It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (22 page)

I looked again at the ground as it passed under my wheels, at the water spitting off the tires and the spokes turning round. I saw more faded painted letters, and I saw my washed-out name: Go

Armstrong.

As I continued upward, I saw my life as a whole. I saw the pattern and the privilege of it, and the purpose of it, too. It was simply this: I was meant for a long, hard climb.

I approached the summit. Behind me, Chris could see in the attitude of my body on the bike that I was having a change of heart. Some weight, he sensed, was simply no longer there.

Lightly, I reached the top of the mountain. I cruised to a halt. Chris put the car in park and got

out. We didn’t talk about what had just happened. Chris just looked at me, and said, “I’ll put your bike on top of the car.”

“No,” I said. “Give me my rain jacket. I’m riding back.” I was restored. I was a bike racer again. Chris smiled and got back in the car.

I passed the rest of the trip in a state of near-reverence for those beautiful, peaceful, soulful mountains. The rides were demanding and quiet, and I rode with a pure love of the bike, until

Boone began to feel like the Holy Land to me, a place I had come to on a pilgrimage. If I ever have any serious problems again, I know that I will go back to Boone and find an answer. I got

my life back on those rides.

A day or two later we went to the university training center to test my wattage. I pedaled so hard I blew out the odometer. I spun the machine so fast Chris couldn’t get a digital readout.

Laughing, he smacked $100 into my palm.

That night at dinner, I said to Chris casually, “I wonder if I could get into that race in Atlanta.”

“Let’s do it,” Chris said.

‘That evening, we started figuring out my comeback. Chris placed a bunch of calls, trying to find me some new racing wheels. Then he called Bill Stapleton, and said, “Get ready. He’s coming

back a different guy. The guy we used to know.”

I DIDN’T JUST JUMP BACK ON THE BIKE AND WIN. THERE were a lot of ups and downs, good results and bad results, but this time I didn’t let the lows get to me.

After Boone, I enjoyed every day on the bike. Every day. Even when I was in bad shape, suffering, crashing, trying to come back, I never once, never, ever, ever, thought about

abandoning again.

I even took the bike to my wedding. My trip to Boone was in April of ‘98, and Kik and I were married that May in Santa Barbara. We invited about a hundred people, and we exchanged

vows in a small Catholic ceremony–Kik is Catholic–and afterward we had a dance party. No one sat down for the duration of the night, people were too busy rocking all over the room, and

it was such a good time that Kik and I didn’t want it to end. We ended up in the hotel bar with our guests in our wedding getups, and had cocktails and cigars.

We stayed on in a beach house for a few days, but it wasn’t the ideal honeymoon, because I was so intent on training after my Boone experience. I rode every day. Finally we returned home to

Austin for the Ride for the Roses, which had grown to be a big-time event. Part of downtown was blocked off, lights were strung up through the streets. I won the criterium over a pretty

good field. When I took the podium, Kik shrieked and jumped around, as thrilled as if it were the Tour de France. It struck me that she had never seen me win anything before. “That’s

nothing,” I said, shrugging, but I was secretly delighted.

It was nice to have a little taste of competition again. I got another in June, when I made my official return to the cycling circuit and finished fourth in the U.S. Pro Championships, while my

friend and teammate George Hincapie won it.

One morning I said to Kik, “Okay, maybe it’s time to try Europe again.” She just nodded cheerfully and started packing. The thing is, I could have said to her: “We’re going back to

Europe,” and when we got to Europe, I could have said, “We’re going back to Austin,” and when we got to Austin, I could have said, “You know what? I made a mistake. We’re going

back to Europe,” and she would have made every trip without complaint. Nothing was a huge crisis to her.

Kik liked the challenge of a new place and a new language, so when I said: “Okay, let’s try it one more time,” that was an easy one for her. Some wives would have thought it was hard, but

that’s why I didn’t marry some wives. A lot of wives wouldn’t have made it over there in the first place. My wife, on the other hand, is a stud.

Kik and I tentatively rented a little apartment in Nice, and she enrolled back in school and started French lessons again, while I continued to race. I entered the Tour of Luxembourg–and I

won it. After the first stage, I called home, and Kik wanted to know why I wasn’t more excited, but by now I was so wary of the psychological pitfalls of a comeback that I kept my emotions

and expectations in check. It was just a four-day race, not the kind that the major riders would have celebrated as a big victory. But from a morale standpoint it was great, because it meant I

could win again–and it was worth some ICU bonus points, too. It erased the last lingering bit of self-doubt.

Next, I traveled to the weeklong Tour of Holland, and finished fourth. In July, I skipped the Tour de France, not yet ready for the strenuous routine of a three-week stage race. Instead, I did

some TV commentary and watched from the side of the road as it turned into the most controversial and traumatic bike race in history. In a series of raids On team cars, French police

found trunkloads of EPO and anabolic steroids. Team members and officials were thrown in French jails, everyone was under suspicion, and the cyclists were furious at the tactics used by

authorities. Of the 21 teams that began the race, only 14 finished. One team was expelled and the other six quit in protest. Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling, or any other

endurance sport for that matter. Inevitably, some teams and riders feel it’s like nuclear weapons–that they have to do it to stay competitive within the peloton. I never felt that way,

and certainly after chemo the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was especially repulsive. Overall, I had extremely mixed feelings about the 1998 Tour: I sympathized with the

riders caught in the firestorm, some of whom I knew well, but I also felt the Tour would be a more fair event from then on.

I continued to make steady progress on the bike through the summer, and in August Kik and I felt secure enough about my future as a rider to buy a house in Nice. While Kik employed her

stumbling French to handle the bankers and buy furniture and move us into the new home, I went off with the team for the three-week Vuelta a Es-pana (Tour of Spain), one of the most

strenuous races on the face of the earth. There are three grand tours in cycling, of Italy, Spain, and France.

On October 1, 1998, nearly two years to the day after I was diagnosed, I completed the Vuelta. I finished fourth, and it was as important an achievement as any race I’d ever won. I rode 2,348

miles over 23 days, and missed making the awards podium by only six seconds. The winner,

Abraham Olano of Spain, had ridden just 2 minutes and 18 seconds faster than I had. What’s more, I nearly won the toughest mountain stage of the race, in gale-force winds and freezing

temperatures. The race was so tough that almost half the field retired before the finish. But I didn’t quit.

To place fourth in the Vuelta meant more than just a comeback. In my previous life, I’d been a great one-day racer, but I’d never been competitive in a three-week stage race. The Vuelta

meant I was not only back, I was better. I was capable of winning any race in the world. I swept up ICU ranking points right and left, and all of a sudden I was the real deal.

WHILE I WAS RIDING IN THE VUELTA, KIK WAS IN AN endurance contest of her own called moving. Our apartment was on the third floor, and she would call up the elevator, load it

with our things–boxes of clothes, cycling gear, and kitchenware. She would ride down and unload everything in the lobby, and then she’d move it all from the lobby to the front door of the

building, and from there into the back of the car. She’d drive to the new house, unload the car, carry the boxes up a set of steep stairs ascending a hillside, and dump them in the house. Then

she’d drive back to the apartment and repeat the routine all over again, elevator load by elevator load. Kik worked for two days straight, until she was bleary-eyed with fatigue.

When I arrived home, my clothes were put away, the refrigerator was full of groceries, and Kik handed me a new set of keys. For some reason, it made me ridiculously happy. That house

seemed like the culmination of the whole year. We had done it, we had established ourselves in Europe and regained my career. Kik could speak some French now, and we had a home and a

life together, and it meant everything to us. “Oh, my God,” she said. “We did it. We started over.”

To celebrate we spent a few days in Lake Como, which was still one of my favorite places anywhere. I treated us to a wonderful hotel, and handpicked the room we stayed in, with a

gigantic terrace and sweeping view, and all we did was sleep and stroll and go to elegant dinners. Finally, we went home to Austin for the fall and winter holidays. Not long after we got

back, I received an e-mail from the U.S. Postal team director, Johan Bruyneel. He congratulated me on the Vuelta. “I think that fourth was better than you expected,” he wrote. Then he made

an interesting reference. “You will look great on the podium of the Tour de France next year,” Johan wrote, cryptically.

That was the end of the message. I saved his e-mail to a disk, printed it out, and looked at the words. The Tour? Johan didn’t just think I could be a stage racer again, he thought I could be a

Tour rider. He thought I could win the whole thing. It was worth considering.

Over the next few days, I read and reread the e-mail. After a year of confusion and self-doubt, I now knew exactly what I should do. I wanted to win the Tour de France.

WHAT YOU LEARN IN SURVIVORSHIP is THAT AFTER ALL the shouting is done, after

the desperation and crisis is over, after you have accepted the fact of your illness and celebrated the return of your health, the old routines and habits, like shaving in the morning with a

purpose, a job to go to, and a wife to love and a child to raise, these are the threads that tie your days together and that give them the pattern deserving of the term “a life.”

One of the things I loved about Boone was the view it offered. When I cycled around an unexpected bend in the road, suddenly the landscape opened up, the line of trees parted, and I

could see thirty mountain ranges stretching to the horizon. I was beginning to see my life in the same way.

I wanted to have a child. When I was sick, fatherhood was something obscured around the next bend, perhaps impossible, a lost chance. Now my view was as clear and crystallized as those

mountain ranges in the distance, and I didn’t want to postpone fatherhood any longer. Fortunately, Kik was as ready as I was. We understood each other perfectly despite the

upheavals of the last year, and we’d held on to a sweet harmony, the kind that makes you want to join with another and create a new human being.

Ironically, the process would be almost as medically intricate as a cancer treatment: it would require as much research and planning, and a raft of syringes, drugs, and two surgeries. I was

sterile. In order to get pregnant, Kik would need in-vitro fertilization (IVF), using the sperm I had banked in San Antonio on that awful day.

What follows in these pages is an attempt to render the experience truthfully and openly. A lot of couples are private about their IVF treatment and don’t want to talk about it at all, which is

their right. We aren’t. We understand we may be criticized for being so free with the details, but we have decided to share them because so many couples deal with infertility and are

faced with the fear that they may not be able to have a family. We want them to hear the specifics of IVF so they understand what’s ahead of them. For us, it was forbidding but worth

it.

We planned to start our family right after the New Year, and I began to research in-vitro as thoroughly as cancer, scouring the Internet and consulting with physicians. We scheduled a trip

to New York City to visit the IVF experts at Cornell University. But as the date drew closer on the calendar, we started having second thoughts. The experience was going to be clinical and

impersonal enough, and we were so tired of travel that the idea of being in a strange hotel room for weeks in New York sounded as unappealing as a chemo cycle. We changed course and

decided to seek an IVF specialist at home in Austin, Dr. Thomas Vaughn.

On December 28, we had our first consultation with Dr. Vaughn. Both of us were nervous as we sat on the couch in his office, and out of habit I wore what Kik called my “medical

demeanor,” which I put on in any clinical situation, a tight-lipped, hard look. Kik smiled a lot to offset my grimness, so Dr. Vaughn would think we were fit to be parents.

As we discussed the IVF procedure, I noticed Kik blushed slightly. She wasn’t used to the

clinical language, but after testicular cancer, discussing sexual matters publicly with strangers was no big deal to me. We left the office with a rough plan in place and a sense of surprise that

it could happen so fast–if things worked, Kik could be pregnant by February. The timing was important, because we’d have to plan the arrival of the new baby along with my cycling

schedule if I wanted to win the Tour de France.

Two days later, Kik went to an X-ray lab for her first appointment. Nurses strapped her to a sliding X-ray table and stuck a torture device inside her that sprayed dye. The X ray was to

make sure she didn’t have any blocked tubes or other problems. Well, the nurses messed up twice before they finally got it right, and it hurt Kik to the point that she sobbed. But, typical