Every Second Counts-Lance Armstrong(1)

CHAPTER 1
Pitched Back
So, it looks as though I'm going to live–at least for another 50 years or more. But whenever I
need to reassure myself of this, as I sometimes do, I go out to a place called Dead Man's Hole,
and I stare down into it, and then, with firm intent, I strip off my shirt and I leap straight out
into what you might call the great sublime.
Let's say it's my own personal way of checking for vital signs. Dead Man's Hole is a large green
mineral pool gouged out of a circular limestone cliff, so deep into the hill country ofTexasthat
it's hardly got an address. According to conflicting legends, it's either where Confederates tossed
Union sympathizers to drown, or where Apaches lured unsuspecting cowboys who didn't see
the fall coming. In any event, I'm drawn to it, so much so that I bought 200 acres of brush and
pasture surrounding it, and I've worn a road into the dirt by driving out there. It seems only right
that a place called Dead Man's Hole should belong to a guy who nearly died–and who, by the
way, has no intention of just barely living.

I stand there next to a 45-foot waterfall and examine the drop–and myself, while I'm at it. It's a
long drop, so long that it makes the roof of my mouth go dry just looking at it. It's long enough
for a guy to actually think on the way down, and to think more than one thought, too. Long
enough to think first one thing,A little fear is good for you , and then another,It'sgood for you if
you can swim , and then one more thing as I hit the water:Oh fuck, it's cold . As I jump, there
are certain unmistakable signs that I'm alive: the press of my pulse, the insistent sound of my
own breathing, and the whanging in my chest that's my heart, which by then sounds like an
insubordinate prisoner beating on the bars of my ribcage.
I come up whooping through the foam and swim for the rocks. Then I climb back up and towel
off, and I drive home to my three kids. I burst through the door, and I shout at my son, Luke,
and my twin daughters, Grace and Isabelle, and I kiss them on the necks, and I grab a Shiner
Bock beer with one hand and an armful of babies with the other.
The first time I ever did it, my wife, Kik, just looked at me and rolled her eyes. She knew where
I'd been.
“Was that clarifying for you?” she said.
At what pointdo you let go of not dying? Maybe I haven't entirely and maybe I don't want to.
I know they're out there, lying in their hospital beds, with those damn drip poles, watching the
damn chemo slide into their veins, and thinking,Thisguy had the same thing I do. If he can do it,
I can, too . I think of them all the time.
My friend Lee Walker says I got “pitched back.” What he means is, I almost died, and possibly
even did die a little, but then I got pitched back into the world of the living. It's as good a
description as any of what happened. I was 25 when cancer nearly killed me: advanced
choriocarcinoma spread to my abdomen, lungs, and brain and required two surgeries and four
cycles of chemotherapy to get rid of. I wrote an entire book about death, calledIt's NotAbout the
Bike , about confronting the possibility of it, and narrowly escaping it.
“Are you sure?” I asked the doctor.
“I'm sure.”
“How sure?”
“I'm very sure.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I'm so sure that I've scheduled you for surgery at7A.M.tomorrow.”
Mounted on a light table, the X-ray showed my chest.Black meant clear; white meant cancer. My
chest looked like a snowstorm.
What I didn't and couldn't address at the time was the prospect of life. Once you figure out
you're going to live, you have to decide how to, and that's not an uncomplicated matter. You
ask yourself:now that I know I'm not going to die, what will I do? What's the highest and best use
of my self? These things aren't linear, they're a mysterious calculus. For me, the best use of
myself has been to race in the Tour de France, the most grueling sporting event in the world.
Every time I win another Tour, I prove that I'm alive–and therefore that others can survive, too.
I've survived cancer again, and again, and again, and again. I've won four Tour titles, and I
wouldn't mind a record-tying five. That would be some good living.
But the fact is that I wouldn't have won even a single Tour de France without the lesson of
illness. What it teaches is this: pain is temporary.Quitting lasts forever.
To me, just finishing the Tour de France is a demonstration of survival. The arduousness of the
race, the sheer unreasonableness of the job, the circumnavigation of an entire country on a
bicycle, village to village, along its shores, across its bridges, up and over the mountain peaks
they call cols, requires a matchless stamina. The Tour is so taxing that Dutch rider Hennie
Kuiper once said, after a long climb up an alp, “The snow had turned black in my eyes.” It's not
unlike the stamina of people who are ill every day. The Tour is a daily festival of human
suffering, of minor tragedies and comedies, all conducted in the elements, sometimes terrible
weather and sometimes fine, over flats, and into headwinds, with plenty of crashes. And it's
three weeks long. Think about what you were doing three weeks ago. It feels like last year.
The race is very much like living–except that its consequences are less dire and there's a prize at
the end. Life is not so neat.
There was no pat storybook ending for me. I survived cancer and made a successful comeback
as a cyclist by winning the 1999 Tour, but that was more of a beginning than an end. Life
actually went on, sometimes in the most messy, inconvenient, and un-triumphant ways. In the
next five years I'd have three children, take hundreds of drug tests (literally), break my neck
(literally), win some more races, lose some, too, and experience a breakdown in my
marriage.Among other adventures.
When you walk into the Armstrong household, what you see is infants crawling everywhere.
Luke was born in the fall of 1999 to Kristin (Kik) Armstrong and me shortly after that first Tour,
and the twins came in the fall of 2001. Grace and Isabelle have blue saucer eyes, and they toddle
across the floor at scarcely believable speeds. They like to pull themselves upright on the
available furniture and stand there, wobbling, while they plan how to make trouble. One of
Isabelle's amusements is to stand up on the water dispenser and press the tap until the kitchen
floods, while she laughs hysterically. I tell her, “No, no, no,” and she just shakes her head back
and forth and keeps laughing, while the water runs all over the floor. I can't wait for their teen
years.
Luke adds to the bedlam by riding his bike in the living room, or doing laps in a plastic car, or
tugging the girls around in separate red wagons. He is sturdy and hardheaded. He wears his bike
helmet inside the house and refuses to take it off, even when we go out to dinner. We get some
interesting stares–but anything is better than the fight that ensues if you try to remove the
helmet. He insists on wearing it just in case he might get to go cycling with me. To him, a road
is what his father does for a living. I'm on the road so much that when the phone rings, he says,
“Daddy.”
One afternoon I went to pick my family up at an airport. Luke gave me a long stare and said,
“Daddy, you look like me.”
“Uh, I look likeyou ?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure it's not the other way around?”
“Yeah, I'm sure. It's definitely you that looks like me.”
Also milling around our house are a cat named Chemo and a small white dog named Boone. I
trip around all of them, watching my feet, careful not to step on a critter or a kid. It's been a
chaotic few years, and not without its casualties. There have been so many children and adults
and animals to feed that sometimes things get confused and the dog winds up with the baby
food. One day Kik handed me what was supposed to be a glass of water.
“This tastes like Sprite,” I said.
“Just drink it,” she said.
I could never seem to find the right keys to anything. One time I pulled the ring of keys from my
pocket and stared at them in their seeming hundreds, and said to Kik, wonderingly, “I have the
keys to the whole world.” She just said, “Perfect.”
The reason I have so many keys is because I need so many homes and vehicles, in various
countries and counties. I spend most of the spring and summer in my European home
inGirona,Spain, while I prepare for the Tour. When the racing season is over, I come back
toAustin. Our family lives in a house in centralAustin, and we also have the ranch in the hill
country. But my favorite home is a small hideaway, a one-room cabin just outsideAustin, in the
hills overlooking theColorado River. Across the river there's a rope swing dangling from an old
bent oak, and on hot days I like to swing on the rope and hurl myself into the current.
I love the tumult of my large family, and I've even been accused of fostering a certain amount of
commotion, because I have no tolerance for peace and quiet. I'm congenitally unable to sit still; I
crave action, and if I can't find any, I invent it.
My friends call me Mellow Johnny. It's a play on the French term for the leader of the Tour de
France, who wears a yellow jersey: themaillot jaune. We like to joke that Mellow Johnny is the
Texan pronunciation. The name is also a play on my not-so-mellow personality. I'm Mellow
Johnny, or Johnny Mellow, or, if you're feeling formal, Jonathan Mellow.
Sometimes I'm just Bike Boy. I ride my bike almost every day, even in the off-season, no matter
the weather. It could be hailing, and my friends and riding partners dread the call that they know
is going to come: they pick up the phone, and they hear Bike Boy on the other end, demanding,
“You ridin', or youhidin '?”
One famous November day during the off-season, I rode four and a half hours through one of
the strongest rainstorms on record.Seven inches of precipitation, with flash floods and road
closures everywhere. I loved it. People thought I was crazy, of course. But when I'm on the
bike, I feel like I'm 13 years old. I run fewer red lights now, but otherwise it's the same.
Some days, though, I feel much older than a man in his thirties; it's as if I've lived a lot longer.
That's the cancer, I guess. I've spent a lot of time examining what it did to me–how it aged me,
altered me–and the conclusion I've come to is, it didn't just change my body; it changed my
mind.
I've often said cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. But everybody wants to
know what I mean by that: how could a life-threatening disease be a good thing? I say it
because my illness was also my antidote: it cured me of laziness.
Before I was diagnosed, I was a slacker. I was getting paid a lot of money for a job I didn't do
100 percent, and that was more than just a shame–it was wrong. When I got sick, I told myself:
if I get another chance, I'll do this right–and I'll work for something more than just myself.
I have a friend, a fellow cancer survivor named Sally Reed, who sums up the experience better
than anyone I know. “My house is burned down,” she says, “but I can see the sky.”
Sally was diagnosed with rampant breast cancer in the spring of 1999. The disease had reached
Stage Three and spread to her lymphatic system. She was facing both radiation and
chemotherapy. Right away, all of her smaller fears disappeared, replaced by this new one. She
had been so afraid of flying that she hadn't flown in more than 15 years. But after she got the
diagnosis, she called an airline and booked a flight toNiagara Falls. She went there by herself
and stood overlooking the roaring falls.
“I wanted to see something bigger than me,” she says.
Mortal illness, like most personal catastrophes, comes on suddenly. There's no great sense of
foreboding, no premonition, you just wake up one morning and something's wrong in your
lungs, or your liver, or your bones. But near-death cleared the decks, and what came after was a
bright, sparkling awareness: time is limited, so I better wake up every morning fresh and know
that I have just one chance to live this particular day right, and to string my days together into a
life of action, and purpose.
If you want to know what keeps me on my bike, riding up an alp for six hours in the rain, that's
your answer.
Oddly enough, whilethe near-death experience was clarifying, the success that came afterward
was confusing.
It complicated life significantly, and permanently. The impact of winning the 1999 Tour de
France was larger than I ever imagined it would be, from the first stunned moment when I
stepped off the plane inAustin, into theTexasnight air, to see people there waiting. There was
yellow writing painted on the streets, “Vive la Lance,” and banners stretched across the streets,
and friends had decorated our entire house with yellow flowers, streamers, and balloons. I was
bewildered to be invited to the State Capitol to see our then-governor, George W. Bush, and
afterward there was a parade through town with more than 6,000 cyclists (in yellow) leading the
route. People were lined up five deep along the sides, waving signs and flags.
I didn't understand it: I was just anotherAustinbike geek who liked his margaritas and his
Tex-Mex, and Americans weren't supposed to care about cycling. “You don't get it,” said my
friend and agent, Bill Stapleton.
I lived in a constant, elevated state of excitement; the air was thin and getting thinner, and
compounding the excitement was the fact that Kik and I were awaiting the birth of our first
child, Luke. I kept waiting for things to subside, but they never did–they just got busier. Bill
was swamped with offers and requests and proposed endorsements. He struck some handsome
new deals on my behalf, with prestigious sponsors like Bristol-Myers Squibb, Nike, and
Coca-Cola. With the deals came new responsibilities: I shot half a dozen commercials, posed for
magazine ads and the Wheaties box. I earned the nickname “Lance Incorporated” and now I
was a business entity instead of just a person.
It was estimated that the '99 victory generated $50 million in global media exposure for the
United States Postal Service cycling team. Our budget grew, and now we were a $6 million
year-round enterprise with dozens of support staff, mechanics, cooks, and accountants.
With success came the problem of celebrity, and how not to be distorted by it. There were
invitations that left me and Kik amazed. Robin Williams had a jet. Kevin Costner offered his
house inSanta Barbara. Elton John had a Super Bowl party. Kik and I felt like Forrest Gump,
lurking in the background of photos with accomplished people. We were impressed, so much so
that sometimes we would save the messages on our answering machine and replay them, awed.
But fame, I learned, is an isotope, and it's not good for you. When you become celebrated, a
kind of unhealthy radioactive decay forms around you, and the decay can be creeping, or even
catastrophic. The attention could become addictive. There was no doubt I could have turned
into a swollen-headed jerk, and there's no doubt some people think I did turn into one, much as I
tried to keep it all straight.
One afternoon I said, “Bono called me.”
Kik said, “Really? Brad Pitt called me. He wants to know what time we're having lunch.”
Okay, I got it.
I struggled with what to think about all of it, until I read a remark by J. Craig Ventner, the man
who helped map the human genome. He said, “Fame is an intrinsic negative. People respond to
you based on their preconceived notion of you, and that puts you at a continual disadvantage.” I
agreed. I was just the son of a single mother fromPlano,Texas, a secretary who'd passed on her
conscientious work ethic. It seemed wrong to be idolized by strangers, or to idolize strangers in
turn: I preferred to idolize my mother, or my teammates. They were the people I'd pick to go
through hard times with.
Don't get me wrong–I liked what winning the Tour did for me, as a person, and as an athlete,
and for my family. It made life very comfortable, and I was thankful for that. But I was learning
that not all of the people who flew toParisto be at the finish line were my very best friends. And
I was learning that the only thing wealth meant was that you had a lot of money. If you thought
of fame and wealth any other way, you could get confused–think you achieved it through some
specialness and believe it made you better than others, or smarter.
There was onegood use for celebrity: it was a huge and influential platform from which to lobby
for the cancer cause. I had become a symbol, the poster boy for the hardships of the disease, and
now I was on cereal boxes, andLate Night with David Letterman , and I went to the White
House.
At first I didn't quite understand the intensity of people's curiosity. What did they care about my
particular hurts? But one day Kik said, “You've been on the brink, stood on the edge between
life and death and looked over. You've seen the view from that cliff and come back down. You
can share that perspective.”
The pitched-back experience, I realized, was important: even to participate in the Tour
demonstrated that I had survived, and if I had survived,others could, too . What's more, they
could live the rest of their lives normally, if not even better than before.
It was an important message for the entire cancer community, not just for patients but for
families, physicians, and nurses dealing with the disease. Doctors knew how serious my
situation had been, and how severe my four cycles of chemotherapy had been, and they knew
that (a) I survived it and (b) the treatment didn't ruin my body. That gave the doctors hope, and
it occurred to me that doctors needed hope as much as patients did.
They wanted to use me as an example, and I wanted to be used. But I wanted to be used in the
right way. I was deeply uncomfortable with the word “hero”–it wasn't heroic to survive cancer.
No one was immune; eight million Americans suffered from some form of it, and about a million
were newly diagnosed each year. Like them, I was dealt an unfortunate hand, and I simply did
what came naturally to me: I tried hard.
I met all kinds of people who were fighting the illness, turned yellow and gaunt by
chemotherapy. Go to Sloan-Kettering inNew York, or M. D. Anderson inHouston, or the
Southwest Regional Cancer Clinic inAustin, and you'll see them, 50 or 60 people packed into a
waiting room that only has 30 chairs, people of the widest possible variety, and a handful of
stone-faced, weary nurses.
Other cancer patients wanted to know everything I did, every drug I took, every morsel I
digested.
“What was in your chemo?”
“What did you eat?”
“What kind of vitamins did you take?”
“How much did you ride your bike?”
I was a success story–for the moment. But if I got sick again, I would no longer be a success
story, and the truth was, at times I was still as scared and anxious as a patient. What if the
cancer came back? Each time I visited a hospital I had an uneasy reaction. The first thing that
struck me was the smell. If I did a smell test I could find a hospital with my eyes closed:
disinfectant, medicine, bad cafeteria food, and recycled air through old vents, stale and artificial.
And the lighting: a leaky radiant, it made everyone look pale, like they didn't have quite enough
blood in their bodies. The sounds were artificial and grating: the squeak of the nurses'
rubber-soled shoes, the sound of the hospital mattresses. A hospital mattress is covered with
plastic, and I remembered how it felt and sounded as I shifted in the bed, the crackle of the
covering beneath me, every time I moved, crackle, crackle, wrinkle,wrinkle .
These are the odors and sensations and images that all cancer patients carry with them no matter
how far removed they are from the disease, and they are so traumatic, so concentrated, that they
can bring about reactions years afterward.
Some people even get physically ill when they encounter sights or smells that remind them of
illness. There was a story in theNew England Journal of Medicine : a woman was treated for
breast cancer with very arduous chemo, and she suffered violent bouts of nausea. Five years
later, she was walking in a mall when she ran into her oncologist, the doctor who had treated
her. She threw up. So that's how cancer stays with you. And it has stayed with me.
When I had the illness, I fought it with the hope of returning to my life, but I never gave any real
thought to what that life would be. The term “life after cancer” has very real ramifications: you
might be dealing with the loss of a leg or a breast, or with infertility, or, as in my own case, with
sterility, a potentially lost career, and deep anxieties. There are physical, emotional, and financial
consequences. In other words, you can save someone's life, but what about saving thequality of
that life?
All of these issues fell under the title “survivorship,” a curious, post-traumatic state of being that
I was experiencing, and which all cancer survivors experience in one form or another.
Survivorship, I decided, should be the core of the cancer foundation I'd launched: managing the
illness and its aftereffects was as important as fighting it. The Lance Armstrong Foundation
began to take shape as a place where people could come for information of the most personal
and practical kind. There were other, richer foundations and more comprehensive Web sites, but
at the LAF, hopefully you could call or e-mail us and get a greeting card from me to a patient, or
you could ask, what's the right exercise for breast-cancer patients and survivors?
Most people, I discovered, just wanted to be heard, or sometimes they just wanted to be
touched. I met a boy named Cameron Stewart who has leukemia, got it when he was about six.
“Did you have a port?” he asked me.
“Did I have a port? Look at this,” I said.
I unbuttoned my shirt and showed him the scar on my chest. He took off his shirt, too. He had a
small port inserted in his tiny little bird chest.
Cameron and I have kept in touch; he came toAustinwith his family for our annual foundation
bike race. He's in remission, and he's growing into a healthy kid. He likes to say, “I have Lance
Armstrong legs.”
I met other athletes with cancer, and we swapped stories and anecdotes. I laughed with Eric
Davis, the great baseball player, about trying to eat during chemo. “Caesar salad with chicken,”
he said. “I ate two of them, every day, right before the chemo. Because when you take chemo,
you throw up. And if you don't have anything in you, you can't throw up. Andnot being able to
throw up is even worse than throwing up. So I'd eat my Caesar salad. It went in, just so it could
come out.”
Doctors got cancer, too. A prominent physician inNew Yorkwas diagnosed with prostate
cancer. We got to know each other via e-mail. He wrote, “I hope I live for ten more years.” I
wrote him back: “I hope you were joking about living only ten years,” I said. “I'll see you in
thirty.”
I never tired of the subject, of talking about it or hearing about it or reliving it. I celebrated the
three-year anniversary of my diagnosis onOctober 2, 1999, and I called it “Carpe Diem Day,”
meaning, “Seize the Day.” It remained the most important day of the year, larger than any
birthday or anniversary or holiday, and it was a day filled with introspection, of thinking about
second chances.
Every so often a friend or a family member discovered just how much cancer occupied my mind.
One afternoon my coach, Chris Carmichael, told me that he had begun working with other
athletes who had cancer. Chris wanted my counsel. “You have a great template for me to work
from,” he said. “You've beenthere, you know exactly what those athletes are facing.” I did: the
long days with an IV in the arm, the heaving nausea, and the scars and chemical burns that
would tattoo their bodies. But I didn't feel like an expert on how to beat cancer, I just felt lucky.
“You don't know, this thing could come back tomorrow, come back in me,” I said to Chris. “It
only went away because mine was treatable. But it's not really gone and it's not something that
ever does disappear. I still worry about it.”
“Lance, it's not coming back,” he said.
“Who says? Who says it can't come back?”
At no point could I say, “That's over.” Even with a Tour victory, and a new baby on the way, I
still had the lingering impression that everything might go away overnight, that I might not be
able to ride again, or even that I'd get sick again.
My son camein the early hours of a mid-October morning, and his birth was hectic and difficult:
at first, he had trouble breathing and the nurses took him away to clear his lungs. Finally, he let
go a beautiful howl.
The fear at that moment when he wasn't breathing trumped any fear I'd ever known. Kik and I
looked at each other, and we instantly realized the truth about parenthood: it's the most
vulnerable state in the world. Later, Kik said, “Now we're both capable of being emotionally
annihilated.” To be a parent was to be totally stripped down, emotionally naked, and that would
be true for the rest of our lives.
After Luke was cleaned and wrapped in a blanket, we settled into a room to get some rest. But
the reverberations and anxieties lasted all night and made it impossible to sleep. I shifted on the
plastic hospital mattress. I thought about the difference in the fear I had for myself during
cancer, and the fear I had for someone else's well-being now that I was a father.
I thought about my mother, and wondered at the risks she had watched me take without
interfering, the things she had watched me climb, the high dives and hard falls, the times I
wrecked my bike, and of course, the time I got sick. Nothing could be as emotionally hazardous,
or interesting, or rewarding, as the job of being a parent.
Having a child was an excellent way to feel alive, I decided. Not unlike jumpingoff a cliff.
Cancer made me want to do more than just live: it made me want to live in a certain way. The
near-death experience stripped something away. Where others have a little bit of
trepidation–Am I ready for a child, what happens if people don't like me, should I do this or is it
too dangerous–I didn't anymore. To me, there were some lives where you might as well be dead.
Illness had left me with a clear view of the difference between real fear and meredisquiet, and of
everything worth having, and doing.
The trick was to make sure it wasn't also a recipe for disaster. I was a confirmed risk-taker, but
now I was also a husband, father, and businessman responsible for others. Did that mean I had
to make concessions, become more conservative? It was an essential question. I wanted to live a
life of action, but I also wanted to live a life of vigilance.
It was an uneasy balance, much easier in theory than in practice. I wanted to be a father–and I
also wanted a motorcycle. My friends lectured me to slow down; for years my pal John Korioth
had been yelling at me to drive more slowly. Korioth was the best man at our wedding, and we
call him “College,” which is short for College Boy. We call him that because he played college
basketball, and one night he and another of my best friends, Bart Knaggs, got into a beer-fueled
game of one-on-one. Bart started taunting John. “Come on, College,” he said, “let's see you
make one.” He's been College to us ever since.
When I had a Porsche, before the birth of my kids, College was always begging me to ease off
the accelerator. I'd roar down the freeways, while he flinched in the passenger seat,
white-knuckled and cussing in anger. “Son of a bitch!” he'd scream, “Slow down!” I'd just die
laughing.
I also thought it was hysterically funny to make him turn pale on bike rides. We would ride out
to a place calledRedBudTrail, where there's a hill that sweeps down into a blind left-hand turn.
I'd descend the hill at high speed, swing wide into the opposite lane, and then suddenly dive into
the turn. It scared him every time. I explained to him that compared to a high-speed mountain
descent, it was an elementary move, and it looked much more dangerous than it really was. But
College didn't believe me, until one day inFranceI showed him what race-pace was really like.
One minute we were gliding down an alp, side by side. The next minute I was gone, rocketing
downhill into the mist. He's never bothered me again aboutRedBudTrail.
But with the arrival of children, I've reprioritized. I got rid of the Porsche in favor of a
family-friendly car. Not long ago, a gentleman invited me to tour a Ferrari factory.
“You don't understand,” I said, “I need something with three baby seats.”
College claims that the craziest and most dangerous thing I do these days is argue with truckers,
and he might be right. Over the years, I've been run off the road by too many pickups and rock
trucks to count.Texastruck drivers hate cyclists; we have an ongoing war with them on the state
byways. I've been blown into ditches, hit by stones, and threatened with tire irons. So I have a
tendency to want to take on trucks personally.
A few years ago, College and I were blown off the road by an 18-wheeler. College flipped over
on his bike, and the chain came off. I was livid. I spat the grit out of my mouth and went
chasing after the truck, pedaling hard. Behind, I could hear College hollering at me, “Stop, at
least wait for me!”
The truck pulled up at a light. I braked and leaped off my bike. Just then a guy stepped out . . .
and then another guy got out . . . and then another. The last guy pulled a knife out of his back
pocket, just a pocketknife, I noted, but still, it looked ready to unfold. By now, however, I was
too angry to be scared.
“Are you trying to kill me?” I asked.
“You don't belong on this road,” one of them said.
“What do you mean we don't belong?”
“I pay taxes on this road,” another one said.
I burst out laughing. “Yeah, taxes are a hot issue with me, too,” I said. Just then, fortunately,
College arrived, and stepped between us, and advised me to calm down. We haggled about the
tax issue a bit more, and all of us decided to get back to our respective vehicles and move on.
Things like that have happened again and again. Sometimes it's dangerous, and sometimes it's
funny, and sometimes it's a little of both. There's a particularly bad stretch of road we call
Redneckville, a desolate sector where trucks roar through the intersections and the only
businesses for miles are a couple of convenience stores. One morning, I was out riding with
another localAustincyclist over the blacktop when an old pickup truck came right for us. It
aimed its windshield toward us and never wavered, a game of chicken. We veered off the road
and sailed into a ditch, both of us flying over our handlebars.
We lay there, scraping the dirt off, when we heard a disembodied voice speak to us from above.
A telephone repairman was high on a pole, peering down at us. He'd watched the whole thing.
His voice floated down to us from the phone wires.
“If you-all don't call the cops, I'm calling 'em. 'Cause that's not right.”
The result of these adventures is that I'm more careful riding my bike aroundAustin. These days
I travel with somebody following me in a car, or on a motorbike, to help shield me from the
trucks, the rocks, and the cranks in their pickups. I can't afford to get hit or hurt by some guy
coming from behind.
I still like to ride out on isolated roads with friends, though. We ride, and we think aloud, and
talk. Once when College and I were out riding, we discussed risk, and recklessness, and the
difference between the two. What's adventurous and what's plainly imprudent? To me, what I
do on my bike or with my body is not high-risk, because I'm a professional. I have expertise in
handling my own limbs, and what might seem risky to others is mundane to me. Chasing
truckers, on the other hand, is purely reckless.
“I'm going to give you a hypothetical situation,” College said. “You die. Luke has no father.”
He was obviously trying to scare me. I was silent.
“And your twins grow up having never really met you.”
I thought it over.
“Well, look,” I said. “First of all, ain'tnobody killing me.”
College threw back his head and shouted with laughter. “Lance Armstrong, ladies and
gentlemen,” he said.
He was right, of course, but I wasn't about to give him the satisfaction. The truth is, I may never
be reformed, may never find the proper balance between risk and caution. But I try to be more
careful, and my caution grows in direct proportion to the number of people I love, my circle of
family and my friends. When I'm descending a mountain, I'm less aggressive than I used to be. In
the old days I'd descend so fast, sometimes I'd catch cars. Now I don't need to, I just get down
the mountain, because the fact that I have a family is in the back of my mind. You can't win a
race on a descent, but you can lose one, and you can lose your life, too. I don't want to lose my
life, all I have, on a mountainside.
The real reason I drive a family car now isn't just for the kids. I drive it simply so that I'll slow
down.
But some things in me won't change: I like to control things, like to win things, like to take
things to the limit. A life spent defensively, worried, is to me a life wasted.
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 bastard, mad at the world. Then I can die.
Maybe I didn't do enough cannonballs when I was a kid, because I was so busy working hard,
making my own living and trying to get out ofPlano. Or maybe I have a different appreciation of
what limits really are. Who knows? Maybe one thing the pitched-back experience does is make
the barriers different, one threshold higher. Life, to me, is a series of false limits and my
challenge as an athlete is to explore the limits on a bike. It was my challenge as a human being
to explore them in a sickbed. Maybe cancer is a challenge no one needs, but it was mine.
All I know is,something makes me want to jump.
So this is about life.Life after cancer.Life after kids.Life after victories.Life after some personal
losses. It's about risk, it's about agenda, and it's about balance. It's about teeing the ball up high
and hitting it hard while trying not to lose control. And if you shank it, then go and find your
ball and try it again . . . because the way you live your life, the perspective you select, is a choice
you make every single day when you wake up. It's yours to decide.
My ranch, which I bought with my father-in-law, Dave Richard, is on a bluff near a town called
Dripping Springs. I've named the property Mirasol, which means, “to watch the sun.” The house
will be positioned on the highest point of the 204 acres, and turned at an angle so that it catches
the sun as it meanders down in the summer, or as it sinks more hurriedly in winter.
The first time I ever went out to Dead Man's Hole, I traipsed around it with Dave. I studied the
waterfall and took a picture of it. Afterward, it stayed with me. I kept looking at the picture, and
I showed it to Kik, and I said, “I'm jumping off that sucker.” She just said, “Okay.”
Finally, I went back out there with Dave and my friend and architect,Ryan Street, who is
designing the ranch house. After we did some work sighting the house, we climbed into a truck
and drove down through the brush and parked in a grove of live oak. From there we hiked to
the swimming hole. First, Ryan and I slid into the pool and checked its depth. Ryan dove down
deep and came up sputtering. He said, “I went down until my ears rang,” he said.
“Maybe you should go deeper,” I said uncertainly.
“I'd get the bends,” he said.
We climbed back up, and then stepped carefully through the rocks, looking for a good place to
jump from. Finally we found the spot we were looking for. I stood there, shaky in my knees,
with that parchedness in the roof of my mouth.
“Don't touch me,” I said to Ryan.
“I'm nowhere near you,” he said.
Knees bent, I peered over the edge. “Oh, man,” I said.
Down below, I saw Dave sitting on a fallen tree by the pool. I yelled at him over the noise of the
waterfall.
“Hey!” I hollered. “Why aren't you jumping?”
“I qualify for Social Security next year,” he yelled back. “I don't want to screw it up!”
I laughed at that. And then I straightened up, and I jumped. I fell, and fell some more. My arms
started to pinwheel, until I remembered to gather them in and hold them tight to my body.
When my sneakers hit the water, it sounded like cement breaking.
I came up laughing. I could hear Dave applauding and cheering from the side of the pond. I
climbed out, and we toweled off, and then we hiked back up the ridge. We strolled to a small
creek where there's a dammed-up fishinghole , through a pasture of waving rye grass, the kind
that used to brush against the bellies of horses as they made their way. We paused there and I
scanned the pond, looking for fish.
While I stood there on a rock, I saw a pure red dragonfly, the reddest-winged bug I'd ever seen.
And then here came a blue dragonfly, right next to it. I marveled at the two vivid creatures
buzzing around each other. “Where's the white one?” I wondered aloud. And then for the fun of
it, I burst out singing the national anthem at the top of my lungs, my voice banging off the walls
of the little wash.
I was stupidly happy, as if I had a new skin. The scare of Dead Man's Hole made me feel fresh.
It was a freshness put there by fear–cleansing, clarifying,sharpening fear.Fear that opened the
senses, and brought everything into clearer view. Like I say, a little fear is good for
you–assuming you can swim.
But not everyone approved of my pulse-checking methods, especially my friend Bill Stapleton,
who also happens to be my lawyer and agent and therefore has a certain interest in my future
and all. When he heard I'd made the leap into Dead Man's Hole, he grimaced, and delivered a
lecture on how foolish it was, and how I could break something or tear something. But even as
he was talking, Bill knew it was useless. “I'm doing it again,” I said. Bill knew I was serious,
because he knows something else about me, too. He knows I need the action.
“That's great, that's just great,” he says. “Why don't you make it the stuff of legend?”
CHAPTER 2
A Regular Guy
I'm just a regular guy.A regular, hardworking, T-shirt-wearing guy.A regular, hardworking,
motivated, complicated, occasionally pissed-off, T-shirt guy.
There are some obvious contradictions in that statement, I know. I can't promise to resolve
them: even if I could dismantle my psyche, and explain all the neuron-firings of my brain, and
the subsequent messages to my muscles and from there to my ventricles, I'm not sure it makes a
worthwhile map. Self-examination has not always been my strength; for one thing, it takes too
long, and for another, I have the suspicion that it's the old secrets in me, the cheats and slights
of childhood, all melted down into one purpose, that make me turn the wheels.
Meanwhile, people hopefully understand that beneath the competitiveness I'm a more sensitive
sort than I seem at times, and when I say something like “So?” what it really means is, “I care
more than I let on.” But it may get wearying doing the work of interpreting me.
We only have inklings as to why we are the way we are. Which parts of any of us are made,
which parts self-made, and which parts born? The question isn't an easy one to answer, and we
can't answer it solely; we define ourselves in our relations to other people: parents, mates,
adversaries, bosses, kids. What surviving cancer teaches you is the magnitude of your
dependence on others, not just for self-definition, but for your mere existence. Cancer robs you
of your independence; you're reliant on friends, family, and complete strangers, stoic doctors and
nurses, and when you finally recover, you're never casual again about your place in the human
chain.
Sometimes we define ourselves through people we don't even know. That was the case with
Sally Reed and me; without cancer there would have been no likely connection between a bike
rider and a fiftysomething woman who, as she jokingly puts it, would have otherwise spent most
of her time watching daytime TV. We were strangers in the spring of 1999, but our paths
crossed due to what Sally calls a “universe wink”: I was en route to winning my first Tour de
France when Sally was diagnosed with cancer. The day after Sally's first chemo treatment, a
friend told her to tune in and watch me ride in the Tour, because I had made an amazing return
from the disease.
I had just launched the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and a volunteer there who knew Sally
asked me if I'd sign a poster for a nice lady who lived in theAustinsuburbs and who was fighting
a tough case of breast cancer. So I did.
“Be brave, and fight like hell,” I wrote to her.
Sally put the poster up in her kitchen, and she looked at it every day as she endured six months
of radiation and chemotherapy treatments. When she finally finished radiation in December of
'99, she began to volunteer at the foundation, even though her hair hadn't grown back yet. She
came in without fail every Tuesday and Thursday, driving an hour each way, to answer mail and
requests from cancer patients all over the world. She became the most devoted volunteer in the
office, dispensing information, advice, and sympathy.
The peculiar thing was, for the longest time we never met face to face. I heard all about her and
she heard all about me, but we kept missing each other. I usually went to the foundation on
Wednesdays or Fridays, and she was never there. After a while, Sally started joking that I didn't
really exist. Once, she left a copy ofIt's NotAbout the Bike for me to sign, along with a note: “I'm
leaving this book but I'm not sure there's an author.”
Sally started a Lance Sighting Chart on a big eraser-board in the volunteer room at the center.
She made columns for the date, place, and time of each Lance Sighting. One column
said,WITNESS OF SIGHTING.The next column said,VERIFICATION OF SIGHTING.And so on. It
became a running cause of hilarity in the foundation.
The board filled up with Lance Sightings; all the volunteers marked their columns each time I
stopped by. But Sally and I continued to miss each other. She liked to joke that even the
delivery man had made a Lance Armstrong sighting, but she never had. One afternoon, her
husband saw me out training on my bike. Sally started a new category:SIGHTINGS BY PROXY.
Finally, after about a year of this, I went by the foundation and wrote a note and stuck it in her
mailbox. “I am here,” I said. “Where are you?” I added, scribbling, “When they let me stop
traveling, then you'll have a sighting. In November and December I have no travel, and we'll
hook up then.”
Sally put a new column up on the board:LANCE LETTER SIGHTING.
About a month later, I got back to town, and I went over to the foundation office. I burst
through the door, yelling, “Where's Sally?”
And there she was. She had spent a thousand hours at the foundation before we finally met face
to face. We hugged, and liked each other instantly. She was as sweet-faced and good-natured as
I'd expected, but there was also an interesting hint of no-nonsense about her. She was a
well-to-do wife and mother whose life had been derailed by breast cancer not once, but three
times; both of her sisters had also been diagnosed with it. We visited for a while, talking about
the foundation a little bit, about how to make people feel strong. And we talked about cars,
because we both liked fast ones.
But we've never really talked about cancer itself, and I can't quite say why. Maybe we simply
have a kind of telepathy about it. Or maybe we're accustomed to being alone in our thoughts
about it, since relatively few of the people in our lives can fully understand the experience. Or
maybe we simply choose not to dwell on the horrors of it. What's important is the connection;
and through Sally I connect with others, too. She forwards correspondence and special requests
from all kinds of people in the cancer kinship, and she sets up encounters between us. What we
both understand is that it's a source of strength to someone diagnosed to know someone who
has survived. Shared experience makes people feel strong. Sally says that if we can give one
patient even five minutes of hope, “then we've done the most important thing.”
Sometimes it's theabsence of a person that complicates the question of who we are. In my case, I
never knew my own father. Eddie Gunderson might as well have been an anonymous DNA
donor; he left my mother shortly after I was born, and he surrendered all legal parental rights to
her. My mother and I never discussed him. I read in a newspaper story that he once tried to
contact me after the 1999 Tour, but I didn't welcome it, and found that I didn't have any interest
in knowing him, or in dwelling on him, either. That price was paid. He was the keeper of the
secret, the man with the answer to the unanswerable. I intended to investigate the meanings of
family through my own children–by looking ahead, not back.
Sometimes one person can be all you need, and that was the case with my mother. She managed
to be two parents and a best friend, packed into one 5-foot-3 person, although it wasn't easy.
“You were a survivor even before you had cancer,” she says. If that's true, it's because of her;
she supported us on a secretary's salary, and she was always looking for a way to make our lives
better. “If anything is going to get done, you've got to do it,” she'd tell me.Planowas a wealthy
suburb, and other families had a lot of things compared to us. Whatever we wanted to buy, we
had to earn. I didn't have a whole lot of anything–but thanks to my mother, I had enough.
Now that I'm a father, I understand how much she must have wanted to give me. I also
understand the hundred small anxious moments I must have caused her–there was always some
childhood injury to nurse, from my various bike wrecks and stunts. She laughs at the way I
worry over and indulge my own kids. “I'm seeing a side of my son I've never seen,” she says.
She also wonders if, now that I'm a father, I'll be more inclined to examine the past, and I
wonder the same.

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