timv's blog

The 2006 Vuelta a España, the third and last of the three-week tours, begins this weekend in Malaga with a dead-flat 7.2km team time trial on Saturday. The field looks pretty interesting too. Tom Danielson will be the designated team leader for Discovery, unlike the situation in the Tour de France this year where there was no clear number one for that team. Alexandre Vinokourov and his Kazakhstan-based Astana team (formerly the Spanish Liberty Seguros squad) will compete after being shut out in France at the last minute. TdF de facto winner Oscar Pereiro and hard-luck crash victim Alejandro Valverde will lead the Caisse d'Epargne-Illes Balears team. And one of my favorite riders, Alessandro Petacchi, has recovered from the fractured kneecap suffered early in the Giro d'Italia and will be back to contest the sprints against Robby McEwen, Thor Hushovd, and others.

I was watching today's stage with Lance Armstrong and several other people, and at one point during the race, Lance and I talked a bit about the difference between racing conservatively and aggressively.
 
During his reign as Tour de France champion, Lance was adamant about seizing every opportunity to gain time on his rivals. The idea was to build a cushion between Lance and his nearest competitors in case he ran into problems later on in the race. A one-minute lead can turn into a three-minute deficit in just a few kilometers, and Lance and Johan Bruyneel always said they'd rather defend a lead than fight to catch up.
 
If you're in the lead, you have two options. You can follow other riders, and as long as you stay with them you don't lose any of your lead. Your other choice is to attack and build an even bigger lead. If you get into a situation where you're behind, there's only one option. You have to attack and drop riders who somehow gained time on you already, and there's never any guarantee you'll be able to do that.
 
The one thing that's certain about the Tour de France is that anything can happen, to anyone, at any time. Having the yellow jersey and several minutes of time in hand gives a rider a margin of safety; losing one minute of a six-minute lead isn't a cause for major concern. Losing one minute of a one-and-a-half-minute lead puts the yellow jersey in a stressful position and lends encouragement to the challenger.

I guess they pretty much nailed that one. It's a fair question to ask whether Floyd actually could have put more time into his rivals last week and early this week, and whether it would have been enough to matter when the bad day did come. But they sure did see it coming.

After much research and comtemplation on the subject, I heat-molded my Hyper boots Tuesday night. It was my first heat-molding experience, and I rejected Hyper's suggested method of using a kitchen oven at 200°F. I didn't like the idea of softening all the carbon in the boot when I only wanted to reshape the heel cup area. And I also didn't like the idea that the whole boot could collapse in a molten heap if left in the oven too long at that temperature, which seemed to be a risk of that method.

Not a bad article in this past weekend's Washington Post about converting a road bike to fixed gearing. If you've never tried it, riding a bike that doesn't coast and that only has one gear is more fun than you might guess.

Besides celebrating old bikes, this weekend's Cirque du Cyclisme is also a celebration of those individuals and small businesses who continue to build bikes inspired by the classic style--typically made by hand out of steel tubing, and usually brazed (joined by melted brass or silver alloy rather than by welding, a higher temperature process that actually melts the steel) with "lugs" at each of the frame's joints. Dale Brown has dubbed this class of builder "Keepers of the Flame," a pun on the flame of the torch that's used to create the brazed joints.

I just saw this column in a old print copy of Runner's World as I was catching up on some of my reading backlog. It addresses a topic that I'd wondered about and had my own preconceptions on.