Lance Armstrong has said that he doesn’t want to have a 9-to-5 job after he retires from cycling next week. He did the cycling equivalent of that in yesterday’s 189-kilometer stage from Albi to Mende.

Armstrong kept his closest opponents in check, ate lunch on the go, stayed out of trouble, and then showed up on the podium to collect his yellow jersey. Aside from a tight sprint at the end with rival Ivan Basso (CSC), the stage was the six-time Tour champion’s version of the daily grind, the same-old, same-old.

Armstrong finished the stage in 12th place, some 11 minutes behind the winner. He retained his 2:46 overall lead on Basso and improved to 3:46 on third-placed Mickael Rasmussen (Rabobank), who struggled up the final climb.

The Texan’s workdays have followed a similar pattern ever since he emerged from the Pyrenees with a comfortable lead. The day starts with a breakaway, made up of lower-placed riders who sprint ahead in search of minor fame. His Discovery Channel team then sets the tempo, making sure the escape doesn’t get out of hand, all the while watching out for an attack from Basso, Rasmussen, or one of the T-Mobile riders. At the end, there’s an all-out sprint to the finish.

As he did on Wednesday, Armstrong also found time in the middle of yesterday’s stage to do some public relations, smiling and chatting with the motorcycle-driven press corps.

“How are you doing, Lance?” one of them asked.

“Really bad, really bad,” he said with a chuckle as he pedaled along. He, of course, felt just fine.

“Who’s going to win this one?”

“I think Axel [Merckx, of the Davitamon-Lotto team] is going to win the stage.”

It wasn’t a bad prediction. Merckx is a fine sprinter – and a good friend of Armstrong’s – but he finished third. The day’s glory instead went to Spain’s Marcos Serrano (Liberty Seguros), who was one of the early breakaways along with Merckx and France’s Cedric Vasseur (Cofidis). At one point, that group had mounted a 15-minute lead on the Discovery Channel-led peloton, but the escapees were so low-placed in the overall classification that they represented no danger to the leaders.

On the final climb, with spectators cramming both sides of the road and leaving only a handlebar’s width between them, Serrano, Merckx, and Vasseur struggled away from the pack, building about a minute lead. Serrano broke away in the last three kilometers to win his first Tour stage, and the first for his Spanish team this year. Thirty seconds later, Vasseur sneaked past Merckx to capture second place.

The remains of the escape group rolled in one after another over the next two minutes, and then the day’s real action began in the peloton. Armstrong, Basso, and fourth-placed Jan Ullrich (T-Mobile) shifted gears on the day’s last hill, standing on their pedals, jockeying for the lead in the final descent. Armstrong and Basso, the nearest thing this Tour has had to a true rivalry, rode neck-and-neck to the summit, with Ullrich and Australia’s Cadel Evans (Davitamon-Lotto) very close behind. The four flew through the final curves together, and Evans came from the rear to nose past Armstrong at the line.

In the process, Evans climbed over Kazakhstan’s Alexandre Vinokourov for seventh-place in the standings. The Kazakh and Rasmussen could not keep up with Basso and Armstrong on the final ascent.

It was an animated finish for the yellow jersey, but spectators might have been hoping for more from Armstrong, who has yet to win a stage victory on this Tour. He will likely conserve his energy during today’s stage – a hilly, 153.5 kilometers from Issoire to Le Puy-en-Velay in preparation for Saturday’s long individual time trial. But it will be the first day his children will be in France, getting a chance to see just what Daddy does when he goes to work every day.