tessellahedron

I carry CO2 and a spare tube to avoid getting stranded but once it's installed I have to turn around because another flat would leave me stuck.

I hear about people with better setups who can get numerous flats and keep riding, so I'm trying to figure out how to do that.

do they carry 10 tubes on each ride?

or would they somehow carry all the necessities to patch a tube? I have a glueless patch kit that does work, but it's useless on the side of the road because I usually can't find the hole. That's what happened this morning.

cheap frame pumps can't get my 32-630 (27") tires fully inflated, and partial inflation takes weeks of pumping. So I use CO2, but every time I've tried to release just a bit of CO2 to find a hole in an inner tube, it's ended up leaking and I've wasted a whole cylinder, in addition to not even finding the hole (no water to dunk it in). So now I only use CO2 to inflate good tubes.

carrying a ****** frame pump and soapy water in a spray bottle just to find holes in tubes seems crazy.

every time I've used a sealant like slime I've gotten a flat anyway and when I went to fix it had to deal with a gigantic mess inside the tire. I'm better off fixing double the flats with no mess, even if it means carrying a case of tubes.

I have those hard flexible plastic strips that go in the tire to shield the inner tube and thought about installing them. Of course that would be adding weight at the worst possible location on the bike. In the past I've gotten punctures right at the edges of the plastic strips.

I thought using gatorskin tires would be all I needed to do, and it does help tremendously, but I still get flats far too often.

So what do you do? End your ride at one flat? Contract a semi truck to follow you carrying a load of spare tubes?