LANCE ARMSTRONG
with Sally Jenkins
THIS BOOK IS FOR:
My mother, Linda, who showed me
what a true champion is. Kik, for completing me as a man. Luke, the greatest gift of my life,
who in a split second
made the Tour de France seem very small. All of my doctors and nurses. Jim Ochowicz, for the
fritters . . . every day. My teammates, Kevin, Frankie, Tyler,
George, and Christian. Johan Bruyneel. My sponsors. Chris Carmichael.
Bill Stapleton for always being there. Steve Wolff, my advocate. Bart Knaggs, a man's man.
JT Neal, the toughest patient cancer has ever seen. Kelly Davidson, a very special little lady.
Thorn Weisel. The Jeff Garvey family.
The entire staff of the Lance Armstrong Foundation. The cities of Austin, Boone, Santa
Barbara, and Nice. Sally Jenkins–we met to write a book but you became a dear friend along the
way.
The authors would like to thank Bill Stapleton of Capital Sports Ventures and Esther Newberg
of ICM for sensing what a good match we would be and bringing us together on this book.
Stacy Creamer of Putnam was a careful and caring editor and Stuart Calderwood provided
valuable editorial advice and made everything right. We're grateful to ABC Sports for the
comprehensive set of highlights, and to Stacey Rodrigues and David Mider for their assistance
and research. Robin Rather and David Murray were generous and tuneful hosts in Austin.
Thanks also to the editors of Women's Sports and Fitness magazine for the patience and
backing, and to Jeff Garvey for the hitched plane ride.
one
BEFORE AND AFTER
I WANT TO DIE AT A HUNDRED YEARS OLD WITH an American flag on my back and
the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles
per hour. I want to cross one last finish line as my stud wife and my ten children applaud, and
then I want to lie down in a field of those famous French sunflowers and gracefully expire, the
perfect contradiction to my once-anticipated poignant early demise.
A slow death is not for me. I don't do anything slow, not even breathe. I do everything at a fast
cadence: eat fast, sleep fast. It makes me crazy when my wife, Kristin, drives our car, because
she brakes at all the yellow caution lights, while I squirm impatiently in the passenger seat.
"Come on, don't be a skirt," I tell her.
"Lance," she says, "marry a man."
I've spent my life racing my bike, from the back roads of Austin, Texas to the Champs-Elysees,
and I always figured if I died an untimely death, it would be because some rancher in his Dodge
4x4 ran me headfirst into a ditch. Believe me, it could happen. Cyclists fight an ongoing war
with guys in big trucks, and so many vehicles have hit me, so many times, in so many countries,
I've lost count. I've learned how to take out my own stitches: all you need is a pair of fingernail
clippers and a strong stomach.
If you saw my body underneath my racing jersey, you'd know what I'm talking about. I've got
marbled scars on both arms and discolored marks up and down my legs, which I keep
clean-shaven. Maybe that's why trucks are always trying to run me over; they see my sissy-boy
calves and decide not to brake. But cyclists have to shave, because when the gravel gets into
your skin, it's easier to clean and bandage if you have no hair.
One minute you're pedaling along a highway, and the next minute, boom, you're face-down in
the dirt. A blast of hot air hits you, you taste the acrid, oily exhaust in the roof of your mouth,
and all you can do is wave a fist at the disappearing taillights.
Cancer was like that. It was like being run off the road by a truck, and I've got the scars to prove
it. There's a puckered wound in my upper chest just above my heart, which is where the catheter
was implanted. A surgical line runs from the right side of my groin into my upper thigh, where
they cut out my testicle. But the real prizes are two deep half-moons in my scalp, as if I was
kicked twice in the head by a horse. Those are the leftovers from brain surgery.
When I was 25,1 got testicular cancer and nearly died. I was given less than a 40 percent chance
of surviving, and frankly, some of my doctors were just being kind when they gave me those
odds. Death is not exactly cocktail-party conversation, I know, and neither is cancer,
or brain surgery, or matters below the waist. But I'm not here to make polite conversation. I
want to tell the truth. I'm sure you'd like to hear about how Lance Armstrong became a Great
American and an Inspiration To Us All, how he won the Tour de France, the 2,290-mile road
race that's considered the single most grueling sporting event on the face of the earth. You want
to hear about faith and mystery, and my miraculous comeback, and how I joined towering
figures like Greg LeMond and Miguel Indurain in the record book. You want to hear about my
lyrical climb through the Alps and my heroic conquering of the Pyrenees, and how it felt. But the
Tour was the least of the story.
Some of it is not easy to tell or comfortable to hear. I'm asking you now, at the outset, to put
aside your ideas about heroes and miracles, because I'm not storybook material. This is not
Disneyland, or Hollywood. I'll give you an example: I've read that I flew up the hills and
mountains of France. But you don't fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and
maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else.
Cancer is like that, too. Good, strong people get cancer, and they do all the right things to beat
it, and they still die. That is the essential truth that you learn. People die. And after you learn it,
all other matters seem irrelevant. They just seem small.
I don't know why I'm still alive. I can only guess. I have a tough constitution, and my profession
taught me how to compete against long odds and big obstacles. I like to train hard and I like to
race hard. That helped, it was a good start, but it certainly wasn't the determining factor. I can't
help feeling that my survival was more a matter of blind luck.
When I was 16,1 was invited to undergo testing at a place in Dallas called the Cooper Clinic, a
prestigious research lab and birthplace of the aerobic exercise revolution. A doctor there
measured my VO0 max, which is a gauge of how much oxygen you can take in and use,
and he says that my numbers are still the highest they've ever come across. Also, I produced less
lactic acid than most people. Lactic acid is the chemical your body generates when it's winded
and fatigued–it's what makes your lungs burn and your legs ache.
Basically, I can endure more physical stress than most people can, and I don't get as tired while
I'm doing it. So I figure maybe that helped me live. I was lucky–I was born with an
above-average capacity for breathing. But even so, I was in a desperate, sick fog much of the
time.
My illness was humbling and starkly revealing, and it forced me to survey my life with an
unforgiving eye. There are some shameful episodes in it: instances of meanness, unfinished
tasks, weakness, and regrets. I had to ask myself, "If I live, who is it that I intend to be?" I found
that I had a lot of growing to do as a man.
I won't kid you. There are two Lance Armstrongs, pre-cancer, and post. Everybody's favorite
question is "How did cancer change you?" The real question is how didn't it change me? I left
my house on October 2, 1996, as one person and came home another. I was a world-class
athlete with a mansion on a riverbank, keys to a Porsche, and a self-made fortune in the bank. I
was one of the top riders in the world and my career was moving along a perfect arc of success.
I returned a different person, literally. In a way, the old me did die, and I was given a second life.
Even my body is different, because during the chemotherapy I lost all the muscle I had ever built
up, and when I recovered, it didn't come back in the same way.
The truth is that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. I don't know why I got the
illness, but it did wonders for me, and I wouldn't want to walk away from it. Why would I want
to change, even for a day, the most important and shaping event in my life?
People die. That truth is so disheartening that at times I can't bear to articulate it. Why should
we go on, you might ask? Why don't we all just stop and lie down where we are? But there is
another truth, too. People live. It's an equal and opposing truth. People live, and in the most
remarkable ways. When I was sick, I saw more beauty and triumph and truth in a single day than
I ever did in a bike race–but they were human moments, not miraculous ones. I met a guy in a
fraying sweatsuit who turned out to be a brilliant surgeon. I became friends with a harassed and
overscheduled nurse named LaTrice, who gave me such care that it could only be the result of
the deepest sympathetic affinity. I saw children with no eyelashes or eyebrows, their hair burned
away by chemo, who fought with the hearts of Indurains.
I still don't completely understand i t .
All I can do is tell you what happened.
OF course I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT SOMETHING WAS wrong with me. But
athletes, especially cyclists, are in the business of denial. You deny all the aches and pains
because you have to in order to finish the race. It's a sport of self-abuse. You're on your bike for
the whole day, six and seven hours, in all kinds of weather and conditions, over cobblestones
and gravel, in mud and wind and rain, and even hail, and you do not give in to pain.
Everything hurts. Your back hurts, your feet hurt, your hands hurt, your neck hurts, your legs
hurt, and of course, your butt hurts.
So no, I didn't pay attention to the fact that I didn't feel well in 1996. When my right testicle
became slightly swollen that winter, I told myself to live with it, because I assumed it was
something I had done to myself on the bike, or that my system was compensating for some
physiological male thing. I was riding strong, as well as I ever had, actually, and there was no
reason to stop.
Cycling is a sport that rewards mature champions. It takes a physical endurance built up over
years, and a head for strategy that comes only with experience. By 1996 I felt I was finally
coming into my prime. That spring, I won a race called the Fleche-Wallonne, a grueling test
through the Ardennes that no American had ever conquered before. I finished second in
Liege-Bastogne-Liege, a classic race of 167 miles in a single punishing day. And I won the Tour
Du Pont, 1,225 miles over 12 days through the Carolina mountains. I added five more
second-place finishes to those results, and I was about to break into the top five in the
international rankings for the first time in my career.
But cycling fans noted something odd when I won the Tour Du Pont: usually, when I won a
race, I pumped my fists like pistons as I crossed the finish line. But on that day, I was too
exhausted to celebrate on the bike. My eyes were bloodshot and my face was flushed.
I should have been confident and energized by my spring performances. Instead, I was just tired.
My nipples were sore. If I had known better, I would have realized it was a sign of illness. It
meant I had an elevated level of HCG, which is a hormone normally produced by pregnant
women. Men don't have but a tiny amount of it, unless their testes are acting up.
I thought I was just run down. Suck it up, I said to myself, you can't afford to be tired. Ahead of
me I still had the two most important races of the season: the Tour de France and the Olympic
Games in Atlanta, and they were everything I had been training and racing for.
I dropped out of the Tour de France after just five days. I rode through a rainstorm, and
developed a sore throat and bronchitis. I was coughing and had lower-back pain, and I was
simply unable to get back on the bike. "I couldn't breathe," I told the press. Looking back, they
were ominous words.
In Atlanta, my body gave out again. I was 6th in the time trial and 12th in the road race,
respectable performances overall, but disappointing given my high expectations.
Back home in Austin, I told myself it was the flu. I was sleeping a lot, with a low-grade achy
drowsy feeling. I ignored it. I wrote it off to a long hard season.
I celebrated my 25th birthday on September 18, and a couple of nights later I invited a houseful
of friends over for a party before a Jimmy Buffett concert, and we rented a margarita machine.
My mother Linda came over to visit from Piano, and in the midst of the party that night, I said
to her, "I'm the happiest man in the world." I loved my life. I was dating a beautiful co-ed from
the University of Texas named Lisa Shiels. I had just signed a new two-year contract with a
prestigious French racing team, Cofidis, for $2.5 million. I had a great new house that I had
spent months building, and every detail of the architectural and interior designs was exactly
what I wanted. It was a Mediterranean-style home on the banks of Lake Austin, with soaring
glass windows that looked out on a swimming pool and a piazza-style patio that ran down to
the dock, where I had my own jet ski and powerboat moored.
Only one thing spoiled the evening: in the middle of the concert, I felt a headache coming on. It
started as a dull pounding. I popped some aspirin. It didn't help. In fact, the pain got worse.
I tried ibuprofen. Now I had four tablets in me, but the headache only spread. I decided it was a
case of way too many margaritas, and told myself I would never, ever drink another one. My
friend and agent attorney, Bill Stapleton, bummed some migraine medication from his wife,
Laura, who had a bottle in her purse. I took three. That didn't work either.
By now it was the kind of headache you see in movies, a knee-buckling,
head-between-your-hands, brain-crusher.
Finally, I gave up and went home. I turned out all the lights and lay on the sofa, perfectly still.
The pain never subsided, but I was so exhausted by it, and by all the tequila, that I eventually
fell asleep.
When I woke up the next morning, the headache was gone. As I moved around the kitchen
making coffee, I realized that my vision was a little blurry. The edges of things seemed soft. I
must be getting old, I thought. Maybe I need glasses.
I had an excuse for everything.
A couple of days later, I was in my living room on the phone with Bill Stapleton when I had a
bad coughing attack. I gagged, and tasted something metallic and brackish in the back of my
throat. "Hang on a minute," I said. "Something's not right here." I rushed into the bathroom. I
coughed into the sink.
It splattered with blood. I stared into the sink. I coughed again, and spit up another stream of
red. I couldn't believe that the mass of blood and clotted matter had come from my own body.
Frightened, I went back into the living room and picked up the phone. "Bill, I have to call you
back," I said. I clicked off, and immediately dialed my neighbor, Dr. Rick Parker, a good friend
who was my personal physician in Austin. Rick lived just down the hill from me.
"Could you come over?" I said. "I'm coughing up blood."
While Rick was on his way, I went back into the bathroom and eyed the bloody residue in the
sink. Suddenly, I turned on the faucet. I wanted to rinse it out. Sometimes I do things without
knowing my own motives. I didn't want Rick to see it. I was embarrassed by it. I wanted it to go
away.
Rick arrived, and checked my nose and mouth. He shined a light down my throat, and asked to
see the blood. I showed him the little bit that was left in the sink. Oh, God, I thought, I can't tell
him how much it was, it's too disgusting. What was left didn't look like very much.
Rick was used to hearing me complain about my sinuses and allergies. Austin has a lot of
ragweed and pollen, and no matter how tortured I am, I can't take medication because of the
strict doping regulations in cycling. I have to suffer through i t .
"You could be bleeding from your sinuses," Rick said. "You may have cracked one."
"Great," I said. "So it's no big deal."
I was so relieved, I jumped at the first suggestion that it wasn't serious, and left it at that. Rick
clicked off his flashlight, and on his way out the door he invited me to have dinner with him and
his wife, Jenny, the following week.
A few nights later, I cruised down the hill to the Parkers' on a motor scooter. I have a thing for
motorized toys, and the scooter was one of my favorites. But that night, I was so sore in my
right testicle that it killed me to sit on the scooter. I couldn't get comfortable at the dinner table,
either. I had to situate myself just right, and I didn't dare move, it was so painful.
I almost told Rick how I felt, but I was too self-conscious. It hardly seemed like something to
bring up over dinner, and I had already bothered him once about the blood. This guy is going to
think I'm some kind of complainer, I thought. I kept it to myself.
When I woke up the next morning, my testicle was horrendously swollen, almost to the size of
an orange. I pulled on my clothes, got my bike from the rack in the garage, and started off on my
usual training ride, but I found I couldn't even sit on the seat. I rode the whole way standing up
on the pedals. When I got back home in the early afternoon, I reluctantly dialed the Parkers
again.
"Rick, I've got something wrong with my testicle," I said. "It's real swollen and I had to stand up
on the ride."
Rick said, sternly, "You need to get that checked out right away."
He insisted that he would get me in to see a specialist that afternoon. We hung up, and he called
Dr. Jim Reeves, a prominent Austin urologist. As soon as Rick explained my symptoms, Reeves
said I should come in immediately. He would hold an appointment open. Rick told me that
Reeves suspected I merely had a torsion of the testicle, but that I should go in and get checked.
If I ignored it, I could lose the testicle.
I showered and dressed, and grabbed my keys and got into my Porsche, and it's funny, but I can
remember exactly what I wore: khaki pants and a green dress shirt. Reeves' office was in the
heart of downtown, near the University of Texas campus in a plain-looking brown brick medical
building.
Reeves turned out to be an older gentleman with a deep, resonating voice that sounded like it
came from the bottom of a well, and a doctorly way of making everything seem routine–despite
the fact that he was seriously alarmed by what he found as he examined me.
My testicle was enlarged to three times its normal size, and it was hard and painful to the touch.
Reeves made some notes, and then he said, "This looks a little suspicious. Just to be safe, I'm
going to send you across the street for an ultrasound."
I got my clothes back on and walked to my car. The lab was across an avenue in another
institutional-looking brown brick building, and I decided to drive over. Inside was a small
warren of offices and rooms filled with complicated medical equipment. I lay down on another
examining table.
A female technician came in and went over me with the ultrasound equipment, a wand-like
instrument that fed an image onto a screen. I figured I'd be out of there in a few minutes. Just a
routine check so the doctor could be on the safe side.
An hour later, I was still on the table.
The technician seemed to be surveying every inch of me. I lay there, wordlessly, trying not to be
self-conscious. Why was this taking so long? Had she found something?
Finally, she laid down the wand. Without a word, she left the room.
"Wait a minute," I said. "Hey."
I thought, It's supposed to be a lousy formality. After a while, she returned with a man I had
seen in the office earlier. He was the chief radiologist. He picked up the wand and began to
examine my parts himself. I lay there silently as he went over me for another 15 minutes. Why is
this taking so long?
"Okay, you can get dressed and come back out," he said.
I hustled into my clothes and met him in the hallway.
"We need to take a chest X ray," he said.
I stared at him. "Why?" I said.
"Dr. Reeves asked for one," he said.
Why would they look at my chest? Nothing hurt there. I went into another examining room and
took off my clothes again, and a new technician went through the X-ray process.
I was getting angry now, and scared. I dressed again, and stalked back into the main office.
Down the hallway, I saw the chief radiologist.
"Hey," I said, cornering the guy. "What's going on here? This isn't normal."
"Dr. Reeves should talk to you," he said.
"No. I want to know what's going on."
"Well I don't want to step on Dr. Reeves' toes, but it looks like perhaps he's checking you for
some cancer-related activity."
I stood perfectly still.
"Oh, fuck," I said.
"You need to take the X rays back to Dr. Reeves; he's waiting for you in his office."
There was an icy feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it was growing. I took out my cell phone
and dialed Rick's number.
"Rick, something's going on here, and they aren't telling me every-thing."
"Lance, I don't know exactly what's happening, but I'd like to go with you to see Dr. Reeves.
Why don't I meet you there?"
I said, "Okay."
I waited in radiology while they prepared my X rays, and the radiologist finally came out and
handed me a large brown envelope. He told me Reeves would see me in his office. I stared at
the envelope. My chest was in there, I realized.
This is bad. I climbed into my car and glanced down at the envelope containing my chest X rays.
Reeves' office was just 200 yards away, but it felt longer than that. It felt like two miles. Or
20.
I drove the short distance and parked. By now it was dark and well past normal office hours. If
Dr. Reeves had waited for me all this time, there must be a good reason, I thought. And the
reason is that the shit is about to hit the fan.
As I walked into Dr. Reeves' office, I noticed that the building was empty. Everyone was gone.
It was dark outside.
Rick arrived, looking grim. I hunched down in a chair while Dr. Reeves opened the envelope
and pulled out my X rays. An X ray is something like a photo negative: abnormalities come out
white. A black image is actually good, because it means your organs are clear. Black is good.
White is bad.
Dr. Reeves snapped my X rays onto a light tray in the wall.
My chest looked like a snowstorm.
"Well, this is a serious situation," Dr. Reeves said. "It looks like tes-ticular cancer with large
metastasis to the lungs."
I have cancer.
"Are you sure?" I said.
"I'm fairly sure," Dr. Reeves said.
I'm 25. Wliy would I have cancer?
"Shouldn't I get a second opinion?" I said.
"Of course," Dr. Reeves said. "You have every right to do that. But I should tell you I'm
confident of the diagnosis. I've scheduled you for surgery tomorrow morning at 7 A.M., to
remove the testicle."
I have cancer and it's in my lungs.
Dr. Reeves elaborated on his diagnosis: testicular cancer was a rare disease–only about 7,000
cases occur annually in the U.S. It tended to strike men between the ages of 18 and 25 and was
considered very treatable as cancers go, thanks to advances in chemotherapy, but early diagnosis
and intervention were key. Dr. Reeves was certain I had the cancer. The question was, exactly
how far had it spread? He recommended that I see Dr. Dudley Youman, a renowned
Austin-based oncologist. Speed was essential; every day would count. Finally, Dr. Reeves
finished.
I didn't say anything.
"Why don't I leave the two of you together for a minute," Dr. Reeves said.
Alone with Rick, I laid my head down on the desk. "I just can't believe this," I said.
But I had to admit it, I was sick. The headaches, the coughing blood, the septic throat, passing
out on the couch and sleeping forever. I'd had a real sick feeling, and I'd had it for a while.
"Lance, listen to me, there's been so much improvement in the treatment of cancer. It's curable.
Whatever it takes, we'll get it whipped. We'll get it done."
"Okay," I said. "Okay."
Rick called Dr. Reeves back i n .
"What do I have to do?" I asked. "Let's get on with it. Let's kill this stuff. Whatever it takes,
let's do it."
I wanted to cure it instantly. Right away. I would have undergone surgery that night. I would
have used a radiation gun on myself, if it would help. But Reeves patiently explained the
procedure for the next morning: I would have to report to the hospital early tor a batter}7 of
tests and blood work so the oncologist could determine the extent of the cancer, and then I
would have surgery to remove my testicle.
I got up to leave. I had a lot of calls to make, and one of them was to my mother; somehow, I'd
have to tell her that her only child had cancer.
I climbed into my car and made my way along the winding, tree-lined streets toward my home
on the riverbank, and for the first time in my life, I drove slowly. I was in shock. Oh, my God,
I'll never be able to race again. Not, Oh, my God, I'll die. Not, Oh, my God, I'll never have a
family. Those thoughts were buried somewhere down in the confusion. But the first thing was,
Oh, my God, I'll never race again. I picked up my car phone and called Bill Stapleton.
"Bill, I have some really bad news," I said.
"What?" he said, preoccupied.
"I'm sick. My career's over."
"What?"
"It's all over. I'm sick, I'm never going to race again, and I'm going to lose everything."
I hung up.
I drifted through the streets in first gear, without even the energy to press the gas pedal. As I
puttered along, I questioned everything: my world, my profession, my self. I had left the house
an indestructible 25-year-old, bulletproof. Cancer would change everything for me, I realized; it
wouldn't just derail my career, it would deprive me of my entire definition of who I was. I had
started with nothing. My mother was a secretary in Piano, Texas, but on my bike, I had become
something. When other kids were swimming at the country club, I was biking for miles after
school, because it was my chance. There were gallons of sweat all over every trophy and dollar I
had ever earned, and now what would I do? Who would I be if I wasn't Lance Armstrong,
world-class cyclist?
A sick person.
I pulled into the driveway of my house. Inside, the phone was ringing. I walked through the
door and tossed my keys on the counter. The phone kept ringing. I picked it up. It was my friend
Scott MacEach-ern, a representative from Nike assigned to work with me.
"Hey, Lance, what's going on?"
"Well, a lot," I said, angrily. "A lot is going on."
"What do you mean?"
"I, uh . . . "
I hadn't said it aloud yet.
"What?" Scott said.
I opened my mouth, and closed it, and opened it again. "I have cancer," I said.
I started to cry.
And then, in that moment, it occurred to me: I might lose my life, too. Not just my sport.
I could lose my life.
two
THE START LINE
PAST FORMS YOU, WHETHER YOU LIKE IT or not. Each encounter and experience has
its own effect, and you're shaped the way the wind shapes a mesquite tree on a plain.
The main thing you need to know about my childhood is that I never had a real father, but I
never sat around wishing for one, either. My mother was 17 when she had me, and from day one
everyone told her we wouldn't amount to anything, but she believed differently, and she raised
me with an unbending rule: "Make every obstacle an opportunity." And that's what we did.
I was a lot of kid, especially for one small woman. My mother's maiden name was Linda
Mooneyham. She is 5-foot-3 and weighs about 105 pounds, and I don't know how somebody so
tiny delivered me, because I weighed in at 9 pounds, 12 ounces. Her labor was so difficult that
she lay in a fever for an entire day afterward. Her temperature was so high that the nurses
wouldn't let her hold me.
I never knew my so-called father. He was a non-factor–unless you count his absence as a factor.
Just because he provided the DNA that made me doesn't make him my father, and as far as I'm
concerned, there is nothing between us, absolutely no connection. I have no idea who he is,
what he likes or dislikes. Before last year, I never knew where he lived or worked.
I never asked. I've never had a single conversation with my mother about him. Not once. In 28
years, she's never brought him up, and I've never brought him up. It may seem strange, but it's
true. The thing is, I don't care, and my mother doesn't either. She says she would have told me
about him if I had asked, but frankly, it would have been like asking a trivia question; he was
that insignificant to me. I was completely loved by my mother, and I loved her back the same
way, and that felt like enough to both of us.
Since I sat down to write about my life, though, I figured I might as well find out a few things
about myself. Unfortunately, last year a Texas newspaper traced my biological father and printed
a story about him, and this is what they reported: his name is Gunderson, and he's a route
manager for the Dallas Morning News. He lives in Cedar Creek Lake, Texas, and is the father of
two other children. My mother was married to him during her pregnancy, but they split up
before I was two. He was actually quoted in the paper claiming to be a proud father, and he said
that his kids consider me their brother, but those remarks struck me as opportunistic, and I have
no interest in meeting him.
My mother was alone. Her parents were divorced, and at the time her father, Paul Mooneyham,
my grandfather, was a heavy-drinking Vietnam vet who worked in the post office and lived in a
mobile home. Her mother, Elizabeth, struggled to support three kids. Nobody in the family had
much help to give my mother–but they tried. On the day
I was born my grandfather quit drinking, and he's been sober ever since, for 28 years, exactly as
long as I've been alive. My mother's younger brother, Al, would baby-sit for me. He later joined
the Army, the traditional way out for men in our family, and he made a career of it, rising all the
way to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He has a lot of decorations on his chest, and he and his
wife have a son named Jesse who I'm crazy about. We're proud of each other as a family.
I was wanted. My mother was so determined to have me that she hid her pregnancy by wearing
baby-doll shirts so that no one would interfere or try to argue her out of it. After I was born,
sometimes my mother and her sister would go grocery shopping together, and one afternoon my
aunt held me while the checkout girls made cooing noises. "What a cute baby," one of them
said. My mother stepped forward. "That's my baby," she said.
We lived in a dreary one-bedroom apartment in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas, while my mother
worked part-time and finished school. It was one of those neighborhoods with shirts flapping on
clotheslines and a Kentucky Fried on the corner. My mother worked at the Kentucky Fried,
taking orders in her pink-striped uniform, and she also punched the cash register at the Kroger's
grocery store across the street. Later she got a temporary job at the post office sorting dead
letters, and another one as a file clerk, and she did all of this while she was trying to study and to
take care of me. She made $400 a month, and her rent was $200, and my day-care was $25 a
week. But she gave me everything I needed, and a few things more. She had a way of creating
small luxuries.
When I was small, she would take me to the local 7-Eleven and buy a Slurpee, and feed it to me
through the straw. She would pull some up in the straw, and I would tilt my head back, and she
would let the cool sweet icy drink stream into my mouth. She tried to spoil me with a 50-cent
drink.
Every night she read a book to me. Even though I was just an infant, too young to understand a
word, she would hold me and read. She was never too tired for that. "I can't wait until you can
read to me," she would say. No wonder I was reciting verses by the age of two. I did everything
fast. I walked at nine months.
Eventually, my mother got a job as a secretary for $12,000 a year, which allowed her to move us
into a nicer apartment north of Dallas in a suburb called Richardson. She later got a job at a
telecommunications company, Ericsson, and she has worked her way up the ladder. She's no
longer a secretary, she's an account manager, and what's more, she got her real-estate license on
the side. That right there tells you everything you need to know about her. She's sharp as a tack,
and she'll outwork anybody. She also happens to look young enough to be my sister.
After Oak Cliff, the suburbs seemed like heaven to her. North Dallas stretches out practically to
the Oklahoma border in an unbroken chain of suburban communities, each one exactly like the
last. Tract homes and malls overrun miles of flat brown Texas landscape. But there are good
schools and lots of open fields for kids to play i n .
Across the street from our apartment there was a little store called the Richardson Bike Mart at
one end of a strip mall. The owner was a small, well-built guy with overly bright eyes named Jim
Hoyt. Jim liked to sponsor bike racers out of his store, and he was always looking to get kids
started in the sport. One morning a week my mother would take me to a local shop for fresh, hot
doughnuts and we would pass by the bike store. Jim knew she struggled to get by, but he
noticed that she was always well turned out, and I was neat and well cared for. He took an
interest in us, and gave her a deal on my first serious bike. It was a Schwinn Mag Scrambler,
which I got when I was about seven. It was an ugly brown, with yellow wheels, but I loved it.
Why does any kid love a bike? It's liberation and independence, your first set of wheels. A bike
is freedom to roam, without rules and without adults.
There was one thing my mother gave me that I didn't particularly want–a stepfather. When I
was three, my mother remarried, to a guy named Terry Armstrong. Terry was a small man with a
large mustache and a habit of acting more successful than he really was. He sold food to grocery
stores and he was every cliche ot a traveling salesman, but he brought home a second paycheck
and helped with the bills. Meanwhile, my mother was getting raises at her job, and she bought
us a home in Piano, one of the more upscale suburbs.
I was a small boy when Terry legally adopted me and made my name Armstrong, and I don't
remember being happy or unhappy about it, either way. All I know is that the DNA donor,
Gunderson, gave up his legal rights to me. In order for the adoption to go through, Gunderson
had to allow it, to agree to it. He picked up a pen and signed the papers.
Terry Armstrong was a Christian, and he came from a family who had a tendency to tell my
mother how to raise me. But, for all of his proselytizing, Terry had a bad temper, and he used to
whip me, for silly things. Kid things, like being messy.
Once, I left a drawer open in my bedroom, with a sock hanging out. Terry got out his old
fraternity paddle. It was a thick, solid wood paddle, and frankly, in my opinion nothing like that
should be used on a small boy. He turned me over and spanked me with i t .
The paddle was his preferred method of discipline. If I came home late, out would come the
paddle. Whack. If I smarted off, I got the paddle. Whack. It didn't hurt just physically, but also
emotionally. So I didn't like Terry Armstrong. I thought he was an angry testosterone geek, and
as a result, my early impression of organized religion was that it was for hypocrites.
Athletes don't have much use for poking around in their childhoods, because introspection
doesn't get you anywhere in a race. You don't want to think about your adolescent resentments
when you're trying to make a 6,500-foot climb with a cadre of Italians and Spaniards on your
wheel. You need a dumb focus. But that said, it's all stoked down in there, fuel for the fire.
"Make every negative into a positive," as my mother says. Nothing goes to waste, you put it all
to use, the old wounds and long-ago slights become the stuff of competitive energy. But back
then I was just a kid with about four chips on his shoulder, thinking, Maybe if I ride my bike on
this road long enough it will take me out of here.
Piano had its effect on me, too. It was the quintessential American suburb, with strip malls,
perfect grid streets, and faux-antebellum country clubs in between empty brown wasted fields. It
was populated by guys in golf shirts and Sansabelt pants, and women in bright fake gold
jewelry, and alienated teenagers. Nothing there was old, nothing real. To me, there was
something soul-deadened about the place, which may be why it had one of the worst heroin
problems in the country, as well as an unusually large number of teen suicides. It's home to
Piano East High School, one of the largest and most football-crazed high schools in the state, a
modern structure that looks more like a government agency, with a set of doors the size of
loading docks. That's where I went to school.
In Piano, Texas, if you weren't a football player you didn't exist, and if you weren't upper middle
class, you might as well not exist either. My mother was a secretary, so I tried to play football.
But I had no coordination. When it came to anything that involved moving from side to side, or
hand-eye coordination–when it came to anything involving a ball, in fact–I was no good.
I was determined to find something I could succeed at. When I was in fifth grade, my
elementary school held a distance-running race. I told my mother the night before the race, "I'm
going to be a champ." She just looked at me, and then she went into her things and dug out a
1972 silver dollar. "This is a good-luck coin," she said. "Now remember, all you have to do is
beat that clock." I won the race.
A few months later, I joined the local swim club. At first it was another way to seek acceptance
with the other kids in the suburbs, who all swam laps at Los Rios Country Club, where their
parents were members. On the first day of swim practice, I was so inept that I was put with the
seven-year-olds. I looked around, and saw the younger sister of one of my friends. It was
embarrassing. I went from not being any good at football to not being any good at swimming.
But I tried. If I had to swim with the little kids to learn technique, then that's what I was willing
to do. My mother gets emotional to this day when she remembers how I leaped headfirst into
the water and flailed up and down the length of the pool, as if I was trying to splash all the
water out of it. "You tried so hard," she says. I didn't swim in the worst group for long.
Swimming is a demanding sport for a 12-year-old, and the City of Piano Swim Club was
particularly intense. I swam for a man named Chris MacCurdy, who remains one of the best
coaches I ever worked with. Within a year, Chris transformed me; I was fourth in the state in the
1,500-meter freestyle. He trained our team seriously: we had workouts every morning from 5:30
to 7. Once I got a little older I began to ride my bike to practice, ten miles through the semi-dark
early-morning streets. I would swim 4,000 meters of laps before school and go back for another
two-hour workout in the afternoon–another 6,000 meters. That was six miles a day in the water,
plus a 20-mile bike ride. My mother let me do it for two reasons: she didn't have the option of
driving me herself because she worked, and she knew that I needed to channel my
temperament.
One afternoon when I was about 13 and hanging around the Richardson Bike Mart, I saw a
flyer for a competition called IronKids.
It was a junior triathlon, an event that combined biking, swimming, and running. I had never
heard of a triathlon before–but it was all of the things I was good at, so I signed up. My mother
took me to a shop and bought me a triathlon outfit, which basically consisted of cross-training
shorts and a shirt made out of a hybrid fast-drying material, so I could wear it through each
phase of the event, without changing. We got my first racing bike then, too. It was a Mercier, a
slim, elegant road bike.
I won, and I won by a lot, without even training for it. Not long afterward, there was another
triathlon, in Houston. I won that, too. When I came back from Houston, I was full of
self-confidence. I was a top junior at swimming, but I had never been the absolute best at it. I
was better at triathlons than any kid in Piano, and any kid in the whole state, for that matter. I
liked the feeling.
What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potential embarrassment, and to
suffer without complaint. I was discovering that if it was a matter of gritting my teeth, not
caring how it looked, and outlasting everybody else, I won. It didn't seem to matter what the
sport was–in a straight-ahead, long-distance race, I could beat anybody.
If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at i t .
I COULD HAVE DEALT WITH TERRY ARMSTRONG'S PADdle. But there was
something else I couldn't deal with.
When I was 14, my mother went into the hospital to have a hysterectomy. It's a very tough
operation for any woman, physically and emotionally, and my mother was still very young when
it happened. I was entered in a swim meet in San Antonio, so I had to leave while she was still
recuperating, and Terry decided to chaperone me. I didn't
want him there; I didn't like it when he tried to play Little League Dad, and I thought he should
be at the hospital. But he insisted.
As we sat in the airport waiting for our flight, I gazed at Terry and thought, Why are you here?
As I watched him, he began to write notes on a pad. He would write, then ball up the paper and
throw it into the garbage can and start again. I thought it was peculiar. After a while Terry got
up to go to the bathroom. I went over to the garbage can, retrieved the wadded papers, and
stuffed them into my bag.
Later, when I was alone, I took them out and unfolded them. They were to another woman. I
read them, one by one. He was writing to another woman while my mother was in the hospital
having a hysterectomy.
I flew back to Dallas with the crumpled pages in the bottom of my bag. When I got home, I
went to my room and pulled my copy of The Guinness Book of World Records off the shelf. I
got a pair of scissors, and hollowed out the center of the book. I crammed the pages into the
hollow and stuck the book back on the shelf. I wanted to keep the pages, and I'm not quite sure
why. For insurance, maybe; a little ammunition, in case I ever needed it. In case Terry decided to
use the paddle again.
If I hadn't liked Terry before, from then on, I felt nothing for him. I didn't respect him, and I
began to challenge his authority.
Let me sum up my turbulent youth. When I was a boy, I invented a game called fireball, which
entailed soaking a tennis ball in kerosene, lighting it on fire, and playing catch with it wearing a
pair of garden gloves.
I'd fill a plastic dish-tub full of gasoline, and then I'd empty a can of tennis balls into the tub and
let them float there. I'd fish one out and hold a match to it, and my best friend Steve Lewis and I
would throw the blazing ball back and forth until our gloves smoked. Imagine it, two boys
standing in a field in a hot Texas breeze, pitching flames at each other. Sometimes the gardening
gloves would catch on fire, and we'd flap them against our jeans, until embers flew into the air
around our heads, like fireflies.
Once, I accidentally threw the ball up onto the roof. Some shingles caught fire, and I had to
scramble up there and stamp out the fire before it burned down the whole house and then
started on the neighbors' place. Then there was the time a tennis ball landed squarely in the
middle ot the tray full of gas, and the whole works exploded. It went up, a wall of flame and a
swirling tower of black smoke. I panicked and kicked over the tub, trying to put the fire out.
Instead, the tub started melting down into the ground, like something out of The China
Syndrome.
A lot of my behavior had to do with knowing that my mother wasn't happy; I couldn't
understand why she would stay with Terry when they seemed so miserable. But being with him
probably seemed better to her than raising a son on her own and living on one paycheck.
A few months after the trip to San Antonio, the marriage finally fell apart. One evening I was
going to be late for dinner, so I called my mother. She said, "Son, you need to come home."
"What's wrong?" I said.
"I need to talk to you."
I got on my bike and rode home, and when I got there, she was sitting in the living room.
"I told Terry to leave," she said. "I'm going to file for divorce."
I was beyond relieved, and I didn't bother to hide it. In fact, I was downright joyful. "This is
great," I said, beaming.
"But, son," she said, "I don't want you to give me any problems. I can't handle that right now.
Please, just don't give me any problems."
"All right," I said. "I promise."
I waited a few weeks to say anything more about it. But then one day when we were sitting
around in the kitchen, out of the blue, I said to my mother, "That guy was no good." I didn't tell
her about the letters–she was unhappy enough. But years later, when she was cleaning, she
found them. She wasn't surprised.
For a while, Terry tried to stay in touch with me by sending birthday cards and things like that.
He would send an envelope with a hundred one-dollar bills in it. I'd take it to my mother and
say, "Would you please send this back to him? I don't want it." Finally, I wrote him a letter
telling him that if I could, I would change my name. I didn't feel I had a relationship with him, or
with his family.
After the breakup, my mother and I grew much closer. I think she had been unhappy for a while,
and when people are unhappy, they're not themselves. She changed once she got divorced. She
was more relaxed, as if she had been under some pressure and now it was gone. Of course, she
was under another kind of pressure as a single woman again, trying to support both of us, but
she had been through that before. She was single for the next five years.
I tried to be dependable. I'd climb on our roof to put up the Christmas lights for her–and if I
mooned the cars on the avenue, well, that was a small, victimless crime. When she got home
from work, we would sit down to dinner together, and turn off the TV, and we'd talk. She
taught me to eat by candlelight, and insisted on decent manners. She would fix a taco salad or a
bowl of Hamburger Helper, light the candles, and tell me about her day. Sometimes she would
talk about how frustrated she was at work, where she felt she was underestimated because she
was a secretary.
"Why don't you quit?" I asked.
"Son, you never quit," she said. "I'll get through it."
Sometimes she would come home and I could see she'd had a really bad day. I'd be playing
something loud on the stereo, like Guns 'N Roses, but I'd take one look at her and turn the
heavy stuff off, and put something else on. "Mom, this is for you," I'd say. And I'd play Kenny G
for her–which believe me was a sacrifice.
I tried to give her emotional support, because she did so many small things for me. Little things.
Every Saturday, she would wash and iron five shirts, so that I had a freshly pressed shirt for each
school day of the week. She knew how hard I trained and how hungry I got in the afternoons, so
she would leave a pot of homemade spaghetti sauce in the refrigerator, for a snack. She taught
me to boil my own pasta and how to throw a strand against the wall to make sure it was done.
I was beginning to earn my own money. When I was 15,1 entered the 1987 President's Triathlon
in Lake Lavon, against a field of experienced older athletes. I finished 32nd, shocking the other
competitors and spectators, who couldn't believe a 15-year-old had held up over the course. I
got some press coverage for that race, and I told a reporter, "I think in a few years I'll be right
near the top, and within ten years I'll be the best." My friends, guys like Steve Lewis, thought I
was hilariously cocky. (The next year, I finished fifth.)
Triathlons paid good money. All of a sudden I had a wallet full of first-place checks, and I
started entering triathlons wherever I could find them. Most of the senior ones had age
restrictions–you had to be 16 or older to enter–so I would doctor my birth date on the entry form
to meet the requirements. I didn't win in the pros, but I would place in the top five. The other
competitors started calling me "Junior."
But if it sounds like it came easy, it didn't. In one of the first pro triathlons I entered, I made the
mistake of eating badly beforehand– I downed a couple of cinnamon rolls and two Cokes–and I
paid for it by bonking, meaning I ran completely out of energy. I had an empty tank. I was first
out of the water, and first off the bike. But in the middle of the run, I nearly collapsed. My
mother was waiting at the finish, accustomed to seeing me come in among the leaders, and she
couldn't understand what was taking me so long. Finally, she walked out on the course and
found me, struggling along.
"Come on, son, you can do it," she said.
"I'm totally gone," I said. "I bonked."
"All right," she said. "But you can't quit, either. Even if you have to walk to the finish line."
I walked to the finish line.
I began to make a name in local bike races, too. On Tuesday nights there was a series of
criteriums–multi-lap road races–held on an old loop around those empty Richardson fields. The
Tuesday-night "crits" were hotly contested among serious local club riders, and they drew a
large crowd. I rode for Hoyt, who sponsored a club team out of the Richardson Bike Mart, and
my mother got me a toolbox to hold all of my bike stuff. She says she can still remember me
pedaling around the loop, powering past other kids, lapping the field. She couldn't believe how
strong I was. I didn't care if it was just a $100 cash prize, I would tear the legs off the other
riders to get at i t .
There are degrees of competitive cycling, and they are rated by category, with Category 1 being
the highest level, Category 4 the lowest. I started out in the "Cat 4" races at the Tuesday-night
crits, but I was anxious to move up. In order to do so you had to have results, win a certain
number of races. But I was too impatient for that, so I convinced the organizers to let me ride in
the Cat 3 race with the older and more experienced group. The organizers told me, "Okay, but
whatever you do, don't win." If I drew too much attention to myself, there might be a big stink
about how they had let me skip the requirements.
I won. I couldn't help it. I dusted the other riders. Afterward there was some discussion about
what to do with me, and one option was suspending me. Instead, they upgraded me. There were
three or four men around there who were Cat 1 riders, local heroes, and they all
rode for the Richardson Bike Mart, so I began training with them, a 16-year-old riding with guys
in their late 20s.
By now I was the national rookie of the year in sprint triathlons, and my mother and I realized
that I had a future as an athlete. I was making about $20,000 a year, and I began keeping a
Rolodex full of business contacts. I needed sponsors and supporters who were willing to front
my airfare and my expenses to various races. My mother told me, "Look, Lance, if you're going
to get anywhere, you're going to have to do it yourself, because no one is going to do it for
you."
My mother had become my best friend and most loyal ally She was my organizer and my
motivator, a dynamo. "If you can't give 110 percent, you won't make it," she would tell me.
She brought an organizational flair to my training. "Look, I don't know what you need," she'd
say. "But I recommend that you sit down and do a mental check of everything, because you
don't want to get there and not have it." I was proud of her, and we were very much alike; we
understood each other perfectly, and when we were together we didn't have to say much. We
just knew. She always found a way to get me the latest bike I wanted, or the accessories that
went with it. In fact, she still has all of my discarded gears and pedals, because they were so
expensive she couldn't bear to get rid of them.
We traveled all over together, entering me in 10K runs and triathlons. We even began to think
that I could be an Olympian. I still carried the silver-dollar good-luck piece, and now she gave
me a key chain that said "1988" on it–the year of the next summer Olympics.
Every day after school I'd run six miles, and then get on my bike and ride into the evening. I
learned to love Texas on those rides. The countryside was beautiful, in a desolate kind of way.
You could ride out on the back roads through vast ranchland and cotton fields with nothing in
the distance but water towers, grain elevators, and dilapidated sheds. The grass was chewed to
nubs by livestock and the dirt looked like what's left in the bottom of an old cup of coffee.
Sometimes I'd find rolling fields of wildflowers, and solitary mesquite trees blown into strange
shapes. But other times the countryside was just flat yellowish-brown prairie, with the
occasional gas station, everything fields, fields of brown grass, fields of cotton, just flat and
awful, and windy. Dallas is the third-windiest city in the country. But it was good for me.
Resistance.
One afternoon I got run off the road by a truck. By then, I had discovered my middle finger, and
I flashed it at the driver. He pulled over, and threw a gas can at me, and came after me. I ran,
leaving my beautiful Mercier bike by the side of the road. The guy stomped on it, damaging i t .
Before he drove off I got his license number, and my mom took the guy to court, and won. In
the meantime, she got me a new bike with her insurance, a Raleigh with racing wheels.
Back then I didn't have an odometer on my bike, so if I wanted to know how long a training
ride was, my mother would have to drive it. If I told her I needed to measure the ride, she got in
the car, even if it was late. Now, a 30-odd-mile training ride is nothing for me, but for a woman
who just got off work it's long enough to be a pain to drive. She didn't complain.
My mother and I became very open with each other. She trusted me, totally. I did whatever I
wanted, and the interesting thing is that no matter what I did, I always told her about it. I never
lied to her. If I wanted to go out, nobody stopped me. While most kids were sneaking out of
their houses at night, I'd go out through the front door.
I probably had too much rope. I was a hyper kid, and I could have done some harm to myself.
There were a lot of wide boulevards and fields in Piano, an invitation to trouble for a teenager
on a bike or behind the wheel of a car. I'd weave up and down the avenues on my bike, dodging
cars and racing the stoplights, going as far as downtown Dallas. I used to like to ride in traffic,
for the challenge.
Click Here to Read More
No comments:
Post a Comment