Every Second Counts (2 page)

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 in
Girona
,
Spain
, while I prepare for the Tour. When the racing season is over, I come back to
Austin
. Our family lives in a house in central
Austin
, and we also have the ranch in the hill country. But my favorite home is a small hideaway, a one-room cabin just outside
Austin
, in the hills overlooking the
Colorado 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: the
maillot 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 you
hidin
’?”

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 to
Niagara 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.

O
ddly enough, while
the 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 in
Austin
, into the
Texas
night 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 another
Austin
bike 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 in
Santa 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 from
Plano
,
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 to
Paris
to 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.

T
here was one
good 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, and
Late 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 in
New York
, or M. D. Anderson in
Houston
, or the Southwest Regional Cancer Clinic in
Austin
, 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 the
New 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 the
quality
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?