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I have never doped, and, unlike many of my accusers, I have competed as an endurance athlete for 25 years with no spike in performance, passed more than 500 drug tests and never failed one.

- Lance Armstrong, June 13, 2012

Nice try but you are wrong.

In Tour, peak for sprinters is about 1800W (for sprints). Lance apparantly has a max power at VO2max of 600W, but more for sprints (non-oxygen). That is the power he can sustain for some time. Resting HR: 32bpm but average for the tour was something in the 56 or so.

source: http://lancearmstrong.com/

Hmm. When it comes to power produced on a bicycle, there's one obvious place to look...

http://www.lancearmstrong.com/faq.html points out that Lance produces around 250 watts during an endurance ride (2-4 hours). For sustainable travel, I think that we can comfortably state that most potential helicopter pilots will not be in better shape than Lance.

His burstable power is around 600W, but there's no point in being able to get yourself 30 meters up off the ground and then need to take a break for a minute...

I know they've changed the rules to make it harder for him to win his 6th straight.

First Greg Lemond, now Lance? Whatever shall the Europeans do?

Oh... and another thing... what the hell is the name of the thing that connects the crank arms? I just can't remember the f'en name for it.

"Tests revealed advanced testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and his brain"
http://lancearmstrong.com/about.htm

If you read either of his books, you can read all about the witch-hunt the French cycling authorities put him through, for over a year, without ever finding any evidence of his using illicit substances.

Take for example a 200-pound person riding your basic 40-pound cruiser bike at a nice easy cycling speed of 12 MPH. Let's compare the grade with the number of watts the cyclist must put out to maintain 12 MPH on that grade:

0% grade, 112 watts
1% grade, 171 watts
5% grade, 409 watts
10% grade, 704 watts
17% grade, 1108 watts

Just for comparison Lance Armstrong can put out 600 watts at VO2max and on a long ride averages 245-280 watts.

First off, you can see why he doesn't weight 200 pounds and ride a 40-pound cruiser bike with fat, soft tires . . .

But, regardless of what kind of bike you ride and what the gears are, you just simply have to put out a surprisingly lot more power to keep the same speed going up hill vs. on the flat.

This is accentuated if you try to stay in a big gear/slow cadence up the hill (or if your bike runs out of low gears, so that even in your lowest gear you have a slow cadence). As the book review mentions, keeping a fast cadence is one of the ways cyclists "trick" their bodies into being able to put out a lot of wattage for a very long time without becoming exhausted.

At low cadence, your muscles load up with lactic acid quickly and so start to feel tired quickly.

At a higher cadence your entire aerobic system takes on the job of putting out the watts. No one individual muscle is putting out a whole lot of force at one time, so no muscle gets overworked and overtired quickly.

Subjectively, if you climb a hill at low cadence, your legs are pushing very very hard and soon they feel more and more tired until finally they are so tired you just can't push the pedals around one more time.

If you climb the same hill at high cadence, your heart rate climbs, your breathing rate climbs (eventually, if grade/speed are high enough, reaching a limit you can't pass), but it feels like your entire body is getting thrown into action, not just your legs. Each rotation of the pedals at high cadence is relatively light, easy, and quick, so more muscles in your legs can be involved (not just the largest ones) and no one muscle gets worked to the point of exhaustion.

(Please read the book for the "real" explanation of the physiology of high vs. low cadence--but that's the best I can do on short notice.)

"A bicycle can't stand on its own because it's two tired . . . "

Imagine the US postal cycling team support car having stats in real time on all of the cyclist during the tour de france.

No need to imagine - Team USPS has been using heart rate monitors for years, not to mention being in constant radio contact with their director. All of the other teams do this, too.

Imagine the US postal cycling team support car having stats in real time on all of the cyclist during the tour de france.

No need to imagine - Team USPS has been using heart rate monitors for years, not to mention being in constant radio contact with their director. All of the other teams do this, too.

Imagine the US postal cycling team support car having stats in real time on all of the cyclist during the tour de france.

No need to imagine - Team USPS has been using heart rate monitors for years, not to mention being in constant radio contact with their director. All of the other teams do this, too.

I thought .COM was for commercial, not corporation.

So are you saying that, for example, Lance Armstrong should not be allowed to have lancearmstrong.com?

How about this guy? Freaky-low lactic acid production, high lactic-acid clearing, huge heart, VO2 Max (oxygen uptake to blood) more than twice the average person... And he beat cancer when he had about a 20% chance of living through it. Then he went and won the toughest race in the world. Five times. In a row.

These days I take out my stress with a different method of going Postal, by getting off my chair and hitting the road for a few dozen miles. The USPS has put a significant amount of money into sponsoring pro cycling and I think the efforts of Lance Armstrong, George Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer and team have gone a long way to boost moral and paint a more positive image of the Postal Service.

Kind of a bummer that Loki didn't redo the art and make it something more appropriate for today, such as Catching Up With Bin Laden, but I suppose being in a Ch. 11 pickle they didn't have the bucks to cover the time and logistics.