Lance Fall-Out: Reflections on the Pro Cycling Doping Scandal

A teacher friend who started a cycling club for the kids at his previous school tells me that as a result of the Lance Armstrong/US Postal doping scandal, two parents have pulled their children from the club and my friend is not sure it will continue at all next year.

Have people no sense of proportion?  By letting their children join a high-school level club did these parents think they were launched into a pro racing career?   A cycling club, where children would learn to ride safely and efficiently in a group, train properly and enjoy athletic accomplishment with their peers has nothing to do with the cheating and corruption at million-dollar commercial teams.  When Linford Christie was suspended for doping were kids pulled out of track and field clubs by their parents?   Did Mark McGwire’s steroid revelations end Little League baseball?  No.  Are professional sports rampant with cheating and corruption?  Yes.  The danger is that people rationalize them as more than the mere entertainment and spectacle they are and when the truth is finally out fans feel used as their loyalty has brought fortunes to people who maybe never were deserving of their support.

Lance Armstrong’s return from cancer to extraordinary athletic success on the road was an heroic story, resistible only by cynics.  He was admirable for his professional approach to the sport, his dedication to training, his control of a powerful, unified team.   For jingoistic Americans he was the Texas outlaw beating the effete Euros at their own game over and over.  Less attractive aspects of his personality were not so visible to those wanting victory.  Sports fans who had ignored cycling forever were inspired now by it and not just in North America: while riding the recent Gran Fondo  associated with the World Championships in Limburg one was struck by how many of the 7,000 mainly-Dutch participants were riding Armstrong-era Treks.  Add in the highly-visible Lance Armstrong Foundation, the rock star connections and the millionaire lifestyle and here was a totally different kind of cyclist.  But eventually the truth will out, as Marion Jones (track) and Dwain Chambers (track) and Nina Kraft (triathlon) and Duncan Spencer (cricket!) and Detlef Hoffmann (canoeing!!) and so many others discovered when they were caught.  And now Lance Armstrong, to deafening howls of indignation.

I began watching pro cycling in the Indurain era and it has afforded me great pleasure over the years.  It was wonderful to stand in a square in Bonn  watching a big screen television and seeing Lance ride away from Jan on the Alpe d’Huez or to see Lance chase down the pure climbers on the Hautacam in the rain and pass them without looking back.  To stand on the Alpe myself as Frank Schleck tore off alone to the summit and stage win.  So many challenges addressed, so many memories made.  Even now I admire the attacking spirit of Alberto Contador at the Vuelta this year or think of Johan Museeuw at the velodrome in Roubaix, pointing to his knee.

People who knew of my interest in racing would say: “But they’re all doped” not because they cared about cycling but simply to deflate the bubble, to diminish the pleasure of watching the riders.  There was real effort-- sweaty, painful, eye-popping, screaming-muscle effort--here on the roads of Spain or France or Italy, even if chemically-enhanced.  Nobody ever won a three week long race by sitting on the couch and eating potato chips and taking a shot of EPO at the start line.  But is seems that an awful lot of cyclists were taking that shot.

The argument that they all did it is no argument.  They cheated wilfully and while entertainment was provided to the fans it was at the cost of authenticity as well as theft from those who did not cheat.  The cheaters should be punished or pardoned and the UCI needs to sort itself out and the sponsors need to rethink what the pro sport is to them.  Sports results are ephemera; they are really yesterday’s newspapers and will be recycled as the next race begins.  In truth, fans don’t actually live or die from the results of a sports match, whether soccer or cycling, although from all the indignation over the Armstrong case you would imagine they did.

Instead, I prefer to think of what cycling really means to me.  It has very little to do with being a wanna-be-Armstrong but takes me back to cool mornings riding with my friends, great friends I would never have met except through cycling.  Or cycling alone across Spain on the path of the pilgrims of the Camino de Santiago.  It is about training hard and enjoying the rewards of that effort spent.  It is about competing against myself on the 15 km time-trial course, aching for that 40 km/h average but not quite reaching it.  It is about fixing a flat tire effortlessly.  It is about planning and riding great roads through fantastic scenery, whether on the California coast, the Adirondacks, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Dolomites, the Vosges, the Black Forest.   It is that epic ride over the Blue Ridge and through the Fort Valley when you forgot to eat that you laugh about for years afterwards.   It is about pride of possession or admiration of beautiful purposeful machines, whether conceived by artisans working in steel or the product of the highest of high-tech.  It is the joy of speed downhill on smooth asphalt, the tires whirring.  These are the things that those kids in Nick’s cycling club will lose because their parents cannot differentiate between the important and the less important.

Movie Night: “Race Across the Sky–the Leadville Trail 100"

The documentary about the Leadville Trail 100 mountain bike race that premiered in November finally reached the Great White North for two showings, January 27 and February 7. Although I don’t know much about mountain biking, I thought it would be interesting to attend since there are not a lot of films about cycling of any kind and reviews I had read sounded pretty positive.

I have been to Leadville, Colorado, and recall its Wild West ambiance and the fact that I had a splitting headache. The town is 10,152 feet (3094 m) above sea level, so the air is pretty thin. The town once had a population of 40,000 during the great silver boom of the 1880s but as the mines closed, the community withered.

One of those miners, Ken Chlouber, thought that Leadville had more to offer than underground tunnels and pits and in 1983 he organized the first Leadville Trail 100 race, which starts in the town and proceeds on asphalt, dirt roads, fire roads, and singletrack trails out for 50 miles, where the racers turn around and head back in the opposite direction. In that first race, there were 45 cyclists, of whom 10 actually finished. In 2009, there were 1400 starters.

In 2008, Lance Armstrong, coming out of retirement, participated in the race and came second to Dave Wiens, who was clocking his sixth consecutive win and who set a record time that year. This film, “Race Across the Sky,” is the account of the 2009 race, in which Armstrong, fresh from his third place position at the Tour de France, comes back looking for something better than second place.

The race, from the briefing session in the big gymnasium, to the volunteers on the course, has the feel of a big folk festival. But the coverage by the filmmakers is anything but amateur as they use footage from motorbikes and a helicopter, as well as little interviews with participants, to tell the story. The Main Event, of course, is the race between Dave, the local hero, and Lance, but the other stories are great. There is a woman participating just over a year after a car going 60 mph hit her on a training ride. She had terrible injuries, including a broken back, torn gluteus maximus, and a destroyed ACL in her knee. Her husband, still upset at the memory of the crash, talked about her getting onto the trainer wearing a body cast and brace, and here she was, riding one of the toughest marathon bike races in the United States. Another racer was a woman who had been diagnosed with MS twenty years ago. A lighter note was provided by the cyclist who had ridden all 15 prior editions of the race on the same mountain bike, with the same first-generation helmet, and even with the same front tire!

The filmmakers used a great piece of animation to show the course and illustrate the difficult areas. Then it was off to the races as everyone assembled at 5:50 a.m. for what must have been an ice-cold start. Very quickly, a small group of elite riders formed at the front and these seven would animate the race for the rest of the day.

I had always thought that a mountain bike race would be extremely technical but looking at this race I could see how a road racer would do well. There are some long, flat sections, both paved and unpaved, and if you could work it properly you could gain a lot of time. One of the riders, an Olympic mountain biker, was using drop handlebars to obviously take advantage of these sections of road and get aero. Lance Armstrong quickly showed his tactical sense and worked with another rider to set a blistering pace at the front. Since many of the climbs were fairly open, given Lance’s ascending skills it was obvious to me that he would continue to gain time on the pure mountain bike racers and this was the case. He even rode through the feed zone like a Tour de France champ, grabbing a musette and eating on the fly. And for comic relief, we had the opportunity to see him attempt to fix a flat.  I do have to point out that he rides the entire muddy, rainy, slippery course wearing white shoes.

In spite of knowing what the outcome of the race would be, I found it exciting to watch this impressive event, rolling through wonderful scenery. Parts of the course are simply brutal–one section called the Pipeline follows a right-of-way and seems to be made of rocks and dirt stacked vertically. Remember, cyclists have to descend this on the way out, and climb it on the way back. To add to the fun, the slower participants had the opportunity to enjoy a hail storm as they climbed the highest mountain, which gets you to almost 13,000 feet. At no point is the course under 9,000 feet.

The Leadville Trail 100 is just one of a series of races, including running events as well as cycling ones, that are now taking place in this little Colorado town. I enjoyed the film and would recommend it as an entertaining and, yes, perhaps inspirational, addition to the bike film genre.

Tour de Appalachians Day 4: It’s Not About the Bike

With the Banner Elk elk

The final day of our training camp began, sadly, with the departure of the Badger, who had to return to Washington on a family matter. But it was another beautiful morning and after a leisurely breakfast the remaining Lost Boys set out on the road one more time. This course was one that would not even come close to challenging our traditional Bad Navigation Practices, since it merely was a ride down to Banner Elk, where we would turn left and ride up Beech Mountain. At the summit we would just turn around and retrace our steps before packing up and heading out of North Carolina on the long trip home.

Beech Mountain has a special place in the lore of American racing because it was here, on a route previously included in the Tour DuPont, that Lance Armstrong, in his first year back on the bike after his bout with cancer but considering quitting, got back his motivation to race. He was joined by his coach Chris Carmichael and racing buddy Bob Roll for his own training camp. Here is the excerpt from his 2000 book, It’s Not About the Bike.

From then on, all we did was eat, sleep, and ride bikes. Spring had just begun moving up into the mountains, creating a constant fog and drizzle that seemed to muffle the piney woods....Toward the end of the camp, we decided to ride Beech Mountain, Chris knew exactly what he was doing when he suggested it, because there was a time when I owned that mountain. It was a strenuous 5,000 foot climb with a snowcapped summit, and it had been the crucial stage in my two Tour DuPont victories...

We rode and rode through a steady rain, for four hours and then five. By the time we got to the foot of Beech, I’d been on the bike for six hours, drenched. But I lifted myself up out of the saddle and propelled the bike up the incline, leaving Bob Roll behind...I continued upward, and the mountain grew steeper. I hammered down on the pedals, working hard, and felt a small bloom of sweat and satisfaction, a heat under my skin almost like a liquor blush. My body reacted instinctively to the climb. Mindlessly, I rose out of my seat and picked up the pace. Suddenly, Chris pulled up behind me in the follow car, rolled down his window and began driving me on. “Go, go, go!” he yelled. I glanced back at him.. “Allez, Lance, allez, allez!” he yelled. I mashed down on the pedals, heard my breath grow shorter, and I accelerated....That ascent triggered something in me... I was meant for a long, hard climb.

I passed the rest of the trip in a state of near-reverence for those beautiful, peaceful, soulful mountains. The rides were demanding and quiet, and I rode with a pure love of the bike, until Boone began to feel like the Holy Land to me, a place I had come on a pilgrimage. If I ever have serious problems again, I know that I will go back to Boone and find an answer. I got my life back on those rides.

We did not expect any epiphanies of our own on this beautiful Spring day, a decade later, but we were excited about the prospect of riding the same roads. We quickly passed down into Banner Elk and discovered we were on the course of a Sunday road race, with cyclists from regional colleges competing. At the traffic light, the policeman wanted to wave us to the right to stay on the course but we laughed and told him we weren’t competing. Although I did tell him, as I rode by, that although we were not racing we were looking very, very good.

Soon after the 3 mile climb to the top of Beech Mountain began. We passed a Baptist church where the congregation was coming out the door. They waved to us, and Duck called out “Pray for us!” which, since he has ridden Beech Mountain before, should have meant something.

Young Jeff humiliates the guy with the compact crankset
photo by Duck

Although we were neither riding in pouring cold rain nor had been on the road for six hours, the Beech Mountain climb is quite brutal. It was far more difficult that the park road up Mt. Mitchell. I was riding with Young Jeff and our progress was glacial as we rode through the switchbacks, grinding upwards, ever upwards. The valley below us opened up as we kept our pace steady, a difficult task given that there must have been sections of the road with gradients approaching 15%. Eventually we came to the top and in the last little flat stretch we saw Duck with his camera and a there was a big sprint finish, easily won by Young Jeff who had come back to life, fuelled by competition apparently.

Happy to have made it up here
photo by Duck

There is not much to look at on Beech Mountain, altitude 5506 feet (1678 m) which has that same dismal air of most North American ski resorts when it isn’t ski season. The place has a year-round population of only 350, but in winter this swells to 10,000. There are 1,800 residential units, so it is the definition of a resort town. Development had started at Beech Mountain in the mid-1960s, but after building roads, sewers and a lot of houses, the developers went broke in 1974. Property owners took over and eventually the utilities were transferred to public authorities and in 1981 the Town of Beech Mountain was incorporated There was a “Realtor on Duty” sign at one development, in case you wanted to make an impulse purchase. Beech Mountain is the highest town in the United States east of the Mississippi and of course we needed photos with the sign, but we soon turned around and headed back to Banner Elk.

College racers (Lees-McCrae College won the team time trial)

The descent was marvellous, needless to say, and the crawling, eternal climb on the way up was replaced by the kind of high-speed two-wheeled rocket flight that makes you smile for the rest of the day. In the blink of an eye we were past the Baptist Church, and then in downtown Banner Elk. We stopped to take pictures in front of the Banner Elk elk statue, and chatted with some of the college students as they watched the racers go by and cheered them on. Soon, too soon, we made the final climb back up Sugar Mountain. Riding past the golf course I could still see some snow on the ski runs.

Not for flatlanders

The Sugar Mountain to Beech Mountain and Back trip was only 31 km (19.2 miles) , or about what I do on two circuits of my time trial course in Ottawa. But I sure don’t put in nearly 1000 m (970 m, or 3182 feet) of climbing in that distance at home! A worthy challenge, even for an Armstrong.

The greens might be green, but there is still white stuff in the hills

We packed up our stuff, which took lots of time, and helped Duck organize the condo. Soon we were in our cars, headed in different directions. Duck was off to Raleigh, while Tim the Tornado, Young Jeff and I extended our trip together by stopping in Staunton for celebratory burritos and beers at the Baja Bean Company, followed by a brief walk around town. Then they headed to DC, while I was back on Interstate 81, headed northwards. It was a beautiful day, and I drove all the way to Chambersburg with the sunroof open and the Beethoven playing loudly. And thus ended the first Lost Boys Tour de Appalachians Spring Training Camp. There were a few mechanical issues, and some less-than-optimal weather, but it's not really about the bike: with the great company, Duck’s hospitality and a few beers it was all an unqualified success. We all rode well and I for one am motivated to raise my riding to another level higher so that I can take names and kick butt, as they say in North Carolina, next Spring.

Duck and the "Allez, Papa!" sign made by his son

The Compleat Tour de Basement: Introduction

Lance in his garage, getting fit.
Is this the best he can do for a home gym?
Photo: Art Streiber, Men's Health

I was alarmed to see the omnipresent Lance Armstrong appear on the cover of Men's Health magazine for January 2009. Alarmed for several reasons: a) he is smiling in the cover photo; b) he is now on every magazine cover in the world, having been on Outdoor magazine's cover in October, the December, January and February issues of Cycle Sport, not to mention the current Bicycling and c) the inside photos show him looking totally ripped, with hyper-defined abs and pecs. This is a cyclist? But Lance knows a thing or two from training as well as self-promotion if past results are any indication of future possibilities.

You have seen me refer to my extended off-the-road season ("Winter" is too kind) as the Tour de Basement. From the beginning of the bad weather in October I can be found on my time trial bike in the basement, watching old race videos or scenery DVDs or at the gym for spinning classes and weight sessions and doing some cross-training, such as cross-country skiing as well. I have an excellent coach who provides feedback to me and I maintain a detailed workout diary at http://www.trainingpeaks.com/ as well as a food diary at http://www.fitday.com/.

Although I am not a coach or trainer and profess no particular special insight, several years of doing this have given me some ideas about getting ready for the cycling season. In Ottawa I am basically training for seven full months to ride for barely five, and I have three weeks in summer that are the focus of my training. In 2003 I cycled the climbs of the Barolo wine country and the hills around Lake Como; in 2005 a dozen climbs in the Swiss Alps; in 2006 the hilly Black Forest and some climbs of the Tour de France; in 2007 the ballons of Alsace and more climbs in the Black Forest; and in 2008 the Route des Grandes Alpes in France, covering some of the most celebrated (and difficult) climbs of the Tour de France. This is in addition to my regular time trial racing on the flat, which of course has some different training requirements.

I have read very extensively and reviewed a number of cycling publications online. I now have a small collection of recent items related to training and I wanted to share them since they cover what everyone needs for their own Tour de Basement. I propose to do a short series here on Tin Donkey in the form of reviews dealing with books on weight training, nutrition and base training, along with my comments on training DVDs that have recently come on the market.

Until then, be entertained by Lance Armstrong training in Hawaii as he prepares for the Tour Down Under. This week in Ottawa it has been typically -28C (-18F) during the day and approaching -40C (-40F) with the wind or at night. This was clearly not the case in Hawaii. You will also note that Mr. Armstrong is using a 39-28 for the tougher parts of this climb.

Next: Weight Training for Cyclists