South Beach Diet 2011

The South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor-Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss by Dr. Arthur Agatston was published in 2003 and became a runaway best-seller.  The book is really a 100-page essay on the diet plan followed by a couple of hundred pages of recipes.  I bought the book in 2004 after gaining a significant amount of weight steadily over several years, finding myself at nearly 240 lbs for the first time in my life.  The book sounded brilliant to me: the basic principles made too much sense to ignore and the author’s credentials as a famous heart doctor were undeniable.

I started the diet early in 2004 and wound up losing almost fifty pounds in just over eight months.  In 2005 I cycled over 4,000 miles and rode the 2005 Ride for the Roses in Austin, TX, at 185 lbs, my lowest weight in over 15 years. The best part was that I kept the weight off consistently for almost three years.  Unfortunately, I was diagnosed with cancer in October 2007, and had radical surgery that December.

I would love to blame my ensuing weight gain on the carb-boosters I was forced to take during my recovery, and the early post-surgery diet of Coke and potato chips that was the only thing I could keep down.  No doubt that those things were factors in my reverting to the “carb-cycle” that the South Beach Diet had so effectively broken, but the truth is that I was so happy to be alive that I really didn’t care if I weighed 185 or 300.

Statistically, for the first three years following my surgery I had just a 35% chance of ten-year survival, so I fell into a pretty self-indulgent lifestyle with plenty of bad food choices and vast oceans of beer.  I was quite happy through all of this, having taken the philosophical stance that I was going to enjoy every day that I was given.

On December 21st, 2010, I passed the three-year anniversary of my surgery and the statistics all changed.  When I visited my doctor in January 2011 for my regular six-month tests, he told me that by surviving for three full years my statistical chance of ten-year survival had risen to over 85%.  In fact, according to his own detailed analysis of my particular case, he put my chance of ten-year survival at 92%.  I was a happy camper indeed that day.

One of the significant outcomes of that January visit was that I started looking at my body a bit differently.  One day in late March of this year I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror after my morning shower and realized I was looking at a potentially very unhealthy person.  I was sporting love handles and a pretty fair start at man-boobs, neither of which I had ever had, in addition to a very large pot belly.  My neck was thick and saggy with fat and my face was fuller and rounder than it had ever been.  My old inner voice began to speak for the first time since my illness.

“Hey, asshole,” it said, “You’re fat and getting fatter.   You made it to three years and you’re probably not going to die.  Don’t friggin’ kill yourself some another way because you survived cancer.”

Shaking my head, I dug back in the back of the closet and found the old electronic scale I had used weekly in 2004, dragged it into the bathroom, and hopped on.

I weighed 252 pounds.

I was stunned.  I knew I was heavy, but at my worst I had never been close to 250, ever.  Even when I did the diet in 2004 I started at 238 pounds.  I resolved to start the South Beach Diet again as soon as possible.  For various reasons, including my own inability to make the commitment I knew was absolutely necessary to get through the critical first two weeks (Phase One,) I didn’t finally start the South Beach Diet until April 25, 2011.

The principles of the SBD are pretty simple, and I’m not going to go over them in much detail, but here are the basics.  You start off with two weeks of an extremely low-carb diet: no potatoes, bread, rice, pasta, or starches of any kind.  Plus, no sugars: no fruit, no fruit juice, sodas, or sweetened drinks of any kind, and absolutely no alcoholic drinks at all.  You even stay away from high glycemic index vegetables like carrots and corn.  So what can you eat?  As much low-fat, high protein food as you’d like in the form of lean meats, skinless poultry, and fish, and lots of leafy greens such as salads, broccoli, spinach, and green beans. Also, good fats are included, like olive and canola oil and small quantities of nuts.  Fats help make you feel full, and that leads us to Dr. Agatston’s central thesis: diets fail because human beings will not tolerate hunger over long periods of time.  You are not supposed to be hungry, so you always have something handy to munch, even if it’s unlimited quantities of celery sticks!

This two week hell regimen with nearly zero carbs puts your body in a state called ketosis, which essentially breaks the carb-cycle and makes your body burn fat.  It’s all about the way carbs raise your blood sugar, followed by release of insulin to lower it, followed by the inevitable “carb crash” we all know, followed by cravings for more carbs.  About six or seven days into Phase One, something near miraculous occurs: you lose the craving for carbs completely.  And if you do Phase Two right, it doesn’t come back.

Phase Two of the SBD starts in the third week and lasts until you have achieved your target weight.  You pick one specific day and time (Monday morning at 7:30am for me) to weigh yourself, and only do it once a week.  In Phase Two the diet is much more forgiving, but the whole idea is to not add enough simple carbs back to trigger the old cravings and start the carb-cycle again.  If that happens you’ll fail for sure because you’ll always be hungry.  The idea is to lose 1.5 lbs/week.  If you lose less than one or more than two pounds per week you are doing something wrong.  I only looked at the prior four weeks rolling average weight loss and didn’t sweat the minor variations, and when all was said and done on December 19^th I had averaged 1.58 lbs/week weight loss: pretty much right on the mark!

In my opinion there are two keys to successfully completing Phase One.  First, you have to admit that it’s going to be really hard and you have to be 100% committed to get through the first 14 days.  I had a huge advantage here because I had done it before and knew that if I followed through it would definitely work.  The second key is preparation.  You have to know exactly what you’re going to eat, and when, and you have to have all the food ready to go.  I made my shopping list, stocked the right stuff, and also made sure I got rid of any foods extraneous to Phase One.

Once you get to Phase Two it actually becomes easy.  You are typically way ahead of your plan (primarily due to water-weight loss but it still makes you feel good about those first two weeks) and the weight starts to come off like clockwork.  One of the things that made this diet work so well for me is that it travels so well.  There is virtually no situation in which you can find yourself where there is not something to eat that is SBD Phase Two compliant.  Business dinner at a steakhouse?  Petite filet, sautéed spinach and garlic, mushrooms, and you’re stuffed.  Just ignore the bread plate and don’t order any potatoes or dessert and you’re golden. The best part is that if you’ve truly broken the carb-cycle you won’t even feel a craving for the bread or potatoes; I know I never have.  And I always liked sashimi better than nigiri anyway.  Airport fast food?  Chicken Caesar salad, no croutons, please.

All that having been said, the SBD requires some discipline to be successful, and it’s unlikely that you’ll get to your target without a few hiccups.  If you look at the graph of my own goals vs. actuals, you’ll see that I was way ahead of the plan for the first 24 weeks, albeit with some minor setbacks along the way.   From week 25 through week 35, I started to “plateau.”  I was down to losing an average of only a half a pound or so a week, and my weight went up as much as three pounds some weeks.  At this point I kicked in a minimum of four hours of spinning classes per week while rigorously watching food intake to make sure I wasn’t adding any more calories.  Even though the SBD explicitly states it is not a calorie-counting diet, at the end of the day you only lose weight if you burn more calories that you consume; the SBD just makes that easier.  After 25 weeks on the program, it came down less to what I was eating and more to how much I was eating.

And drinking.

The SBD allows moderate drinking, particularly white wine.  In the newer editions of the book, they have relaxed a lot of the more stringent requirements, such as no beer at all, no bread ever, etc.  Personally, I did it old school, which worked for me.  I allowed myself one night of beer drinking every two weeks, but only if my trailing four-week average weight loss was greater than 1.5 lbs.  Otherwise, Sauvignon Blanc was my only friend.  As a part of the difficult final push in weeks 34-35, I drank nothing Monday-Thursday, limiting myself to white wine on the three weekend nights.

On Monday, December 19^th, 2011, I weighed in at 196.8 pounds on an original 35-week target of 196.0.  I declared victory at that point, as my goal from the beginning was to achieve a permanently sustainable weight under 200 pounds.  Thus the target of a four-pound cushion.  I am reasonably certain that I can make a 3.2 pound cushion work just fine.  Phase Three begins now, and has no dietary restrictions at all as long as weight remains stable, but obviously the idea is to have changed the way you eat and the way your body processes foods permanently.  I will continue the once a week weigh-ins, and if things start going the wrong way I know exactly what to do!

The Tale of the Scale:

Start of Phase One:                          April 25, 2011.

Start of Phase Two:                         May 9, 2011

Start of Phase Three:                        December 19, 2011

Starting Weight:                               252.0 lbs

Ending Weight:                                196.8 lbs

Total Weight Loss:                           55.2 lbs

Avg. Loss/Week:                             1.58 lbs

Postscript:  Dr. Agatston has just released a follow-up to the original South Beach Diet book called The South Beach Diet Wake Up Call: Why America is still Getting Fatter and Sicker, Plus 7 Simple Strategies for Reversing Our Toxic Lifestyle.  It’s far more than a diet book, and highly recommended.

Restaurant Review - Philadelphia's La Famiglia on November 12, 2011

 La Famiglia is a traditional Italian restaurant located on Front Street in the Old City section of Philadelphia.  I travel back to Philly at least once a year, and I traditionally make La Famiglia my first choice for dinner.  Living in Portland, OR, I am fortunate enough to have a smorgasbord of fantastic restaurants spanning nearly every type of regional and ethnic cuisine, with one glaring exception:  Portland lacks the kind of authentic Italian dining that is available in New York, Philly, Chicago, and a few other eastern cities.  In this writer’s humble opinion, La Famiglia is the best Italian restaurant in the USA.

From the outside, the restaurant is nondescript.  Inside, it is an oasis of old-world style and décor, with tapestry-covered walls, mirrors, a big fireplace, and comfortable armchairs surrounding twenty or so tables on two levels.  There is also a private dining area upstairs devoted to private affairs and special meals for the many regulars.  Take a trip to the restroom located down a steep staircase in the cellar and you will pass by one of the largest collections of Italian wines in the country, stacked and racked locked behind ornate iron cages.  In fact, the whole basement is a temperature-controlled wine room.

On Saturday night I arrived right on time for my eight o’clock reservation, having arrived in Philadelphia just a few hours earlier.  This was to be an unusual dinner for me, in that I was dining alone.  My regular companion on the trip was forced to cancel his trip due to some unforeseen circumstances, and I confess that after flying all day I was sorely tempted to cancel my reservation and just eat at the hotel or one of the tens of restaurants within a block or two of my Center City digs.  I am glad I didn’t succumb, and after a hot shower, a change of clothes, and a double espresso my second wind arrived.

I was greeted warmly at the door, and waited behind a party of ten young Japanese executives.  I mentioned to the hostess that my party of two had unfortunately become a party of one, and she assured me that was no problem.  She escorted me to our regular table just across from the fireplace on the lower level, and wished me good dining.

I was greeted immediately by a server who brought me some bottled still water and the list of wines by the glass.  A moment or two later my waiter arrived, a young Turkish gent who speaks fluent Italian, and he surprisingly recognized me from years past.  He immediately said, “Where’s the other guy?” referring to my dining companion of the last many years there.  I told him what had happened, and he frowned and said, “Could be a wine problem.” 

"How so?"

"I don't think you will want to drink your normal three bottles by yourself!" he replied.

“I have no problem drinking wine by the glass,” I said, “Do you have any good Italian whites?”

He made a scrunchy face and said, “No,” then added, “You usually drink a bottle of lighter white to start, correct?”

“Correct.”

He left without a word and returned two minutes later with a glass of straw-colored wine and handed it to me.  I took a sip and pronounced it delicious, and asked him what it was.

“Orvieto,” he said, “Which is what you usually order first, am I right?”

I was amazed at his memory.  He told me he opened it especially for me, and would charge me the price of the Pinot Grigio by the glass, which was quite generous as the Orvieto was easily double the price.

And so, on to the food.  La Famiglia is an intensely traditional restaurant, and the wait staff have been known to turn decidedly chilly when diners try to deviate from the three-course Antipasti-Primi-Secondi format.  I have sampled the various Antipasti over the years, but now that I am limited to dining there once a year, twice at best, I have habitually ordered the Carpaccio di Manzo, wafer thin slices of raw beef filet simply dressed with lemon juice, extra-virgin olive oil, capers, scallions, and Grana Padano, and garnished with arugula.  For the past couple of visits I have noticed the addition of a couple of vinaigrette-marinated button mushrooms that are not traditionally part of a carpaccio of beef.  They tasted fine, but I found them kind of unnecessary.  As usual, this dish was simply fabulous, with the deep flavor of the cured beef marrying perfectly with the simple marinade and the strongly flavored slivers of cheese.  Without a doubt the best carpaccio I have ever had, and highly recommended as a first course on your next visit.

The second (pasta) courses at La Famiglia run the gamut, from Pappardelle ai Porcini, a simple dish of pappardelle pasta sauced with a light fresh Roma tomato sauce flavored with Porcini mushroom, to Taglierini con Carciofi e Gamberetti, homemade pasta with artichokes, baby shrimp, cherry tomatoes, and Parmigiano Reggiano. There is always a chef’s special pasta dish, and this night I noticed an on-menu dish called Penne alla Famaglia, which I had not seen before.  My waiter explained that this had been one of their most popular specials and that so many regulars asked for it that they finally just added it to the regular menu.  It should be noted that like any real Italian joint, La Famiglia prides itself on being able to whip up virtually any traditional Italian dish you can think of.  In the past I have asked for, and received, excellent representations of Fettuccini Putanesca, Spaghetti Bolognese, and others, made from scratch by request.

This night I chose the Penne alla Famaglia, a deliciously basic course of perfectly al dente penne with Prosciutto, sweet onion, and Parmigiano Reggiano.  I am beginning to realize that less can be more with pasta dishes.  In my own kitchen, my idea of a sauce was always copious amounts of garlic, onion, basil, oregano, and Roma tomatoes, along with lots of pepper and the occasional variation on the theme that made it Putanesca (olives, capers, anchovies) or Bolognese (sautéed ground veal.)  My re-education started with an excellent article about a little-used traditional Italian cured pork jowl called Guanciale, used in a regional Italian dish called Bucatini all’Amatriciana.  I made the recipe as recommended after discovering that my wonderful local meat market (Chop in the Citymarket coop) made their own Gianciale!  What resulted was an incredibly full-flavored and decidedly Italian course that had no garlic at all, no oregano, and only a bit of thinly sliced (not diced) red onion.  You can see what I’m getting at.  The flavors of the Pecorino Romano cheese and the Gianciale were front and center in a way that would not have happened had I used my regular long list of ingredients, and the same was true of the Penne alla Famaglia, which featured the unmasked taste of the caramelized sweet onion married with the cheese and Prosciutto flavors.  Again, no garlic, basil, oregano, or even tomato, just incredible flavor depth and focus.  An amazing dish.

For my Secondi, or main course, I ordered another new addition to the menu since my last visit, the simply named Vitello con Prosciutto.  I should have noticed that the veal was not called “medallions” which is the traditional pounded veal shoulder rounds that are the basis of nearly all of La Famiglia's veal preparations.  No, these were incredibly fork-tender thick chunks of veal tenderloin, wrapped in Prosciutto slices so thin as to ne nearly invisible, pan seared medium and serve with a light-as-air cream sauce delicately flavored with sliced Porcini mushrooms.  This was positively sublime and easily one of the top ten or fifteen entrees I have ever had the good fortune to sample, so much so that I took over 20 minutes to eat it, carving off tiny pieces to make it last.

Another comment on the wine service.  Finishing my second glass of Orvieto with the Penne alla Famaglia, I asked the waiter to pick me out a glass of good Italian wine off the by-the-glass list.  I explicitly told him that this would be fine and under no circumstances did I wish him to open another expensive bottle on my account.  He grinned and said, “Sir, that will not be necessary,” and returned moments later with a big glass in one hand and a half-full bottle of Brunello in the other, just to prove that he had not opened a new one. 

“What’s this?” I said.

“Truly, sir, we opened this for a regular customer who was dining alone earlier tonight, and he had only one glass.  If you allow, I will charge you the price of the most expensive red wine we have by the glass, which is $16.”

So I had two glasses of Brunello with my veal tenderloin.  Stealing a glance at the wine list on my way out later on I saw that this was a $260 bottle of 1995 vintage Brunello.

Passing on the dessert cart, I mollified the frowning waiter by ordering a double espresso, which seemed to put me back in his good graces.  After that, I bid my hosts goodnight and walked all the way back to my center city hotel, confident once again that La Famiglia is the best Italian restaurant in the country.

                                                            ~

La Famiglia Ristorante is located at 8 South Front Street in Old City Philadelphia.  Reservations can be had by calling 215.922.2803.

Oktoberfest 2006 - Part II

By request, I am publishing my Road Updates from Oktoberfest 2006 on my blog.  If you missed Part I yesterday, it would be a good idea to scroll down and read that first.  It's short.  This one's long.

Enjoy!

Oktoberfest 2006

Despite the lack of a truly great anecdote to kick things off, like for instance the “ice fog” episode of last year or even the “I am very horny” bit from last week, here we go with my promised update on the World Famous Oktoberfest.  Stick with me here, you might even learn something!

Of course, when I long ago planned this month-long odyssey around dueling Deutscher trade shows, I was not at all planning to be in Munich at Oktoberfest.  You see, I made the classic dumb American error of assuming (and we all know what that means) that something called Oktoberfest just might take place in, oh, say, October.

Nuh-uh.

By tradition, by which I mean for the last 173 years, Oktoberfest is a 16-day party that ends on the first Sunday in October.  But when the first Sunday is the first or second of October (this year it’s on the first) the festival is extended until the 3^rd, so that it includes German Unity Day.  Got that?  That makes this year’s Oktoberfest 18 days long, instead of the normal 16.  Think we’ll have enough beer?

Part One - Laying the groundwork

Oktoberfest 2006 actually began for me last Friday night, the night before its official opening, with football fans and Muslims jointly sponsoring an all-nighter behind my apartment, which was duly reported in my last update.  The following day, Saturday, I was resolved to go nowhere near the Theresienwiese, or d’Wiesn for short, the huge fairground where this annual bacchanal is held.  I watched the CNN highlights later, and saw the mayor of Munich, clad in full traditional Bavarian garb, pound the tap into the first keg, exclaiming “O’zapht ist!”, which means, not surprisingly, “It’s tapped!” in very very old Old Bavarian.  Zapht also sounds like what you’d be if you had a few from that famous keg.

Speaking of which, let’s get one thing out of the way right now.  This is all about beer.  Sure, Sunday’s at d’Wiesn are family days, and there are enormous roller coasters and Ferris wheels and various dangerous-looking, vomit-inducing whirling contraptions everywhere, but you can get that lots of places.  The heart and soul of the party is drinking beer, eating lots of food, listening to various music, drinking more beer, banging your giant glass mugs together repeatedly while shouting incoherent toasts, drinking more beer, and drinking a lot more beer.  This cannot be overstated.  But let me try anyway – I have never, ever seen so many people so drunk.  And don’t forget, I went to college!

Fortunately for me, rather than having to stumble around blindly, I had been invited by one of our vendors, Logitech, headquartered conveniently in Munich, to accompany them to their reserved area in one of the “tents.”  Carsten, our representative, in a meeting at IFA in Berlin, had invited me thusly:  “Hey Frank, meet me next Wednesday at d’Wiesn and we will drink beer together.”  Did I mention that the Germans tend to be very direct?

Not content to just show up, I decided to do some homework.  First, I looked on that Internet thing, where I discovered most of the cool facts I’m sharing with you.  Second, I spent an hour and a half on Sunday afternoon on a Secret Reconnaissance Mission to the Theresienwiese.  And third, I conducted numerous scientific experiments involving beer.  Actually, that third part has been ongoing for at least two weeks now.

On Sunday, before heading out to the festival grounds, I walked around to the local grocer for some supplies, stopped for a coffee at a local café, and took the long way back to the apartment so I could check the relative damage incurred on the neighborhood by the first day of Oktoberfest.  I had been kept awake very late by fellow apartment-dwellers doing what seemed to be regular Saturday night reveling more than anything else.

My first impression was not a good one, as it involved blood.  Walking out of the apartment building, there was blood on the stone pathway.  A lot of it.  When I came up to the café, there were unmistakable blood splatters on the sidewalk and the wall, which had definitely not been there Saturday morning.  I also noticed a fair amount of broken glass about, very unusual in generally spotless Munich, and when I went down the escalator later in the afternoon to get the U-Bahn into town, there was blood on both the escalator steps and the train platform.

Ruh-roh.

I am very happy to report that this was completely confined to opening day, and I haven’t given it a single thought since, until now of course.  In fact, everyone seems to be having such a great time that there is no sense of tension or threat anywhere.  Sure, there are plenty of crazed Australians (Crikey!) and Italians (#$%&!) wandering around shouting incoherently, but they all seem fairly harmless.

My stroll around the festival was rather uneventful, but I got an idea of the lay of the land, and also a good sense of how massively huge a deal Oktoberfest is.  First, it was so crowded everywhere that one could literally barely move.  Second, there were absolutely no seats to be had, and a seat is a requirement to be served a beer.  Aside from a huge amusement park, the majority of the fairgrounds are taken up by the beer “tents”, which are actually semi-permanent structures that ring the grounds.  There are fourteen main tents, seating from 2,500 people up on the inside, with additional seating outside surrounding each tent..  The largest tent seats 8,450 souls inside, and another 2,450 outside.  These boys are big.  All are operated and staffed by one of the six authorized official Munich Oktoberfest breweries:  Spaten, Augustiner, Paulaner, Hacker-Pschorr, Hofbrau, and Lowenbrau.  Over six million visitors will pass through these and the 18 smaller tents in the course of the 18 days, and will consume just under 450 billion liters of beer.  OK, I made that last number up, but in actual fact over 30% of all the beer produced in Munich in 2006 will be consumed on these grounds in just 18 days. 

I have pictures.

Surprising, at least to me, is how many of the folks at Oktoberfest are true locals, and by that I mean Bavarians, not just Germans.  As a matter of fact, Oktoberfest is not that popular a tourist destination for Germans outside of Bavaria.  If you thought that this was a Disneyland-ish, sterile, tourist-pandering anachronism, like I guess I sort of did, you’d be way wrong.  Fully 72% of those six million visitors are local Bavarians, with 15% coming from all other countries combined, and just 13% from elsewhere in Germany.

Part Two – The Beer Necessities

After two weeks in Munich, I’ve probably knowingly or unknowingly sampled at least the most popular beer, the “Helles”, from all of the aforementioned breweries.  I say unknowingly since no one other than tourists really pays much attention to the brand of draft beer they’re served, and what it says on the glass is not a sure indicator for what’s in it.  Of course, if you are having one at the Spatenhaus you can be sure it’s a Spaten, etc.  Most of the locals, when given a choice, will drink Augustiner, which is the most local of beers, as well as the oldest brewery in Munich.  I remember when I first came here a few years ago and I was having dinner with my colleague Thorsten, he told me Augustiner was Munich’s own beer, and that it was the only one of the big six brews that was not exported.  “Oh,” I said, “So that means it’s not available outside of Germany.”

“No,” he said, “That means it’s not available outside of Munich.”

And a word about “Helles.”  “Hell” in German means “light”, and “dunkel” means dark.  So “Helles” beer is light beer, lager actually, rather than the other “light” beer, Pils.  Pils is what all of the tourists drink, and in fact what most Germans drink, even in Bavaria.  Not so in Munich.  At the same dinner with Thorsten, I ordered an Augustiner Pils when we sat down, and Thorsten raised a huge eyebrow.

“Frank, you are ordering a Pils?”

“Uh, yes, I think so…why?”

“In Munich, only the women drink Pils.  The men drink Helles.”

Been drinking Helles ever since.  Love to watch the manly American men stride up to the bar and order a lady-bier.  Me, I’m sharing a smile with the Deutscher’s over my Helles.

Thanks, Thorsten!

So far, my favorite draft beer in town is the Lowenbrau Helles that it served at Bar Anna, a place you may remember from previous updates.  It tastes cool and clean, which probably has as much to do with a cool cellar and clean pipes as anything else.  Close second is the Augustiner Helles from any number of places, which seems a tiny bit more carbonated than the Lowenbrau, but who knows?

So how strong is German beer, and Oktoberfest beer in particular?  Funny you should ask, as one of the things I wanted to be fairly sure of before going to the fest with my Logitech buddies was that I would not have two beers and fall over, or worse.  I was not particularly worried about this, since it would not exactly be my first beer, nor my first German beer, but one does wonder.  The myth that Oktoberfest beer is literally twice as strong as the regular stuff is just that, a myth.  Likewise the belief that regular German beer is super-strong.  In fact, sticking with Augustiner for reasons that should by now be obvious, the regular bottled Helles clocks in at exactly 5.5% alcohol.  This is the ubiquitous bottled beer of Munich – from beautiful people at sidewalk café’s to drunks in the gutters, if it’s coming out of a bottle it’s almost always Augustiner Hell.  Compare that to US Budweiser at 4.8%, and it doesn’t look like a huge difference.  In fact, Augustiner is just a wee bit stronger than Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which registers 5.3% alcohol.  Bottled Lowenbrau Export, a kind of Pils/Helles/Dunkles bastard child, is at 5.1%.

So how about the Oktoberfest brews?  First off, let’s get another thing straight.  This is not the quasi-dark beer that Lowenbrau and Becks pass off as Oktobefest for six weeks each year in the USA.  You know, the kind of funky-tasting, semi-flat stuff.  I never buy it.  Gives me a headache.  Oktoberfest beer here is just regular Helles, very slightly darker (but still light) and little more powerful.  How little is a little?  Bottled Augustiner Oktoberfestbier clocks in at 6% even.  What’s the big deal, you say?  Well, that’s what I thought too at first.  Then the math starts kicking in.  Sure, it’s only a half a percent more than the regular, but that’s a cool 10% more alcohol.  And compare it to Bud and it’s all of a sudden 27% stronger!  As a matter of fact, the most powerful stuff available in the USA, which a lot of people want banned from the inner cities, is Old English 800 Malt Liquor, at a massive 6.13% alcohol, or nearly a third stronger than Bud.  Not that I would ever compare Old English to The World’s Best Beer, but there is one other thing they have in common.  No one is drinking 12-ounce cans of the stuff.  Just as the most popular size for killer Malt Liquor is the quart bottle, pretty much all that is served at d’Wiesn is the “Mass”, or 1-liter mug.  For those of you not metrically inclined, a liter is 33.814 fluid ounces, or just about two ounces more than a quart.

So do the math.  Want to go to Oktoberfest and have “a couple beers?”  That’s 67.6 ounces of beer, equivalent to 5.6 cans of Bud, volume wise.  Alcohol wise?  You’d have to swill almost eight cans of Bud to match those two beers.

And the thing is, almost nobody goes to the World Famous Oktoberfest where they are pouring The World’s Best Beer to have “a couple beers.”

See where we’re heading here?

Part Three – About Time, Eh?

The great thing about word processing is that unlike the old typewriter – and don’t give me that wide-eyed “typewriter?” look, I know how old most of you are – one can just go on and on.  No paper to change, etc.  Especially if you’re, oh, say sitting in a 210 square foot apartment where the CNN news is on its 17^th time around on a nine-inch TV.

So on Thursday night I set out towards d’Wiesn to meet my Oktoberfest destiny, on foot of course.  Thanks to Sunday’s Secret Recon Mission it only took me about ten minutes to get over to the sneaky little back entrance that is closest to my apartment.  I did what I guessed to be a very smart thing at that point.  I was purposefully about ten minutes early, so I stopped at a nice-looking Wurst joint and picked up a Brat.  No telling what the agenda was going to be once I met the guys, and the last thing I wanted was to start drilling Mass’s of Festbier on an empty stomach.  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

A few things about Oktoberfest, and these not from the Internet but rather from my own observations.  First, the tents are unspeakably huge.  Sure, I’ve given you the cold stats, but just stop to think about six, seven thousand or more folks seated at rows of booths, packed in shoulder to shoulder, eating, smoking tens of thousands of cigarettes, and toasting each other constantly with these 10-pound mugs of brew.  It’s hypnotizing.  Add a big brass/electric band in the center on a 25-foot high square stage playing everything from traditional Bavarian oom-pah music to mid-seventies hair-band classics and you’ve got a head-shaker.  So after poking my head into three or four, I felt I had gotten the picture. 

I was to meet the guys at Ammer Zelt, which is one of the eighteen “small tents” dotted between and among the giants.  This one was a baby, holding only about 1,500 or so, located right next to the colossal Augustiner main tent, and obviously an affiliated property, shall we say.  When I mentioned Logitech to the host, he smiled broadly and led me with a flourish to four or five booths in the center of the hall, where I immediately recognized Carsten and his troops, who had clearly started without me, even though I was neither thirty seconds early nor late.  Remember, we’re in Germany here.  If you want to get off on the wrong foot with these folks, just show up a few seconds late.  And early is every bit as bad.  I sat down at Carsten’s booth, which could comfortable seat four, with five other people.  The table was completely covered with a huge appetizer tray which was balanced on four empty Mass mugs.  Offerings included lots of huge Bavarian semi-soft pretzels, various cold smoked sausages, and ice cream scoop-sized dollops of different spreads, which I found to include garlicky butter-ish stuff, different cheesy stuffs, and some really delicious smoked fishy stuff.  Everyone was slathering one or more of these spreads on everything available, pretzels and sausages alike.  It was absolutely delicious.  A Mass of Augustiner magically appeared, and the fact that I greeted the table in German was roundly applauded and then repeatedly toasted. 

For several hours, actually.

I was told later that you can get wine as well as soft drinks or water, and even a half-liter (“eines halbes Helles”) of beer, “for the ladies” as Carsten said with a wink, but I didn’t see any of them.  What I saw was hundreds upon hundreds of Mass’ going in one direction and hundred and hundreds of empties going in the other, towards the dishwasher, which ran full time.  None of this is particularly cheap either, by the way, and there is an annual controversy when the official price of a Mass is announced.  Not surprisingly, it goes up nearly every year, and there is public outrage and literally front-page news over every ten Euro-cents increase.  There was much discussion as to whether the universe could even continue to exist when this years’ all-time high price of EU7.50 (US$9.60) was announced, a whopping 40 Euro-cents increase over last year’s maximum.  It’s enough to make you go out and get sauced. (In 2011, the announced price of a liter of beer broke the nine euro barrier for the first time, at EU9.20, or US$12.55! –Ed.)

Confident that one thing I would definitely not be doing was drinking on an empty stomach, I started to relax, forget about the math, and have some fun.  Carsten was fascinated with the idea that an American would willfully subject himself to a week of German Immersion Therapy, and our tablemates were equally perplexed, and said so.  Directly.  Naturally, they only wanted to speak German to see exactly what I had learned, and I was all too happy to bungle along, particularly as Carsten was totally my advocate, repeatedly telling them to slow down, stop using beery colloquialisms, and repeat themselves.  He was so great about it, I could’ve kissed him.

But I am not warm.

I noticed that Carsten’s first beer had been much lighter than mine as he ordered a “Normal” from our waitress for his second, and asked him if he had been drinking something different.  He told me that since he had walked from the train to d’Wiesn and was thirsty he had started off with a half-and-half, beer and lemonade.  Yuck.  In England, they call this stuff Shandy, and drink it on hot days.  In Germany, they call it beer and lemonade.  Did I mention that Germans are fairly direct?

Since by this time I had completely forgotten about equivalent numbers of Budweiser’s, alcohol percentages, and the fact that I had to go to work the next day, I was rapidly nearing the bottom of my second Mass of Helles.  I was also getting wrecked.  Not wanting to make much more of a fool out of myself than I already had, I prepared to offer my sincere thanks to all and take my leave.  So I stood up.

“Toilet?” said Carsten, directly.

“No, actually, I’m going to say thank you and good night.” I said in my best beery German.

Carsten looked at me with a mix of sadness and horror.

“But we haven’t even eaten yet!” he laughed.  “Sit down!  We have ordered dinner already.”

OK.  At this point, I had consumed about two pounds of sausages, a whole two-foot-wide pretzel, lots of goopy dip stuff, and oh yeah, two liters of The World’s Best Beer.  Not to mention the "safety" Bratwurst.  So naturally, I sat down and had dinner.  We ate the traditional dinner of d’Wiesn: potato dumplings, beet-reddened kraut, and a Hendl each.  “Hendl” is another Old Bavarian word meaning hen or chicken, and they go through thousands and thousands a day.  You can see (and smell) them cooking from early morning until late night on long rotisseries over charcoal fires that never die for 18 days.  Delicious stuff all, especially the Hendl, which was crispy on the outside and moist and tender inside, an interesting species of local chicken with no real white meat, just slightly less dark at the breast.  Oh, and here comes another Mass of Festbier to wash it all down.  How appropriate!

After the plates were cleared and dinner was duly toasted, we settled in for some more music and chat.  My German began to desert me completely, and Carsten switched mercifully to about 80% English.  The band, situated about thirty feet above one end of our tent, came back after a break and began playing more loudly.  I suddenly realized that they were no longer playing traditional Bavarian folk and drinking tunes.  The dead giveaway was when they broke into “Smooth Operator.”  So of course I deadpanned Carsten and said “Hey Carsten, is this a traditional Bavarian song?”  To which he responded, equally deadpan, “Hell, no, Frank, that's Smooth Operator!”

Shortly after, I gave up.  The forty-ish lead singer was belting out “These Boots were Made for Walkin’” in her Dirndl, and I was having a hard time understanding even the basics of the conversations raging at our tables.  Their English was fast approaching the deconstructed state of my German, and it was time to go.  Following six or eight heartfelt toasts, naturally.  I honestly can’t tell you whether or not that third Mass was my last.  I strongly suspect it wasn’t.  You do the math, it gives me a headache to think about it.

**********

If you’ve made it this far, I owe you an apology for the length of this missive.  I’m actually editing it down here Sunday night as I listen to the Eagles game live on the computer.  It was a lot longer just an hour ago!  Tomorrow I’m in the Munich office for one more day, then off to Amsterdam Tuesday and Cologne Wednesday for PhotoKina.

Who knows what adventures await?

Best wishes to all,

Frank

Thanks for reading!
FS
September 20, 2011

Oktoberfest 2006

Let me explain these next two posts.  From 2004-2006 I traveled extensively in Europe while working for Amazon.com. London and Munich were my most frequent destinations, and I spent cumulatively months in Munich, my unquestioned favorite.  During my trips, I penned Road Updates, silly little missives that I sent to an email list of friends. During one epic month-long trip to Berlin, Amsterdam, Cologne, and Munich, I ended the trip with two weeks in Munich, the second of which overlapped Oktoberfest.

By popular demand, I am re-posting these Updates in their original, untouched form, errors and all, on my new blog.  Your comments, as always, are welcome.  Here's Part One.

September, 2006

Howdy, all:

Sorry about the somewhat impersonal group mail, but I wanted to give you a quick update from Munich.  Also sorry if a lot of this is a repeat for some of you.

The less said about the IFA trade show in Berlin the better.  It was crowded, hot, and too long, but it was actually quite productive from a boring business perspective.

My dear Laura made the absurdly long trek from Seattle through Amsterdam to Munich to visit me for a long weekend following IFA, and it was wonderful.  The weather forecast had been for rain all weekend right up until Laura left Seattle, but miraculously the storms blew through the night before her arrival and left us with three days of unseasonably sunny, breezy, warm weather.  We saw some sights, ate some great food, and even celebrated our 27th (!) wedding anniversary Saturday night at my favorite Provencal restaurant here.  Overall, a great weekend.

Since her departure, I have been living a monk-like existence in a tiny student apartment (more on it below), going to school all day and roaming Munich at night, really getting a feel for the different areas of the city.

My week of immersion German classes ended yesterday, and I promptly went out to celebrate.  I was planning to splurge on one of the top-rated restaurants downtown, but as I walked about and perused the menus I realized I was in more of a swill-beer-and-party frame of mind than a fine-wine-and-dine mood.  Wound up much later at the ultra-tony Bar Anna, a huge trendy hotel bar, so exclusive that there were reserved seats at the bar!  There was also a small but chic restaurant area, and to my surprise and delight it turned out to be very good Japanese.  Cha-ching!  Beer and sushi!

The classes were beyond hard.  I had six 45-minute classes per day, for billing purposes, but what it boiled down to was two hour-and-a-half sessions in the morning separated by a break, a long lunch, and then another hour-and-a-half session with a second teacher in the afternoon.  The two teachers conspired to arrange the punishment thusly: Claudia, a fifty-something classic German battleaxe, would beat me senseless with German grammar and structure for nearly three hours, then after lunch Sabine would conduct a daily "conversation session" around a topic or two in the afternoon.  You get the picture: It was the classic good teacher, bad teacher set up.  Did I mention that Sabine was also a leggy thirty-something blond with an easy laugh and an infectious smile?  No, I didn't think so.

I have a few good stories from the classes, for sure, but here I will share my favorite.  I was in my standard tongue-tied condition during Wednesday's afternoon “conversation” session, trying to explain the horrible service I had experienced along with the great food at the world famous Rathskeller in Marienplatz downtown the previous evening.  I had been walking for a while and was hot and thirsty, and no one in the restaurant would wait on me.  I was explaining this as best I could to Sabine, saying (in German) "Of course, I was very hot."  At this point, although in three days I had not heard her speak a single word of English other than to define words, she literally leapt from her seat and said, in perfect English, "Frank, listen carefully, because I'm going to save you a hell of a lot of embarrassment right now."  I was speechless.  Of course, it turns out that the literal "I was hot", or "Ich war Heiss" in local Deutsch slang, means "I was horny."  So as it happened, I had looked straight at the old waitress at the Rathskeller and pronounced, "I am very horny tonight!"

Mama mia.

I also learned that "I am warm" in literal German, means "I am gay."  I have successfully blocked out all recollection of whether I used this phrase before I learned all of this, but no one followed me home at least.

My apartment is very small, with a tiny combo stove, fridge, and sink, a small cupboard and wardrobe, and a single bed.  I do have a small balcony, and most important a bathroom with a real shower.  The drain doesn't work particularly well, however, limiting showers to seven minutes before it overflows. I was luxuriating in the shower for nine minutes this morning, Saturday, and flooded the whole damn place.

Aye carumba!

Oktoberfest started today as well, and I found out, totally unexpectedly, that my apartment, which is in a horrible lower class student and Turkish immigrant neighborhood, is less than 1.5 K from the Oktoberfest site.  Last night, before it had even started, there were British and German guys in the park behind my place at 4:00 am belting out competing football songs at the top of their lungs.  When the largely Muslim denizens of the floors below mine countered with group shouts of "Allah Akbar" (God is great) the police finally came and shut the whole mess down.

Today, it seems that the entire population of Bavaria has lost its collective mind and is parading around the town (starting at about 8:00am I might add) drinking beer and singing, virtually all dressed in Dirndl's and Lederhosen.  I shit you not.

Humpin' himiny.

Another Munich Update will follow, including an actual first-hand Oktoberfest report.  Ah, the things I do to make these updates interesting.

More soon.

Frank
(At the halfway point of my month-long odyssey.)

Technical note:  for those concerned about my thumbs, not to mention my mental stability, no, I did not type this missive upon my Crackberry.  I sent it from a deep-cover address in an Internet cafe to my Blackberry, from whence it has been forwarded. -F

Stirring the Lance Pot

I don’t know if Lance Armstrong doped.  

And neither do you, unless you are an ex-teammate or confidant who actually witnessed it.  And that can only prove his guilt, not his innocence, because it is impossible to prove the negative.  But the events of the last few weeks have taken the whole Armstrong doping conversation, which has been going on for a decade now, to a whole new state, one in which it is now almost universally assumed that there was indeed systematic doping on the USPS team.  And as the leader of that team through multiple cycling seasons and Tour de France victories, Lance would certainly seem to have almost certainly have had knowledge of such a program, even if he was somehow not personally involved. 

Tyler Hamilton’s pained admissions under the bright lights of 60 Minutes last week seemed to be the tipping point.  Watching his hesitations, his downcast and darting gaze focused anywhere but on the camera or the interview, and his frequent qualifications that “everybody did it” were enough to convince most observers that this was a guy who was telling the truth, and that it was torture for him to do it. At the same time, the ever smaller group of Armstrong defenders point to each of those things as evidence that Hamilton has made a Faustian deal to lie about the whole thing, cloaking his unquestioned guilt of doping and undeniable previous lies in a story that is at once full of specific details and lacking dates, times, and particularly corroboration.

Following are my own personal observations.  They are neither comprehensive nor conclusive, but hopefully will represent a slightly different perspective for those of you who haven’t followed this story in all its arcane detail, as I have.

I first met Lance Armstrong on May 7^th, 1995, in Winston-Salem, NC.  The occasion was the penultimate stage of the Tour du Pont, a long road stage won by the sprinters.  My son and I were staying at the same hotel as the Motorola team, courtesy of an old boss of mine that was at that time a senior executive with Motorola.  We had watched Lance finish in the pack from the VIP tent at the finish line.  He was heading into the next day’s final stage, an individual time trial, holding a four minute and five second lead over the second place rider, a virtually insurmountable lead.  We met him accidentally in the lobby after the race, and he could not have been nicer to my young son or me.  This was a very pleasant surprise, as his public image at the time was one of an arrogant, brash jerk.

As cycling fans, we met Lance a few more times at the annual US Pro Championship, which was held in Philadelphia, including the year he returned to cycling following his cancer.  He was always friendly, and especially nice to our kids.  We became aware of the Lance Armstrong Foundation from a close friend who had worked as a volunteer at the annual Ride for the Roses in Austin Texas, a party and mass ride for the “Peloton Project,” a loose association of folks who worked as fundraisers for the Foundation.  Following a good friend’s wife’s losing battle with breast cancer, and my wife’s cancer, I joined the Peloton Project and wound up riding in the Ride For the Roses for many years, four times as a “Yellow Jersey Team” member.  This was a status conferred on only the highest level fundraisers world wide, and came with lots of perks, the most desirable being a short private ride with Lance out on one of his training courses in the Texas hill country.  As a regional mentor for the Foundation and a Yellow Jersey guy, I had numerous occasions to talk with Lance over these years, which was at the same time he was winning the Tour every year, and of course exactly when all the USPS doping was supposedly going on.  I personally asked Lance about the never-ending drug stories before the Yellow Jersey ride in October, 2008.  It was then that I received the famous piercing blue-eyed stare, and his forceful personal denial of having ever used a performance-enhancing drug. “Never have, and never will,” is the quote I recall, and his delivery was indeed a bit scary in its intensity.

                                                                ~

When you look at the arguments that have been made about Lance and doping for at least the last ten years, there are two that are made over and over again: that his physiological performance numbers are flat out impossible without doping; the old “everybody was doing it” argument (pretty compelling when you look at the number of podium finishers in the Lance era of the Tour de France who have been implicated in doping.)  And then of course there is the riveting testimony of Tyler Hamilton on 60 Minutes, with all of the attendant details like his assertion that the USPS team delivered drugs to riders in white lunch bags and the truly pitiful relation of his happiness at being selected to receive the drugs: “I mean, it's sad to say it, I was kinda willing and accepting of the lunch bag, but you know, in a way it was also an honor that, 'Wow, like, they think I'm good enough to be with the 'A' team guys.”  There was also his corroboration of Floyd Landis’ previous claim that a positive test for the red-cell booster EPO had been suppressed by the testing lab at the request of international cycling officials.

So, the evidence is in, and there can be only one conclusion, right?  Lance Armstrong used EPO to win his seven Tours de France.  Nothing else makes sense, right?

Not so fast.

Even the most virulent Lance-haters will admit that virtually all of the “evidence” is circumstantial.  There has been no “smoking gun” thus far.  So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at the evidence against the “Lance is a doper” argument, while admitting that it too is just as circumstantial.

To understand any of this, you don’t have to be a doctor, but you do have to understand the primary reason for doping and the primary drugs used.  Sure, there are allegations of the use of testosterone, HGH, and others, but the primary allegation comes down to the use of EPO.  EPO, short for Erythropoietin, is a hormone, created naturally in the kidneys and liver, which regulates the body’s production of red blood cells.  Red blood cells carry oxygen to the muscles, and more red blood cells means more oxygen and, in high-intensity athletic endeavors, that means a huge aid in stamina, endurance and recovery.  In a three-week, three thousand mile plus bike race that includes tens of thousands of feet of vertical climbing through some of France’s longest and steepest mountain passes, the difference between high and low red blood cell production can result in time differences measured in hours.  Who wouldn’t be interested in a cheap pill that boosts red blood cell production?  It should be no surprise that in the mid-90’s many, many professional bike racers were using this inexpensive drug, especially because EPO is a natural substance that is already present in the body.  Even after cycling’s drug police knew about synthetic EPO and placed it on the long list of banned substances, it took several years to produce a reliable test for the synthetic form of the hormone.  From the earliest tests to the much more sophisticated ones now available, the test indicates only a level of likelihood that an athlete is using, not a certainty.  For this reason, athletes from the late 90’s on were tested not only for EPO (a urine test), but also for hematocrit, which is the percentage of blood volume occupied by red blood cells.  By setting an arbitrary maximum percentage allowed for professional competition, authorities sought a secondary way to at least slow the use of blood-boosters like EPO.

Enough science. So, with most of the competitive riders during the time of Lance’s seven straight Tour victories presumably using EPO undetected, Lance could not possibly put up the numbers he did, right? 

Well, let’s first remember that Lance didn’t win every stage of every Tour.  He didn’t even win a majority of the tough climbing stages that require the most stamina and endurance and also the most effective recovery for the next day’s stage.  Also, the effect of EPO is pretty straightforward, boosting red blood cell production.  Could there possibly be another, drug-free, legal way to accomplish the exact same thing? 

Why, yes, actually there is, and Lance pioneered its use.

It’s called hypoxic training, or altitude training, and the theory is very simple.  If an athlete trains for a period of time at high altitude, the body reacts by increasing its production of natural EPO, in order to provide more red blood cells to take an adequate amount of oxygen out of the thinner air to drive the muscles.  When an athlete who has trained in this manner returns to a lower altitude, he has an advantage over those who have trained at lower altitudes: he has more red blood cells, or a higher hematocrit.  This is nothing new; cyclists have known the value of altitude training for years, and many professional teams routinely hold altitude training camps prior to major multi-day stage races.  It is undeniable, however, that Lance and his coach, Chris Carmichael, took this approach to levels of scientific scrutiny and training intensity that were previously unheard of.

Lance is well known to be maniacally detail-oriented in every aspect of his training and racing.  Every part on every bike he rides is measured, re-measured, tested, re-set, and re-measured and re-set ad infinitum. It should come as no surprise that he strove to maximize the positive effects of altitude training, and in the late 90’s he was the first athlete to travel with a new invention, the portable hypoxic sleeping chamber, or “oxygen tent.” It’s actually a negative oxygen tent, since instead of adding oxygen to the enclosed sleeping changer it uses a pump to reduce the amount of oxygen in the air, thus simulating high altitude.  What this did for Lance was enable him to maintain his higher hematocrit (achieved pre-race through altitude training) for the long stretches that the Tour passes through at lower altitudes between the toughest mountain stages.  If you look at Lance’s seven wins, many of his most dominant mountain rides have come toward the end of the Tour, where he had a clear advantage over lower-hematocrit riders.  Today there is a whole industry around hypoxic training.

There is no question that Lane Armstrong is a uniquely gifted athlete.  Ed Coyle, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, studied and tested Lance for 13 years, right up until his first retirement in 2006. Read the National Geographic article for the details.  This brings up the frequent apologetic response I hear all the time: if no one had been doped, Lance would have won because he was the strongest; everybody was doped, including Lance, and he was the strongest, so what’s the big deal? Well, what if Lance had the identical advantage that was gained by popping a cheap EPO tablet, but achieved it by harder, more scientific training prior to Tours, and maintained it artificially (but legally, without drugs) with a portable hypoxic sleeping chamber during the Tours, putting him on an equal competitive footing with his chemically enhanced rivals.  I remain amazed that you almost never hear about this.

But Lance has always been public about his use of altitude training and hypoxic chambers, and has discussed their use on the record many times.  He has even spoken publicly of the team being so concerned when he started using the portable tent during the Tour that they were constantly testing his hematocrit, worried that he would go over the limit and be forced from the Tour on suspicion of EPO use.  As a matter of fact, he stopped using the chambers during the Tour around 2004, and when I asked him why he told me that number one, he hated it because it was uncomfortable, making it hard to get adequate sleep, and number two, he felt that he and Chris Carmichael’s natural hypoxic training (living and training at altitude for carefully timed periods year-round) was having the same effect.  My bet is he couldn’t get Sheryl Crow to sleep in a plastic tent.

Then there are the tests.  Lance claims to be the most tested athlete in history, and even according to the French drug labs has never tested positive for any performance-enhancing drug.  Of course, this proves nothing (can’t prove the negative) and I am well familiar with the comeback: the tests are easy to beat; just look at Marion Jones, the famous sprinter who famously never failed a drug test and eventually confessed to career-long doping, returned all her Olympic medals in disgrace, and went to jail.  Apples to apples, right?

It is a documented fact that Lance has been tested over 500 times, far more than any cyclist in history, including every rider who has tested positive for anything illegal.  Never positive.  Marion Jones, you say?  According to USADA documents, the official US anti-doping body that controls testing of Olympic athletes, Marion Jones was tested a total of 24 times between 2000 and 2008, roughly the same period as the Lance era.  She was also almost always tested post-race, which veteran convicted dopers will tell you is the easiest to pass, as most doping takes place prior to competition so the advantages of the drugs like EPO are still in effect even though the drug is gone from the body.  Lance, on the other hand, has been surprise-tested, the so called “out of competition” tests, over 150 times, at his home, on vacation, at training camps, pretty much anywhere at any time.   Never positive.

So what about the second big argument, the eyewitness accounts?  First, neither Floyd Landis’ nor Tyler Hamilton’s claims have a corroborating witness.  No one has come forward and said: yes; I was there when Lance boasted of a “fixed” failed test for EPO.  Or transfused.  Or injected EPO. The fact is, there are more than 650 people who were in direct daily contact with Lance Armstrong for over a decade of professional racing, including team members, coaches, team directors, trainers, and team doctors, and the only two of those 650 who claim direct personal knowledge of Lance’s doping are two proven, documented, self-admitted cheaters and liars who have both had mental health issues. Doesn’t that strain credibility at least as much as the possibility that Landis and Hamilton are lying for personal gain (both are pursuing book deals) sour grapes over their career self-destruction, or both?

Then there’s the press and the investigations.  Is it really credible that the entire French sports press was in full Lance-hunting mode for almost ten years, examining the teams garbage, bribing hotel maids, attempting to plant staff on the support teams, and more, and yet not one piece of solid physical evidence was ever found?  Not one piece of rubber tubing, not a syringe, a blood bag, not even a driver or hotel maid willing to come forward and tell what they saw?  In almost ten years?  Plus there were two full-blown investigations involving the police, both of which ended, after years of probing, in dismissal of all allegations and admission that there was in fact no evidence.  Even French cycling officials and the testing labs have issued strong statements denying the 60 Minutes allegations emphatically.

                                                          ~

As I have said repeatedly, none of this is proof of Lance’s innocence.  I strongly suspect that we will never see proof of his doping or an admission of guilt.  What I do expect to learn from the grand jury proceedings and any subsequent trial is whether on not there is evidence of a systematic doping program at the USPS team.  Jeff Novitsky and his team of federal investigators will follow the money, just as they did on the Balco and Marion Jones cases, and they are very good at what they do.  Whether they should be spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on stuff like this I will leave for another day.

I still don’t know if Lance doped.

But neither do you.

So, I’ve got the pot stirred up a bit.  Here, you take the spoon….

(Comments welcome.)