George

Sounds like your doing pretty good Chuck. Keep going

revchuck 

I did the blood pressure cuff inflator thingy yesterday at PT. They inflated it until my eyes crossed, then backed off a little. Then they had me do the same exercises I'd been doing, except they doubled the reps with a minute RBI in the middle. That took some effort, but I got through it just like hard intervals.

Started putting the new frameset together today. When it came time to put the BB30 bearings in the bottom bracket, I discovered there was only one retaining clip in the package instead of the required two. I figured it was time for a nap, so I went home, will continue the build on Monday.

IBOHUNT

Good to read your progression.

Racer Ex 

Finally have a day with "good" air quality. Then my phone just popped up an alert about a growing fire 25 miles south.

Wind's blowing from the south.

Think I'll go ride now.

We have had a fire in the surrounding area or smoke from fires further away virtually every day for the last month and change.

valygrl

OK for the folks who have that Giro Aerohead TT helmet - or any non-ventilated/full eye-sheild helmet - what do you do to keep sweat from dripping in your eyes? Favorite sweat band? Has to be super low provile b/c the helmet doesn't have any extra room.

thanks.

Heathpack 

No sweat band for me and I can't say I have ever had sweat drip into my eyes. I might be racing in cooler temps for the most part, since our TTs tend to have start times before 9:30am.

Once I had a very distracting/itchy drop of sweat sitting on one cheek. Just so desperately wanted to scratch that one but couldn't because of the visor.

However I've otherwise never had a problem. The helmet is not entirely unvented, so maybe there's enough airflow for me.

Hermes

This book caught my eye in a Washington Post story. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

It should be interesting.

IBOHUNT

Vaseline above my eyebrows to direct the sweat down to my cheeks.

sarals 

I don't sweat, I perspire.



(A lot!)

Hermes

In other news, a racing friend in my age group was notified by UCI that his team sprint team had been awarded the gold medal in Masters Track Worlds from last year. They came in second. One of the racers on the team that won, was disqualified - Robert Gerard Louis of France 68 years old. This is his second doping violation and he received an 8 year suspension. He tested positive to anabolic steroids.

Louis is also the 500 meter WR holder. I do not believe that they have stripped him of the record...yet.

Drugs continue to ruin sports and athletes. They diminish the value of success and one wonders if one even wants to compete against doped athletes or compete at all because if one wins, there is always a cloud that maybe just maybe, you were doped or cheated in some way. If I would have beat his record, many would have said, yeah right.

Racer Ex 

I would have

When you have guys over 50 going faster than they did when they were 20 you just shake your head. I have zero doubt that there are people doing it right but after this many years (and having raced against a long list of "positives") in the sport my doper radar is pretty fine tuned. Drug use is still out there a bunch for sure.

I've had the accusations thrown my way a few times, and I've never been tested since I started racing USCF (now USAC) in 2004. Happy to fill your water bottle anytime, or have you come check out my medicine cabinet. Test away. But I know guys who passed some tests who were later caught out of competition, so take that testing for what it's worth.

I can understand why some folks might head over to the anti aging clinic. Getting old sucks. And I think holding 68 year old guys to an Olympic competition standard is silly. But if you sign up to compete, them is the rules.

Racer Ex 

Speaking of the awesomeness of steroids:

53-year-old amateur rider caught using hidden motor at Italian race | Cyclingnews.com

Guy got caught by a heat gun. Pretty sure somewhere someone is looking at how to build a small water jacket for cooling.

Hermes

He should just race motorcycles.

IBOHUNT

Well; I'm faster at 58 than I was at 20 on a bicycle. Probably because I wasn't on a bike as an adult until I turned 52.

You can get piezo coolers for motors. Run off electricity so your Di2 battery may not last as long...

Cleave

Done.

Building a house is starting to get tiresome. I spent the last 20 years of my career designing nothing. Now I'm having to do detail layouts of bathrooms, design floating steel stairs, design the installation of balcony handrails, etc.

Let's just say that the residential house construction industry is a lot different that the aerospace industry. I have three sets of drawings (architectural, structural engineering, and pre-fab wall installation) and I still can't figure out how they built the house so far.

Here's what it looks like from the front from two different angles:

https://goo.gl/photos/CHBitN66cofxzP4Z7
https://goo.gl/photos/9CDRJwru6FXCwrkd7

Maybe we'll be in it by mid-October 2017. (I typed the year on purpose. )

sarals 

That's a cool looking house, @Cleave. Angular and interesting. Where is it being built?

Cleave

Right next door to where we currently live.

Racer Ex 

Must be some interesting inner dialog. " Can you believe what those jerks next door did...."

I did two giant remodels (I think you saw our SoCal end product). So many details to work out. On one hand you don't have to work around an existing structure, on the other you don't have an existing structure to work from.

sarals 

I need a runaway bulldozer to come down my street....

Cleave

What will be weird is I am assuming the buyers will know that we are the sellers. Hopefully our current house won't start crumbling around them after we sell it.

The number of details are immense. What is astounding is that so many are left until they actually do it. For instance, similar to my aerospace life, I asked my general contractor to get all of the "systems" sub contractors to come over for a meeting before they started doing their worked. I wanted them to lay out on the walls and ceiling where they were going to put their stuff and who had priority. End of the story is that the fire sprinkler people are here today doing their second rework of pipes because of interference with electrical and HVAC. Of course this is a week after the fire department came by and signed off on their inspection of the system. Doh!

Hermes

When I started my electrical engineering career, I worked for an architectural engineering firm that designed electric power plants. A steam electric generating station is mostly equipment connected by pipes and wires. However, some of the pipes are custom made at a factory and believe it or not, some of the wires are custom made at a factory. When the custom made stuff collides in the field, we caught a lot of hell from the constructor and the fixes always expensive and schedule delaying.

We developed more standard plants but utilities liked to have it like the way they did other units in their system. So we used drawings from other projects and of course, having done design before for a client was a competitive advantage for getting new business from them.

Power plants were never really completed but just changed to a different group in the company after they went commercial and the retrofit work started.

As a rookie project engineer, I was in charge of retrofit work for a particular client while the more experienced engineers worked on new projects.

I suspect building airplanes is similar other than as a passenger, we hope that the retrofit punchiest is pretty small.

Heathpack 

Things go so much more smoothly when you're capable of planning 25 steps ahead. But so many people throw their hands up when asked to think just one or two steps ahead. They just do step one and see what happens and then organize step two and so on. Omg, I'd make $72 per year if I did that. Drives me a little crazy when people are like that.

Cleave

That's part of my problem with this. Part of my career was as a project manager. I also know from my Theory of Constraints training that infinitesimally detailing out a schedule doesn't work either and I can't expect my general contractor or subs to understand critical chain planning so I'm fudging a reasonable Gantt chart on MS Project and hoping that helps get us to the finish without exorbitant delays. Yes, I know, hope isn't a strategy.

valygrl

Anyone doing the Ebbets Pass Century next weekend? (@RacerEx, @Heathpack, anyone else for NorCal)?

Heathpack 

Not I. I'm puny these days for anything longer than 20k.