LANDIS ADORES logic. There is no easier way to infuriate him than to say or do something that does not make sense. We are in a Girona restaurant drinking beer and shooting the breeze with the Z-Man when I begin a sentence with the phrase "Of course, it could be worse . . ."

"What does that mean, really?" Landis wants to know. "Of course it could be worse. If you are alive—if you are standing up and have breath in your lungs to say those words—then, yes, I agree, you're definitely right, it could be worse."

Or later, when Z-Man mentions an athlete who spoke about "giving 110 percent."

"Well, why not 112 percent?" Landis inquires, eyes widening with burning incredulity. "Why not 500 percent or 1,300 percent or 38 billion percent? I mean, if he can crank it up beyond 100 percent, why not? What's stopping him, exactly?"

Other items on the Landis list include traffic roundabouts (stoplights are superior), French architecture, and, probably most of all, explanations for losing. The latter especially rankles. Bike racers hardly ever win (Landis's three recent

"Everybody wants to say, 'I couldn't win because of this or that,' " Landis says. "To my way of thinking, it doesn't matter if your goddamn head fell off or your legs exploded. If you didn't make it, you didn't make it. One excuse is as good as another."

victories tripled his win total from his five-year European career), and so most racers naturally tend to attribute losses to ostensible causes: bonking, lack of training, cold, fatigue, team strength, luck. But their logic is of a smaller magnitude than Landis's.

"Everybody wants to say, 'I couldn't win because of this or that,' " he says. "To my way of thinking, it doesn't matter if your goddamn head fell off or your legs exploded. If you didn't make it, you didn't make it. One excuse is as good as another."

Landis takes a sip and leans forward in his chair. "There's only one rule: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins. Period. Because you won't die. Even though you feel like you'll die, you don't actually die. Like when you're training, you can always do one more. Always. As tired as you might think you are, you can always, always do one more."

Z-Man rouses, concerned. "I hope some 16-year-old doesn't read this and then go kill himself on the bike," he says.

"That was what I did," Landis says, not missing a beat. "I read something like that, and I trained like that, and, yeah, I was pretty damn depressed for a while. Then it got better."

So there's no such thing as overtraining?

"If you overtrained, it means that you didn't train hard enough to handle that level of training," Landis says, his fingertip rapping the table for emphasis. "So you weren't overtrained; you were actually undertrained to begin with. So there's the rule again: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins."