It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

Details

Pub. Date: September 2001

Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)

Format: NOOK Book (eBook) 304pp

ISBN-13: 9781101203866

ISBN: 1101203862

Meet The Author

Champion cyclist Lance Armstong's Tour de France victory has been hailed as "one of the most memorable moments in sports history during this century" (USA Cycling magazine). In 1996 he established the Lance Armstrong Foundation, a charity to aid the fight against cancer.

Sally Jenkins is the author of one book, Men Will Be Boys, and the coauthor of three more: Reach for the Summit and Raise the Roof (both with Pat Summitt), and A Coach's Life (with Dean Smith). She is a veteran sports reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, and Cond Nast's Women's Sports & Fitness.

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.

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

4ȕ4 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 it.

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