Mama Might Have Mentioned Something About Days Like This

Before we get into the world of professional cycling, let's discuss my recent woes. My Garmin Edge 305's mode key was broken, so I contacted Garmin and returned it for repair. I thought I was going to get it back quickly because of the time of year as well as the fact that the repair facility is about 20 miles away. Yesterday I called Garmin to ask where my computer was (I shipped it on the 31st of January and was told I would get it back in 7-10 days) and was told that they hadn't received it yet, almost three weeks after I sent it. So I went down to the post office to ask where my Garmin may be as well as ask about filing a claim on the insurance I purchased for it. Before asking I knew I would get the response I ended up getting, "That package was delivered in the first of February." Sweet. So now I'm in a he said, she said thing with Garmin. We'll see how that turns out.

To make matters worse, I got a call from the bike shop letting me know that my rear derailer is bent and needs to be replaced. Awesome. Hopefully the bad days end now and the good days begin. I'm sure the beer tasting (read: beer party with a large range of beer types) I'm attending (read: crashing) this weekend will help bring about those good days.

In the now wide-spread Landis/Kimmage interview, Floyd talks about how even with drugs, cyclists have good days and bad days:

"You still have good days and bad days and all the other variables - you didn’t sleep well, you didn’t eat well, you have a good day and a bad day. Anytime you add the drug card they always attribute everything that happened to the drug but they will happen anyway. It just changes how fast you go relative to how fast you would have gone."

I think many people believe that just because a cyclist (or any athlete for that matter) is doping, everything is easy for them. Clearly, based on Floyd's words, that just isn't true. I'm not going to argue whether or not LA doped, but either way he certainly was suffering here in 2003 (during a time when he was accused of doping):

Again, I'm not saying he was or wasn't, but if he was the drugs clearly didn't make racing in the 2003 Tour easy for LA. If he was doping in 2003, those drugs surely had no effect on how much he suffered during his 2005 SCA deposition:

The quick background story for these videos is summed up best in the NY Velocity write-up, "Tailwind Sports had taken out an insurance policy with SCA Promotions to cover a $5 million performance bonus for Armstrong winning the 2004 Tour. However, when David Walsh and Pierre Ballester's book L.A. Confidentiel came out, SCA refused to pay, claiming that Armstrong voided the contract by doping to win." In the end the decision went the way of LA, who was awarded his bonus because the contract had no stipulations concerning doping.

As I mentioned in Wednesday's post, AC is back to racing. Here he is signing in at the Tour of Algarve:

Everything looks to be back to normal; the champ is once again mounted on his carbon steed ready to take down his adversaries with his hand gun. But wait, what is this:

Seriously AC, what's with the cycling cap? His poor choice of accessories notwithstanding, it would appear that AC has taken the Specialized marketing claim of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" to heart by riding for Saxobank Sungard. Unfortunately, Specialized's poster boy defected to the Trek camp for this season:

Of course, I think Cancellara could be riding the Specialized that his image is used to sell and he would still be competitive in the peloton:

I'm not sure if those training wheels are UCI compliant or not, but I'm sure that even with them Cancellara will still have bad days and good days like he does on his normal ride.