, shoes, tube, and Big Air.