Some people will do anything to have an excuse to drink. I know, I went to college…

We used to play 'complicated' games like quarters (if you can bounce a quarter off the table into a glass the owner of the glass drinks) or Gilligan (where you watch episodes of Gilligan's Island and every time you hear the word Gilligan everyone drinks) but in a pinch you could always find someone to play the most basic of all: as soon as one person finishes their drink everyone else needs to catch up. Repeat.

Here at the UW some IT folks have put together a 'club' called DIVE (Drink In Various Establishments). Nice.

Of course they setup a (by owner approval only) mailing list for the club to coordinate the roughly bi-weekly outings and of course I managed to get on it. Not sure why really, I'll be living vicariously through this list 99 percent of the time as I am so rarely free after work to just hang out.

Maybe I should work on that.

One of the sponsors of my team - IJM.org Racing - is Cycle University. Every winter they hold an indoor time trial series that has been really well attended this year and last year. It consists of eight CompuTrainers positioned side-by-side and everyone races each other on a 10 km rolling course. Times range from around 14 minutes for elite/pro riders to a little over 15 minutes for mere mortals like myself to maybe 18-22 minutes for recreational cyclists or beginning racers.

I have always done fairly well in this series because I participate in a large number of these races, consistency seems to be key.

This year I won.

You hear that? I WON.

I am totally making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

Hahahahaha… when I saw these pictures below it totally cracked me up. They are from this years edition of the Tour of California and you can obviously read into them anything that you want. Here is my take.

As usual during an alpine stage with nice weather, lots of people feel the need to dress up. Unlike every other costume that I have seen which is only supposed to evoke humor, this one potentially has deeper meaning and one could even construe the wearer to be making a statement? Uh, whatever…

Here we see the doping devil armed with a two-pronged syringe running next to everyone's favorite cancer survivor and to some, suspected doper, Lance Armstrong. I can easily imagine the devil yelling, "Hey Lance, how does it feel to get away with the biggest lie in the history of professional sports?"

Having had just about enough of the constant accusations and hounding, not to mention the first hand experience of fans getting to close to riders on alpine stages, Lance decides to take matters into his own hands. I can clearly hear Lance say, "Dude, I have NO TIME FOR THIS SHIT. Je-sus people, where are the freakin' barricades…!?"

As fatty hits the deck you can see (if you look carefully enough) that more than one rider behind Lance is laughing. The most obvious is Chris Horner.

As our costumed crusader wallows in the snow he kicks a bunch of the white stuff in the path of the peloton (but thankfully avoids falling into the road himself). His expression is one of obvious shock and awe.

You can side with the doping devil or you can side with Lance. I think running next to the peloton when there is only 12 inches of space between them and the shoulder is DUMB. I also bet all the riders really enjoyed watching Lance tip this guy into the snow bank. With all the (official AND out of competition) controls professional riders are being subjected to lately and all the doping cases that get tried in the media instead of a court of law it must make them feel pretty damn impotent. I'm fairly confident when I say that the vast majority of the bunch probably lived vicariously through Lance for those few seconds.

And if you're a LA fanboy, this might depict an entirely different scenario. Perhaps something like this…

I clearly see a guy running along the side of the road. He starts to slip and fall, Lance attempts to save the guy but just barely misses helping the poor fellow out. That's what I see. Lance is a great hero. Everyone should try to be as good of a roll model as he is.