the varcinelli is too cool. If you are old enough (and most of those CR posters are) and were serious enough about racing (and many of them were that, too) you had a fixed gear in your past. The old school approach to training was to ride a fixie in the spring, to work on your souplesse. It works. I still spin for a hundred miles or so in the spring (kinda hard on your patellar tendons, though, unless you really work to keep up).

I fixed a 1978 Raleigh Competition GS a way long time ago. All GS except for the sunshine hubs. Still works great (unh, I'll post pics when it quits snowing here.)