I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour. I want to cross one last finish line as my wife and my ten children applaud, and then I want to lie down in a field of those famous French sunflowers and gracefully expire, the perfect contradiction to my once anticipated poignant early demise.

You know when I need to die? When I'm done living. When I can't walk, can't eat, can't see, when I'm a crotchety old man, mad at the world. Then I can die.

The Tour (de France) is essentially a math problem, a 2,000-mile race over three weeks that's sometimes won by a margin of a minute or less. How do you propel yourself through space on a bicycle, sometimes steeply uphill, at a speed sustainable for three weeks? Every second counts.

Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.

At the recent ESPY Awards, addressing Jake Gyllenhaal, who has been recently nominated for an Oscar for "Brokeback Mountain": "Jake, why are you sitting in the front? I thought you liked it in the rear."