I’m in the slow and frustrating process of trying to add a few more miles back into my typical bike ride. I probably complain about this all of the time: this or that doesn’t allow for as much time in the saddle as I’d like.

Life is really hard, right?

This spring and summer my time has been split between triathlon training and travel and other worthwhile pursuits, but that takes its own sort of toll on a guy with already shaky form. So it was that I set out today to add a few more miles than the small amount of miles I’ve been doing recently. And I cracked nicely, right about here:

A friend, and fellow rider, sent me this article and suggested I not worry about it so much.

“I would distinguish ‘easy’ from ‘slow.’ Easy doesn’t mean always going slow, but going at a pace that’s comfortable.”

Indeed, what I consider slow is twice as fast as my girlfriend would go—whereas Fabian Cancellara, out for a casual spin, would drop me as if I were doing a track stand. Novices and unenlightened amateurs see good riders going fast without realizing they might also be going easy—hence the perception that you must ride strenuously to be good.

“Quality training is when you go fast compared to the effort you feel like you’re making,” Saifer explained to me. “If it feels mellow but you’re actually going pretty quick, that’s great. But if you start out hammering, and then you find you’re tired for the rest of the ride, it’s not benefiting you. Those are junk miles.”

Junk miles was what I found today, there was a great deal of hanging on, and hoping the county had flattened a few of the hills I’d chosen for myself.

They had not.

But, I told myself, the next time I add five more miles to the total, it won’t be as bad as this. We’ll see.

Things to read … because reading helps us all see. We’ll start with the journalism stuff.

Attacked on the job: A Post-Dispatch photographer’s tale

The growing pay gap between journalism and public relations

Over 4,000 BuzzFeed Posts Have Completely Disappeared

Teaching the Digital Media Revolution Without Disregarding the Past

It’s a true fact!!! People who edit things no longer neeeded

That last one I’m passing out in class this fall.

I’m pretty sure there’s no way we make it to a point where the next revelation in this huge story is a good revelation. It all just seems more shameful at every unfortunate turn. Local VA finds another 1,146 unread patient images:

A review of the imaging system at the Central Alabama Veterans Health Care System prompted by 900 lost X-rays revealed there were an additional 1,146 unread patient exams going back to 2011.

According to a statement from CAVHCS, they conducted a “broader review” of the imaging system but didn’t specify what the review involved. CAVHCS generated a report dating back to 2001, when the imaging software was installed, and didn’t find any unread exams from before 2009.

Birmingham one of three to submit bid for 2021 World Games:

The Magic City has submitted a bid to host the eleventh edition of the World Games in 2021.

Birmingham had until the end of July to place a bid to host the games and it was announced Monday that the city made the cut for the final three bidding municipalities. The games will feature more than 30 sports like Tug of War, Sumo and Water Ski, according to a release.

Not quite the Olympics that former mayor (and current guest of the federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky — until 2023) Larry Langford had hoped for, but it is something.

Childhood cancer survivors going to Rangers vs Rays baseball game:

That picture was in the June 8 edition of The Birmingham News and caught the eye of Susannah Higgins Moreland. Moreland read about the boys’ mothers meeting in a waiting room at Children’s of Alabama when the boys were toddlers and diagnosed with ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukemia).

According to Children’s of Alabama, every year 150 Alabama children are diagnosed with cancer.

“It’s a life-changing diagnosis that is devastating to the family and is the first step of a grueling treatment journey,” said Kathy Bowers with Children’s of Alabama.

During that journey, the boys grew to become close friends and each others biggest fans on the baseball diamond.

Some recovery. Study: New jobs pay 23% less than those lost during the Great Recession:

The results sync with those of the National Employment Law Project which finds that during the recovery (measured from February 2010 to February 2014), employment gains have been concentrated in lower-wage industries.

This is an amazing feature, just over a decade old, on Robin Williams, the cyclist. Robin Williams: “I’m Lucky to Have Bikes in My Life”:

He also admires how the racers mirror his own go-for-broke style. “These guys spend everything they have, day after day,” he says. A typical Williams stand-up performance is nearly 2 hours long, and reviews of last summer’s comedy tour universally marveled at the entertainer’s exhaustive drive. Biking, Williams, says, helps sustain that drive. The sport became especially important to him as a substitute for a darker passion; in the 1980s, just before seriously taking up the sport, Williams struggled with a well-publicized drug habit.

An important angle to the sad Williams story. Suicide contagion and social media: The dangers of sharing ‘Genie, you’re free’:

More than 270,000 people have shared the tweet, which means that, per the analytics site Topsy, as many as 69 million people have seen it.

The problem? It violates well-established public health standards for how we talk about suicide.

That’s the first place I’ve seen this mentioned. It should be discussed more.