Thanks for the response, MTBM. And thanks for the luck, too. Maybe an example would be a better way of explaining what I`m trying to ask.
Welding is a small part of my job. I pretty much knew how to do it when I started in this position, and the other guys in the department also pretty much knew how to do it, but I found that we all learned a lot by watching each other, comparing notes, and offering suggestions. A few years ago, my employer paid for an instructor to come out to our plant and give a short seminar to us and that really worked wonders. He talked for a while, watched us all wled in different situations, made suggestions, and repeated the cycle. What a difference! Even though we work together and self coach each other, none of us were really experts at it and a few hours of attention from somebody who really knew what he was doing taught us more than we had managed to teach ourselves in the years before that, which was even more than I ever managed to figure out on my own.
But does that relate to bicycling? I don`t have other riders in my social circle, don`t go on group rides or to big events, and that isn`t likely to change since my work schedule is out of whack from the rest of the world (also prefer doing most things by myself). I`m just wondering if a few hours with a coach, or even a more experienced rider, would likely have me slapping myself on the forehead and wondering why I had been doing this or that diferently all along. I won`t turn down any training advise, but what I`m mostly looking for is the mechanics of pedaling and handling and shifting- the training stuff on the UMCA page seems like plenty for my purposes and between the nutrition/hydration threads here and my own experimentation I think I can cover that aspect sufficiently. Does it sound like I`m barking up the wrong tree anywhere?