Lance Armstrong wasn't kidding when he said he was making a cycling comeback. He's got one hard body to prove that he's knee deep in Tour de France training, and the 37-year-old tells Men's Health magazine all about it.

Armstrong's workouts, which make him certain he'll finish on top for an eighth win, have gone high-tech. "Back in the day, people trained on just their feelings," he says. "Now you have heart rate, altitude, lactic acid all measured on one unit." He also has an added step in the training game this go-round.

Armstrong has vowed to submit to a program of blood testing to prove he isn't using performance-enhancing drugs. Sounds like he's the real thing -- what do you think?

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He'll be no sex champion now that he's come out of retirement and has committed to training for his eighth Tour de France. But Lance Armstrong sure hopes to champion another cycling win, adding to his record of seven consecutive first-place Tour finishes. Let the training begin. The sex? On the sidelines for now.

The fact is, says the 36-year-old elite athlete, cancer survivor, and celebrity hook-up guy, that if he's riding his bike five, six, seven hours a day, he just can't be a winner in the sex department. "You have fatigue, low testosterone and a lower libido," says Armstrong.

Imagine what he will have, though -- strength, endurance, and an impressive level of fitness as he begins his quest for what might be one of sport's biggest ever comebacks.

Live Strong, Lance. Live Strong!

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After winning the Tour de France seven times, Lance Armstrong is certainly worthy of a relaxing retirement. However, that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

Since his retirement, the 35-year-old has found himself constantly on the road, promoting LiveStrong Challenges, the Lance Armstrong Foundation for cancer research, joining with Nike and Apple to publicize his involvement in their partnership, and trying to be home to spend time with his kids. Still, his crazy schedule hasn't stopped him from running marathons.

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Athletes sometimes appear to defy human mechanics. For the rest of the world, it would seem insurmountable to ride over 2000 miles in more than 20 days. But to cyclists in the Tour de France, it's part of the job! When you consider athletes like this, it has to make you wonder: is it in their genes?

Some original research was conducted to answer this question, and the short answer is yes! While it goes without saying that practice makes perfect, scientists have identified 23 combinations of genes that enable athletic superiority. The article tells us that the odds of having all 23 is 200,000 to 1.

Those are not bad odds! However, this interesting study brings up some great questions. For example, could we see Olympians genetically engineered some day? While the thought of artificially creating superior athletes takes all the fun out of it, this also backs the truth that hard work and determination usually win in the end.

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It's common in serious athletes to see enlarged hearts. The body adapts to the need for more oxygen by creating thicker walls in the heart. But researchers out of France recently took a look at the hearts of Tour de France cyclists and found that their tickers were 20 to 40% larger than average. Though they can't say for sure whether the bikers' hearts were larger than average to begin with, after cyclists retired, their hearts did lose about 25% of their mass, even though the athletes stayed in excellent shape. Tour de France participants are among athletic elite, so seeing how their bodies adapt to strenuous exercise is pretty interesting!

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I spend a lot of time listening to internet radio while I work and, while I normally wouldn't pick up on Tour de France news as it doesn't rate very high on my interest scale, I have heard a lot about the famous cycling race over the last few days. The 2007 race has been called a disaster after several instances of doping were reported among a number of riders.

What I don't understand is, how do these cyclists assume that they won't get caught? According to this piece, a random sample of riders are tested each day including the race leader and the winner of the current stage, along with a number of other riders. I figure that athletes who show positive results for banned substances have taken them as they think it will help them win, and they must know that they will be tested at the end of the day and found out, so what's the point? Doesn't seem like a very intelligent strategy.

It's a shame that a few riders had to tarnish the reputation of the entire race, but perhaps this will make others smarten up next year. And in happier sports news, not a single one of the 5,500 participants at the Pan-American Games, which just came to a close, tested positive for any banned substances. Apparently these athletes have brains as well as brawn.

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In the world of "fun ways to track your status while working out" cyclists have been a little left out when compared to walkers and runners, who can get heart rate monitors and shoes and mp3 players that tell them what's going on -- all while coordinating their efforts to music no less. Well now there's something specially designed for cyclists by cyclists: the CS600 by Polar. Put together with the help of six teams that competed in last year's Tour de France, it monitors not only your heart rate (of course), but also your bike's speed and altitude, which it sends wirelessly to your computer from it's convenient spot on the bike's handlebars.

Sound cool? It must be -- it costs upwards of $700.

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The Tour de France kicked off this weekend. It may take more than talent and intense training to be a world-class cyclist; one physiologist believes that body structure of elite cyclists is, at least in part, created by nature.

Endurance athletes, like cyclists, require amazing lung capacity. Spain's Miguel Indurain -- a five time Tour winner -- had a lung capacity of eight litres compared to the average six. During exercise, Indurain could consume nearly double the oxygen an untrained adult could consume. Other Tour athletes have had similarly high lung capacity. Elite cyclists also tend to have strong hearts. Lance Armstrong, for example, is estimated to have a heart that's 30% larger than average.

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Floyd Landis, 2006 winner of the Tour de France, was accused of using synthetic testosterone during his race. He's currently involved in a nine-day arbitration hearing that will decide whether to drop or uphold the positive drug test. At Friday's meeting another pro cyclist, Joe Papp, testified on exactly how testosterone can be used in a race and how it improves performance. Papp, who is currently waiting out a two-year doping suspension, was called to the witness stand by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. His testimony disputes claims made by Landis' lawyers stating that testosterone couldn't have helped Landis win and that, because of standard race tests, he wouldn't have tried to use drugs.

Papp displayed a pack of testosterone gel, saying that using the gel had helped him recover between stages of the race and that it's possible to use it undetected. Papp later stated that he tried to race clean for years, but felt the need to dope in order to remain competitive.

Witnesses for the defense included a University of Florida professor, Bruce Goldberger, who took issue with the manner in which Landis' drug tests were done in the laboratory. In his professional opinion, the chain of custody of the samples is unreliable.

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In an age where athletes are willing to subject themselves to severe and unnatural methods of artificially increasing their performance, the threat of gene therapy coupled with doping could prove to be an Achilles heel to legitimate sport. If taking pints of blood out of their body only to modify and put back in wasn't enough, what would happen if genetic doping became the new underground trend?

American Tour de France winner Floyd Landis knows how painful it can be to field accusations about doping. When officials found an excess of testosterone in his blood, it threw the entire race into question. But considering he has been taking cortisone for a degenerative hip, the possibility of whether he was illegally doping or not is still in the air. These type of tests can introduce false positives into the mix, but gene therapy could prove to be totally undetectable and foolproof.

What will happen if and when athletes decide to tamper with their genetic structure in the name of winning? By using the common cold virus, doctors would be able to smuggle in super genes to increase stamina and performance. And don't forget the health implications either: marathon mice that underwent such modifications died much faster than the others. Gene therapy could redefine modern medicine, but we still have a long way to go in understanding it all.

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