As the mountain bike season slowly comes to an end, I decided to give my bike a final round of maintenance before the winter break. The old tyres had already seen plenty of kilometres and a fair share of rocks, roots and questionable line choices, so replacing them seemed like a sensible idea. I ordered a fresh Schwalbe Magic Mary for the front and a Schwalbe Big Betty for the rear, fully expecting to spend half an hour in the workshop and then move on to more interesting things.

As usual, reality had other plans.

The old tyres came off the rims without much resistance. Whenever that happens, experience should tell me to become suspicious immediately, because bike maintenance seems to follow some sort of cosmic balancing law. If one step goes unusually well, another step will compensate for it sooner or later.

In this case, the compensation arrived the moment I tried to mount the new tyres.

The first side of each tyre went onto the rim reasonably well and gave me hope that the entire process would be straightforward. Unfortunately, that hope disappeared as soon as I started working on the second bead. The final section simply refused to cooperate. No matter how carefully I pushed the tyre into the centre channel of the rim, no matter how many times I worked my way around the wheel, there was always that stubborn last section that remained exactly where it was.

At first I approached the problem with patience and proper technique. Then I added tyre levers. A bit later I added stronger tyre levers. Towards the end I started adding vocabulary that would probably not be considered suitable for a family-oriented workshop environment.

The tyres remained completely unimpressed.

For a while it stopped feeling like a maintenance task and started feeling more like a competition. I would gain a few centimetres, the tyre would steal them back. I would think I was finally winning, only to discover that another section had jumped back off the rim. Somewhere during that process I became convinced that Schwalbe’s engineers occasionally sit together and ask themselves how much suffering a mountain biker can endure before questioning all of their life decisions.

Eventually, though, persistence won. The tyres were mounted, tubes were inside, air stayed where it was supposed to stay, and both wheels looked ready for action. Sweaty, slightly exhausted and feeling far too proud about successfully installing two circles of rubber, I considered the job finished.

That was my second mistake.

While reinstalling the wheel, I somehow managed to damage the thread of the through axle.

To this day, I am not entirely sure how I achieved that: even used a torque wrench. Riders frequently destroy components while charging through rock gardens or casing jumps. I managed to do it while standing perfectly still in my workshop. It was one of those moments where you stop, stare at the bike for a few seconds and wonder whether you really saw what just happened.

A quick inspection confirmed that the axle was not going to recover from this experience. What had originally been a simple tyre change had suddenly turned into a tyre change plus an unplanned parts order.

The most frustrating part was that the bike looked completely ready to ride. The new tyres were mounted, everything was clean, and the bike was standing there as if nothing had happened. Except for one small but essential detail: without a functioning through axle, it wasn’t going anywhere.

After a few days the replacement arrived, and thankfully the installation was far less dramatic than the tyres had been. The new axle threaded in smoothly, the wheel sat exactly where it should, and for the first time during the entire project I was able to tighten something without feeling like I was involved in a wrestling match.

The result was worth the effort. The bike now feels ready for the next ride, with fresh rubber, a fresh axle and no suspicious noises coming from anywhere.

Which is fortunate, because timing matters.

Here in the mountains, biking isn’t allowed from November until the beginning of March, which means the season is already entering its final phase. Naturally I chose this exact moment to spend an evening fighting tyres and accidentally creating additional repair work for myself.

Still, looking back, that is probably just part of mountain biking. Sometimes you spend a perfect day flowing down trails and everything works exactly as intended. Other times a maintenance job that should take thirty minutes evolves into a multi-stage workshop adventure involving tyre levers, frustration, replacement parts and a surprising amount of swearing.

In the end, everything works again, the bike is ready, and the season can finish on a positive note.

Now all I need is enough good weather to actually enjoy those new tyres before winter arrives.