This is a pro-quality race face. That's from this year's Belgian National Championships. Baguet (left) ends up winning a very close photo-finish.

Speaking of which, I haven't blogged my glorious experience at the Norm Lowe Memorial Road Race this weekend, a serious piece of riding with a mean-spirited set of rolling hills in the course. For me, a victory consisted of making it home with the pack. Well, I made it to the last lap, when it all went crappy. I finished below my customary mid-pack level, though not by much (35/65 starters), and sucked wind in what was supposed to be an A race for me.

But I console myself with a tiny thought: I'm not built for the hills. The next race is not hilly, it's a flat 30-minute criterium, the Yaletown Grand Prix. My bunch starts at 2:15 pm on Canada Day. I will do well here. Well, I'd better.

At least The Good Thing is, so far, so good. Pictures shortly.

So, The Lovely One and I were discussing the used New Beetle we will soon be acquiring, and we agreed on the perfect name for the new car: The Good Thing.

This is, of course, a very silly joke, and the usual prize (box of Timbits, to be delivered at my convenience within Greater Vancouver) will be awarded to the first respondent who can identify the reference.

You get two hints: I'm pretty sure Google will not help, and it's not a Martha Stewart reference.

Answers to the usual place.

Wednesday evening I saw a lady about a car, and some hours later, have tentatively contracted to buy it on The Lovely One's behalf.

So, the next time you see me, it should be rolling in The Lovely One's pretty black 1998 Volkswagen New Beetle. That's what VW calls them, leading to oxymoronic statements like "I just bought a used New Beetle."

If you're wondering, the upside of Beetles is that they're incredibly cute, reasonably practical, very well appointed for a vehicle that is nominally at the low end of the car ladder, and they feel good, like tiny German cars. It feels like a substantial step up in amenities from my Tercel. The downside is that they're ludicrously cute (when driving it, I will eternally look like a guy driving his wife's car), the design basically sacrifices cargo space to cuteness (underneath, a Beetle is a Golf is a Jetta is an Audi A3; the difference is mostly bodywork), the sightlines are said to be less than ideal, and the reliability is merely average. It's not really a sports car, though it seems to corner happily.

I am happy with the car we got, though. It has no major problems, unlike some of the things we saw. It's not a VW Cabrio, which was the other car on our list (my objection? The Cabrio is up there with the best, but there's no way to escape the fact that convertibles are structurally compromised cars, and that shows up in their ride and noise levels). But I keep thinking of the 1.8 Turbo one that got away before we could looka t it...

What would I have bought in this price range? BMW 535, or found a Lexus SC and bargained until the seller came down to my level. The SC300 and SC400 are very pretty, very luxurious coupes with reasonable performance built by Toyota. My experiences with the Tercel (now for sale, dontcha know, and I've just become a motivated seller...) has made me feel considerable goodwill towards its makers.

Gloriously, a completely non-political posting! It's partly personal, partly cycling-related, all the good things. There's even some car ads, just for a change.

Item the First: I'm selling Old Faithful, the eternal Tercel. It's a 1992, it's an automatic 4dr sedan, it's blue, it's Aircared until 2007, and it's cheap: $3000, and trust me, you can negotiate me off that price with ease. The downsides are that it has 300,000 km, it burns oil, and it has some rumply sheetmetal. I have no doubts that the car will happily continue running as long as the new owner adds 1l oil per tank of gas.

I'm also selling the faithful iMac, a 350 MHz OS9-running machine that is a serviceable e-mail/web station. Pretty, simple, and I'll throw in an external USB CD-Burner. $300... but for you, $200 firm. Just because I like you.

Item the Second: I was sick all week, ranging from a little bit sick to as sick as a dog. But it was all sick and weak. Saturday was near enough the worst day of all. I just sat around the house and lamented my headache, sniffles, and weakness.

Sunday morning I felt a lot better, so I got up early and did the Westside Classic, a gloriously hilly race suffer-fest which made me feel good to be alive, even as I stomped my way to an ignoble 41st-place finish. Oh well, my teammate Tom won our race. I am really looking forward to this race next year, as the course is lots of fun. Up, down, lots of pain.

Speaking of genetic freaks, here's your pre-Tour de France Lance-o-rama:

The NY Times talks about his subtle physiological advantages. Thanks for the pointer, Eric.

David Coyle, author of another Lance bio, gives a neat interview which makes his book sound pretty good, and which is well worth the read.

Here's my editorial on bike racing. First: a lot of attention is paid to Lance, without realizing that road racing is a pretty diverse affair, and there are a ton of well-contested events which don't get air over here simply because there's no Lance-factor. Did you know that Lance's team Discovery actually managed to get its Giro d'Italia rider, Paolo Savodelli, onto the top step of the podium? He rode a very, very smart race, and just took the win. Heck, he even had a Vancouver Island boy riding for him, converted mountain biker Ryder Hesjedal, not to mention perennial Canadian pro Michael Barry.

But I know, it's Lance and the Tour you want to hear about. Here's my poorly informed take: I think Mr. Armstrong wants to win this year just as badly as ever, and is well trained. But do you know why riders Lance's age almost never win grand tours, and especially the Tour de France? Recovery.

Recovery is a funny thing. Grand Tours basically don't allow enough time for it, so you just don't see riders at their best as the race grinds on. The scary thing is that recovery is one of the things that goes on a cyclist as they hit their mid-30s. A GC rider like Lance will probably have the same kind of power numbers as last year, and should look just fine in the early stages, but may suddenly have one or three very bad days in the second half of the Tour, and that's how you lose the race. It's exactly how Miguel Indurain, 5-time winner of the Tour de France, lost on his attempt at number six.

The counterpoint is that Armstrong does fewer racing days per year than any previous 5-time winner of the Tour, and he took a year and a bit off in the middle of his career to, you know, get cured of cancer. Those two things might be just enough to have extended his career a few years. Pro racing is so hard on the body that it's quite interesting how often a rider can come off of a year-odd mid-career setback (usually due to injuries), and pick up even stronger than before, as if their body was responding to a much-needed bit of recovery.

Recovery, at a much different level, is also what so many amateur racers overlook. Recovery is where actual strength-building occurs, as your body responds to the destructive effects of a workout by trying to add more muscle and exercise capacity to compensate for the strong effort. If you don't focus on recovery in your workout program, the workouts will make you weaker, not stronger.

Regarding the fiasco-race that was the United States Grand Prix? Just stupid. It was pretty much the worst possible outcome, and could be enough to ruin what is a great stop on the F1 calendar. My take? You can't race at Indy if your tires are going to delaminate. But isn't it kind of Michelin's job to get that right? The track was the same as it always was. Bridgestone managed to build a safe tire. If Michelin cocked it up (and the linked article notes that the teams generally have access to two tire compounds, but Michelin seems to have gotten them both wrong), then I think I agree, at first blush, with the FIA's call: if you get to the race and your tire supplier warns you that you can't go flat-out through the fast turn, well, sucks to be you, and you have to race at reduced speed through the fast turn, but you have to race. It's not Bridgestone's fault your tires suck, and it's not Ferrari's fault your tires suck.

And finally, you are all invited to watch me make an utter fool of myself at the Yaletown Grand Prix, starting at 1415h on Canada Day. My personal guarantee to you: I will not boycott this race due to unsafe tires.

On the weekend, I did two races, because I like extra pain.

The Brockton Criterium in Stanley Park was my Saturday ride: I expected it to hurt, and it hurt. A Cat 3/4 crit on a technical course, in the rain. Me no like. I managed to hang in for about 30 minutes of a 40 minute race, then pulled up after getting dropped and experiencing a minor mechanical. Suck Level 5, because there were Cat 3s involved.

Saturday was the glorious Atomic Road Race, a serious 60km in Abbotsford, with lots of short, unpleasant climbs. Oh, it hurt.

Sometimes, I don't even realize how a race has gone until I see the results. Our race had 73 starters. I suffered mightily for the entire race. I eventually got dropped with about 5 km to go, tried to chase back to the group, threw up on myself, and dragged myself over the line minutes behind.

I finished 32nd. That's not a good place, but strong riders whom I respect finished behind me. Over half the field finished behind me. Sometimes you just don't realize how selective a race has been until you figure out that most of the riders just didn't make it. Let's call this one Suck 6, because I threw up, bobbled on a climb, and bumped into and frightened a teammate, but I didn't get caught in a crash, and I beat half the field.

And now I'm home sick. Bike racing is mental.

Yes, I know. No matter how much I tell you that the Spring Classics are beautiful, no matter how much I tell you that the Giro D'Italia and Vuelta Espana are very important races, no matter how much I suggest that the ProTour really has changed pro cycling, you still really just want to hear about Lance and the Tour de France.

Well, the big news today is that Lance faced what might be called his first serious test of the season, a time trial in the Dauphine Libere, an eight-day race which Lance Armstrong has regularly used as a tune-up for his Tour assaults. He has won it twice, in 2002 and 2003.

The time trial is vitally important because in the Tour de France, the winners make up time on the rest of the field mainly in the time trials (there are usually two major ones) and in the mountain stages. The Dauphine TT comes a few weeks before the start of the Tour de France, and it is well contested, and is therefore a useful test of Armstrong's relative strength.

The result today? Third place in the TT, which is good, and maybe even good enough.

For my part, my own racing is also approaching benchmark levels. Yesterday I rode from New Westminster to UBC. In New West, I passed a courier van in traffic. We kept going back and forth for some time; the driver was clearly making an effort to stay right at the speed limit, as evidenced by the one time when I started slowly passing him as we paralleled each other on Marine.

He finally got away, though. I saw him get ahead of me as he exited to the Arthur Laing Bridge.

In other words, I'm as fast as a car in rush hour traffic. Next goal: be faster.

Personally, I pray for a better nickname. pMacs? IMacs? Er, that's taken...IntelliMacs?

Looks like it's going to be MacIntel.

For those of you don't understand my inside jokes, an explanation: yesterday Apple dropped the (widely-predicted) bombshell that starting sometime in 2006, new Macs will ship with Intel CPUs inside instead of PowerPC chips.

On one hand, that's stunning news with not a few ramifications. From a performance perspective, Apple says it will be all to the good, and I have to accept that's true, given CPU speed progress on PPC and Intel chips lately. I'm personally a little sad because I just bought a new (iBook G4; PowerPC of course) laptop, but I would have been unlikely to wait an entire year for a new machine.

On the other hand, Apple has been here before, having done both a major OS change (OS 9 to OS X) and another major CPU change (Motorola 68k to IBM* PowerPC). It is painful, but will probably be less painful this time.

I for one, welcome our new Intel-based overlords. Once I can afford one. Of course the real question is how Apple will prevent Mac OS X from running on just any Intel-based computer. It may get a little tricky here.

*IBM created the PowerPC chip family out of their POWER architecture, but when Apple first signed on, an entity known as the AIM Alliance ("Apple-IBM-Motorola") was responsible for the chips, and indeed Motorola was a prime source of development and production for PowerPC CPUs. IBM is now selling PPC-based chips to Microsoft and Nintendo for their upcoming video game consoles (and for the current Nintendo GameCube), Motorola has spun off its chip division as Freescale, and the AIM Alliance is no more.

Robert Cringely, in his latest column, proposes an idea for countering phishing, the type of fraud that sends those fake PayPal, eBay, credit card, and bank requests to "update" your account data so the bad guys can steal it.

His proposal? Poison the incoming data. If everyone responds, but responds with fake data, the few respondents who gullibly enter real data will be lost in a sea of crap.

Now, one must regard Cringely with a grain of salt, because he often comes up with clever concepts that don't quite work, or ideas that are more high-concept than high-quality. But still.

I mean, the poetic justice of it!

At long last, a shot of The Whip. In its latest iteration, it has a bottle cage and I have flipped the stem.

I'll actually be there a little early tonight, probably around 6. All the cool kids are going, you should too.

Heather, Karl?