Considering how sore I was Monday morning, I was a little surprised how good my legs felt today. They felt much better, although I still had some lingering lung issues. As often happens when I ride hard under very hot and dry conditions, every time I would take a really deep breath, my lungs would hurt and I would want to cough. By the end of the ride, though, even that seemed to have disappeared.
Trying to ignore the blatantly obvious lesson from last weekend, I have still not broken down and dismantled my shifters. One reason, of course, is that once I take them apart, it will likely be a few days before I can get all of the necessary parts for a proper rebuild, which means I won't be able to ride the bike for a while. I could always go ahead and order everything ahead of time, and in fact that's what I will probably do. In the meantime, though, I'll do what I did last night, which was to spray liberal amounts of Triflo into the blasted thing.
So this morning I started out with that lovely Triflo smell (amyl acetate, I think, aka "banana oil") wafting from my handlebars and little drips of it occasionally appearing on my fingers as it continually oozed out from the underside of the shifters. Anyway, they were working well enough. The smell of Triflo always reminds me of my graduate school days when I used a lot of amyl acetate to dissolve the plastic that I used to coat tiny electron microscope grids so I could get the bacteriophage DNA to stretch out nicely on them. I still miss being in the lab.
The long Tuesday training ride was missing a few of the usual workhorses today, and as a result the pace was rather civilized. Fast, to be sure, but under control. Matt C. flatted on the way out and Robin and I stopped to assist so the group wouldn't have to stop. Robin got it fixed pretty fast and we rode moderate paceline until we met the group just as they were getting going after the turnaround. Although I was still being cautious, I was pleased that my legs seemed to have recovered quite a bit from last weekend's punishment, and I was having no problem taking my pulls as the group motored along at 26-27 mph. There was a near-disaster this morning as the group made the swing down the levee at "the dip" where the bike path drops down to street level to bypass some pipes. Somebody must have eased up suddenly as the line went through a little "S" curve and the next thing I knew there was one rider flying down the levee on the grass. Luckily, he neither hit any immovable objects nor slid out. This all happened near the back of the group and the riders up front never knew about it so they just kept pounding back up the levee. The rest of us eased up for a moment to see what had happened, but when I saw the gap opening ahead I told Matt "looks like the statute of limitations has already run out on this one." We had to chase pretty hard to close that gap, and I don't think the rider who did the little "Lance Armstrong" thing down the levee ever regained contact.
Back at work we interviewed five people yesterday for an editor position we currently have open. Three were good, one was OK and one was kind of a dud. IMHO, the position is somewhat mis-titled, as this person will likely be doing a lot of other stuff and not a whole lot of what one would normally think a "senior editor" would do. We've got another whole batch of resumes to sift through and another round of interviews to schedule before we narrow it down to three or four to call back for more in-depth interviews. This is the first time I've ever had to interview people who have degrees in things like English and Journalism. The really interesting thing about it is how many of them had glaring grammatical errors in their cover letters. One would have to take that as a bad sign for a position with a title containing the word "editor," right? I have threatened to ask each of them to spell Ophthalmology just for kicks.
Yes, yes, I know I'm throwing stones from a glass house, but I never claimed to be an English major!
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