I admit that title may be a bit of clickbait, but bear with me.
The 2018 CX season was a memorable one. It was a notoriously wet autumn and I remember nearly every race weekend being a complete slop fest. Never-ending clean up, bearing maintenance, kit & shoes caked with mud, soaking in buckets through Monday. Gosh, that part of it really sucked.
One thing I am often reminded of is how much time I spent swapping out tubeless tire after tubeless tire to meet the ever-changing course conditions. I was working at a bike shop at the time and you could often find me there on Friday evening with my bikes in the stand and tubeless sealant all over the place. Depending on the day, I’d be swapping sets of muds with intermediates, or vice versa. I was still pretty new to the sport so I was excited about this stuff, but looking back on it, I really wasted a ton of time for marginal gains.
The worst part of it all was how many failed tubeless setups I dealt with over the years. As a heavier rider (often over 170lbs) I did not have a great track record with burped tubeless tires. There are just too many variables to contend with when running tubeless setups and when you’re trying to race on a budget, you’re often using older wheelsets and worn out tires which add up to inconsistencies with how well the tire and rim mate together.
Some tires and rims work together really well and you rarely have to worry about such things. But, some tires and rims just don’t seal up well enough to hold a low-pressure tubeless CX tire. Not all are created equal.
One season I decided to run latex tubes in my pit bike because I was tired of doing tubeless setups on two bikes. I recall burping the tires on my main bike during the first race, so I swapped to my pit bike and ended up riding that bike for the rest of the season. I suffered zero issues running latex tubes during cx races. Week after week I just settled on the pit bike because I began to trust that tires weren’t going to burp off the rim.
Now, I really only used this bike during cx races. I didn't train on it. I didn’t ride it on gravel, or road, or trails. It only saw action during the gentle caress of the mid-atlantic grass crit scene. In my experience, most CX courses here just don’t provide a ton of opportunity to puncture a tire, so I’m less worried about flats in that regard.
Eventually I would tamper my expectations with bike racing. I stopped taking it SO seriously, and just found a nice set of tubeless Grifos and left them on for the foreseeable future. It also seemed to stop raining as much during future seasons which, for better or worse, eliminated the game of tire tread musical chairs.
A few seasons later, I experimented with 38mm tires and ran tubes in my pit bike for quite a while. No matter what tires I used, I never flatted with my inner tubes. Not once. I even remember banging my rims on the sidewalks at Chimborazo so hard that I yelled to my teammate “Flat!” as I rode near the pit. That tire never went flat despite the rim smoshing.
I’m not saying tubes are better than tubeless, especially not with the modernization of tire liners and great tire/rim combinations. A few of us on the team run tubeless and I rarely, if ever, see an issue. But, the inner tube should not be dismissed. I still run inner tubes in my pit bike to this day. It’s just not worth setting up tubeless tires on a bike that gets so little use.
If you’re a cx racer on a budget with only one set of wheels, inner tubes can make race prep way easier. I've seen so many riders show up to a dry race with mud tires mounted up because they just didn't have the time to swap tubeless tires. Not everyone has an air compressor in their garage.
With tubes, you can swap tires in the parking lot in a matter of minutes without much trouble. You won’t make a mess. You don’t have to worry about dried up sealant. You don’t need an air compressor. It’s just a huge time saver and an inner tube failure feels like so much less of a let down without all the time invested in the setup.
Personally, I now run tubulars on my main bike, mostly because people seem to just give them away these days, but if I didn’t run tubs, I’d run tubes. After all, most tubulars have inner tubes inside anyway. Don’t give up on the humble inner tube!
Besides, you can’t make balloon animals out of tubeless sealant.
But, that's just like, my opinion, man.