It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (21 page)

and frustrated, but in her glance to Bill, something passed between them. Kik’s look got the point across. It said, Be patient with him, he’s a mess.

There was about a 20-second pause before Bill spoke. Then he said, “Well, we need to at least make a statement, do this formally. Let’s get it done right.”

“Just issue a press release,” I said. “What about that?”

“It’s a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“You know those races, Ruta del whatever, and Paris-whatever?” Bill said. “Nobody in America has ever heard of those, pal. Nobody here even knows you got back on a bike. So you can

certainly have a press conference and tell everybody you’re retired. I know you think you had this fabulous comeback, and I agree with you. I mean, what you’ve done is amazing. Just

beating cancer is a comeback. But nobody else knows it.”

“I was 14th at Ruta del Sol,” I said, defensively. “Lance,” Bill said, “you will be the guy who got cancer and never rode again. That’s what it’s going to be.”

There was another long pause. Next to me, Kik’s eyes began to well up.

“Well,” I said, “we can’t have that.”

Stapleton finessed me: he cited a thousand things that had to be done before I could formally retire. “I understand you’re retiring,” Bill said. “But how are you going to retire?” He asked me if

I wanted to hold a live press conference, and suggested that we needed to have meetings with sponsors. Then he said, “Shouldn’t you ride at least one farewell race?” I couldn’t leave the sport

without a final appearance in the U.S.

“Why not race at the national championships in June, and make that your last race?” he said. “You can win that; you know you can. That’s a comeback; that’s something people will know

about.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I want to get back on a bike.”

Bill patiently manipulated me into holding off on a retirement announcement. With every complication he summoned up, he bought more time. At the very least I couldn’t retire before

the Ride for the Roses, he said, and that wasn’t until May.

Finally, Bill wore me down. I told him I would wait to announce anything. But in the meantime, I decided I would take a few days off.

My Postal team was patient. Thorn Weisel offered to wait. But a few days off turned into a week, and then a week turned into a month. I didn’t even unpack my bike. It sat in its bag in the

garage, collecting dust.

I WAS A BUM. I PLAYED GOLF EVERY DAY, I WATER-SKIED,

I drank beer, and I lay on the sofa and channel-surfed.

I went to Chuy’s for Tex-Mex, and violated every rule of my training diet. Whenever I came home from Europe, it was a tradition for me to stop at Chuy’s straight from the airport, no

matter how jet-lagged I was, and order a burrito with tomatillo sauce and a couple of margaritas or Shiner Bocks. Now I was eating practically every meal there. I never intended to deprive

myself again; I’d been given a second chance and I was determined to take advantage of it.

But it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t lighthearted or free or happy. It was forced. I tried to re-create the mood I’d shared with Kik on our European vacation, but this time, things were different, and I

couldn’t understand why. The truth was, I felt ashamed. I was filled with self-doubt and embarrassed by what I’d done in Paris–Nice. Son, you never quit. But I’d quit.

I was behaving totally out of character, and the reason was survivorship. It was a classic case of “Now what?” I’d had a job and a life, and then I got sick, and it turned my life upside-down, and

when I tried to go back to my life I was disoriented, nothing was the same– and I couldn’t handle it.

I hated the bike, but I thought, What else am I going to do? Be a coffee boy in an office? I didn’t exactly feel like a champ at much else. I didn’t know what to do, so for the moment, I just

-wanted to escape, and that’s what I did. I evaded my responsibilities.

I know now that surviving cancer involved more than just a convalescence of the body. My mind and my soul had to convalesce, too.

No one quite understood that–except for Kik. She kept her composure when she had every right to be distraught and furious with me for pulling the rug out from under her. While I was out

playing golf every day, she was homeless, dogless, and jobless, reading the classifieds and

wondering how we were going to support ourselves. My mother sympathized with what she was going through. She would call us, ask to speak with Kik, and say, “How are you doing?”

But after several weeks of the golf, the drinking, the Mexican food, Kik decided it was enough–somebody had to try to get through to me. One morning we were sitting outside on the

patio having coffee. I put down my cup and said, “Well, okay, I’ll see you later. It’s my tee time.”

“Lance,” Kik said, “what am / doing today?”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t ask me what I was going to do today. You didn’t ask me what I wanted to do, or if I minded if you played golf. You just told me what you were going to do. Do you care what I’m

doing?”

“Oh, sorry,” I said.

“What am I doing today?” she said. “What am I doing? Tell me that.”

I was silent. I didn’t know what to say.

“You need to decide something,” she told me. “You need to decide if you are going to retire for real, and be a golf-playing, beer-drinking, Mexican-food-eating slob. If you are, that’s fine. I love

you, and I’ll marry you anyway. But I just need to know, so I can get myself together and go back on the street, and get a job to support your golfing. Just tell me.

“But if you’re not going to retire, then you need to stop eating and drinking like this and being a bum, and you need to figure it out, because you are deciding by not deciding, and that is so

un-Lance. It is just not you. And I’m not quite sure who you are right now. I love you anyway, but you need to figure something out.”

She wasn’t angry as she said it. She was just right: I didn’t really know what I was trying to accomplish, and I was just being a bum. All of a sudden I saw a reflection of myself as a retiree

in her eyes, and I didn’t like it. She wasn’t going to live an idle life, and I didn’t blame her.

Quietly, she said, “So tell me if we’re going to stay in Austin. If so, I’m going to get a job, because I’m not going to sit at home while you play golf. I’m so bored.”

Normally, nobody could talk to me like that. But she said it almost sweetly, without fighting. Kik knew how stubborn I could be when someone tried to butt heads with me; it was my old

reflex against control and authority. I don’t like to be cornered, and when I am, I will fight my way out, whether physically or logically or emotionally. But as she spoke to me I didn’t feel

attacked or defensive, or hurt, or picked on, I just knew the honest truth when I heard it. It was, in a quietly sarcastic way, a very profound conversation. I stood up from the table.

“Okay,” I said. “Let me think about it.”

I went to play golf anyway, because I knew Kik didn’t mind that. Golf wasn’t the issue. The issue was finding myself again.

KIK AND STAPLETON AND CARMICHAEL AND OCH conspired against me, talking constantly behind my back about how to get me back on the bike. I continued to say that I was

retiring, but as the days wore on, I began to waver. Bill persuaded me to commit to one last race, the U.S. Pro Championships, which would be held in Philadelphia in May.

Chris Carmichael flew to Austin. He took one look in my garage, at the bike still in its carrying bag, and shook his head. Chris felt like Kik did, that I needed to make a conscious decision

about whether I belonged back on the bike. “You’re alive again, and now you need to get back to living,” he repeated. But he knew I wasn’t ready to commit to another full-scale comeback

yet, so the surface excuse he gave for coming to Austin was simply to put together a training plan for the U.S. Championships. Also, the second Ride for the Roses was coming up, and the

race would be a criterium around downtown Austin requiring that I be at least minimally fit. “You can’t go out like this,” Chris said, gesturing at my body. “You don’t want to embarrass

your foundation.”

Chris insisted that regardless of what I decided about retirement, I needed an eight- to ten-day intensive training camp to get back to form–and I needed to do it somewhere other than Austin.

“Let’s get out of town,” he said. “You can’t focus here, there’s too much golf, too many distractions.”

We tried to think of a place to go. Arizona? Too hot. Colorado? Too high altitude. Then I said, “Remember Boone? That little hippie town in North Carolina?”

Boone was high in the Appalachians on the route of the old Tour Du Pont, and I had fond memories of it. I had won the Tour Du Pont twice there, and I had spent many afternoons

cycling and suffering on its biggest peak, Beech Mountain, which was the crucial climbing stage of the race. It was arduous but beautiful country, and Boone itself was a college town full of

students and professors from nearby Appalachian State University. Conveniently, it had a training facility at the university, and plenty of cabins for rent in the woods.

I got on the Internet and rented a cabin sight unseen. Next, I decided to invite an old friend named Bob Roll to be my training partner; Bob was a high-spirited 38-year-old former road

racer who had switched over to mountain biking, and he would be easy company for ten days.

We flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, and drove three hours into the mountains. Our first stop was Appalachian State, where Chris arranged with the athletic training center to do some

testing with me on a stationary bike, to find out where I stood fitness-wise. Chris looked at my VO

2 max and lactate threshold numbers, and they confirmed what he already knew: I was fat and in lousy shape. Usually, my physiological values were the elite of the elite. My VO

2 rate, ordinarily at 85, was now at 64.

Chris said to the Appalachian State trainers who helped us, “Watch. When we come back he’s going to be at 74, and he’ll do it after only a week.”

Chris knew that my body responded to new thresholds after a very short period, and he felt I could be back in peak shape in just a few days. But just to challenge me, he made me a bet that I

couldn’t up my wattage–the amount of work in pedaling–in the space of a week. “A hundred bucks says you can’t get over 500,” he said. I took the bet.

From then on, all we did was eat, sleep, and ride bikes. Spring had just begun moving up into the mountains, creating a constant fog and drizzle that seemed to muffle the piney woods. We

rode in the rain every day. The cold seared my lungs, and with every breath I blew out a stream of white frost, but I didn’t mind. It made me feel clean. We rode winding back roads, only some

of which were paved and mapped. We cycled over gravel and hardpan and beds of pine needles, and under hanging boughs.

At night, Chris made big pots of pasta and baked potatoes and we sat around the table wolfing down the food and having unprintable conversations. We told stories and laughed about old

times and the start of our friendship, and my first years as a pro.

I called home each night, and Kristin could tell that I was starting to sound like my old self; I was having fun, joking, I didn’t seem depressed. When I would tell her about the cold and rainy

weather or how far we had ridden, I would laugh. “I’m feeling really good,” I said, almost puzzled.

I began to enjoy the single-mindedness of training, riding hard during the day and holing up in the cabin in the evenings. I even appreciated the awful weather. It was as if I was going back to

Paris-Nice and staring the elements that had defeated me in the eye. What had cracked me in Paris were the cold, wet conditions, but now I took satisfaction in riding through them, the way

I’d used to.

Toward the end of the camp, we decided to ride Beech Mountain. Chris knew exactly what he was doing when he suggested it, because there was a time when I owned that mountain. It was

a strenuous 5,000-foot climb with a snowcapped summit, and it had been the crucial stage in my two Tour Du Pont victories. I remembered laboring on up the mountainside with crowds lined

along the route, and how they had painted my name across the road: “Go Armstrong.”

We set out on yet another cold, raining, foggy day with a plan to ride a 100-mile loop before we returned and undertook the big finishing ascent of Beech Mountain. Chris would follow in a car,

so we could load the bikes up on the rack after we reached the summit and drive back to the

cabin for dinner.

We rode and rode through a steady rain, for four hours, and then five. By the time we got to the foot of Beech, I’d been on the bike for six hours, drenched. But I lifted myself up out of the

saddle and propelled the bike up the incline, leaving Bob Roll behind.

As I started up the rise, I saw an eerie sight: the road still had my name painted on it.

My wheels spun over the washed-out old yellow and white lettering. I glanced down between my feet. It said, faintly, Viva Lance.

I continued upward, and the mountain grew steeper. I hammered down on the pedals, working hard, and felt a small bloom of sweat and satisfaction, a heat under my skin almost like a liquor

blush. My body reacted instinctively to the climb. Mindlessly, I rose out of my seat and picked up the pace. Suddenly, Chris pulled up behind me in the follow car, rolled down his window,

and began driving me on. “Go, go, go!” he yelled. I glanced back at him. “Allez Lance, allez, allez!” he yelled. I mashed down on the pedals, heard my breath grow shorter, and I

accelerated.

That ascent triggered something in me. As I rode upward, I reflected on my life, back to all points, my childhood, my early races, my illness, and how it changed me. Maybe it was the

primitive act of climbing that made me confront the issues I’d been evading for weeks. It was time to quit stalling, I realized. Move, I told myself. If you can still move, you aren’t sick.