Posted: July 21

A tour worth getting excited about

(Rome) The eternal city is living up to its reputation for heat and tourists, but inside the walls of the Curia, life and work proceed smoothly. Actually the past week has been very productive as I have continued to redesign our web site. It might be that a summer's heat is just as conducive to concentrating on a big project as the damp cold of a winter's day. Spring and fall are more challenging when the beautiful weather tempts me outside.

I did get away yesterday afternoon, but blame that on the Tour de France, always one of the year's sporting highlights for me. This year's classic bike race has been topsy-turvy after seven year's of Lance Armstrong's domination. So at 3:30 or so on July afternoons, I like to slip away from the computer and go to a TV to catch the end of the day's race. Wednesday afternoon I watched Floyd Landis' collapse when he could not answer the increased pace his rivals set when they sensed he was struggling. He tumbled from first place overall down to eleventh, so many minutes behind that the race seemed over for him. The commentators went on and on about what a fake he seemed, a pretender to the bicycle throne. Then yesterday Landis counter-attacked his rivals on a day of multiple mountain stages. It was their turn to stagger and they lost most of the time to him that they had gained the day before. At one point he had a nine-minute lead but the peloton gave chase. Usually the aerodynamics and shared work of the group is enough to overtake the individual who tries to get away. Yesterday the mountain climb took away the aerodynamic advantage and Landis' sheer will did the rest. When he dismounted the bike at the finish, he was so keyed up with emotion that he did not even look tired.

Well, how could I leave the TV and go back to programming web pages? No contest. My own bicycle called me out on the streets, which were too full of traffic to go very fast, but even when I got on the bike path that follows the river south out of the city, I was not really racing. But it felt good to go as fast as I could and to play through the excitement of the race in my mind as I felt the wind in my face. The same thing used to happen in college when we would have to go outside and throw a football around after watching a game on television. Of course, my knees were much younger than and there weren't any cars to dodge, so I have to pay more attention to reality now. Nevertheless, the Tour de France and Floyd Landis have given me a surge of energy.