Every Second Counts (21 page)

I tinkered with the bike incessantly. I was always changing the seat height, or the bars, a little down, or up. I talked to engineers, became personally acquainted with every pipe and tube. I’d become so attuned to the bike that I could sense the slightest alteration, like the princess and the pea. A mechanic might change my seat by a micrometer.

“Who messed with my bike?” I’d say.

When I was in remission, College and I took a driving tour of
Europe
. We rented a Renault, and I drove it so fast and so hard, I did something to the engine. When I floored it, it developed a faint high-pitched whining sound,
Wheeeeeeeeeeee.

Finally, on our way from
Italy
to
Switzerland
, I got tired. I let College take the wheel, but only if he promised to keep his foot down on the accelerator.

“Put it to the floor,” I instructed him.

I dozed off in the passenger seat. When he was sure I was fully asleep, College eased off the gas. The
Wheeeeeeeeee
slowed to a
Waaaaaaaaaaah.

My eyes snapped open. “Put it to the floor,” I said.

The winning is really in the details, I told Floyd. It’s in the details that you get ahead. And in racing, “If you aren’t getting ahead, you might as well be going backwards,” I said.

The data and the numbers and the details gave you a psychological edge, not just physical. Each time I rode a hard climb twice, I told myself I was doing something no one else had done; that nobody in the Tour had suffered and worked as hard as I had. It gave me a deeper overall strength.

The reason we trained in bad weather, I told Floyd, was because a race wouldn’t be cancelled just because it was 40 degrees and sleeting. Unless you ride in the cold you can’t know how it feels, can’t understand the sensation of cold seeping into your legs and stiffening them. That was a kind of strength you could only acquire by riding in it.

We spent most of May off in the mountains, training, and we rode at such high elevations that we got snowed out.

One day as I was riding, Johan pulled up next to me and said, “There’s snow six kilometers from the top, you can’t get through the pass.”

“How much snow?”
I asked.

“From an avalanche,” he said.

“What if I keep going?”

“You can’t.”

“Who says?”

That’s what it took to win the Tour.

One day I rode to a huge mountain called La Plagne. I reached the top after six and a half hours,
then
descended. At the bottom I just turned the bike around and went up again. I finished with more than eight hours of riding that day. It was dark when I got off the bike.

Nobody could give that kind of confidence to an athlete, except himself. It couldn’t be faked, or called up at the last minute. You got it from everything you did leading up to the competition, so that on the day of the race itself, you looked around at all the other strong riders beside you, and said, “I’m ready. I’ve done more than they have. Bring it on.”

But these things didn’t always make me easy to work with. Johan Bruyneel and Chris Carmichael got 100 percent from me, and I wanted 100 percent from them. I called Johan four and five times a day.

I’ve been known to call
Carmichael
at
one
A.M
.
and say, “What are you doing?” If he hadn’t posted my latest training program to me via e-mail, I wanted to know why not.

“Why isn’t it up? You said you’d get it done.”

“I forgot.”

“You forgot? What do you mean you forgot? What if I forgot to show up at the Tour?”

“I’ll get it done,” Chris said. And he’d get up, while I was on the phone, and go to his computer.

“Listen,” I’d say, “at this time last year my cadence was 93, and now it’s 90, but I’m at the same wattage. How come? We need to look at that, and the spreadsheets of my last twelve tests, and measure them against where I was two years ago . . .”

A
bike race
was a comparatively easy and compelling form of success. There was a surety to the math: I knew within a fractional certainty how I would perform in a race because it had all been measured. It was ultimate, total confidence in the data.

But matters like marriage, or moving, or parenting, were more complicated and ambiguous compared to winning a race. In May, Kik and I celebrated our four-year wedding anniversary. We had a rare dinner out in Girona, just the two of us. Date night for us was becoming a once-a-year deal, on a birthday or our anniversary.

It was an occasion for reminiscing. Kik and I had first met when I was recovering from cancer and didn’t yet know what I would do with the rest of my life, or how much of a life I would have. She was working for a marketing agency that promoted the cancer foundation, and she
hassled
me about not doing more for a corporate sponsor. We ended up having a drink to make peace—and from then on, we spent all of our time together. I’d known women who were smart, or pretty, or funny, but until Kik I hadn’t met one who was so many things all at once.

Dave Richard hadn’t liked any of Kik’s boyfriends. He shot every one of them down. Finally, she said, “Dad, am I ever going to find anybody to satisfy you?” Dave knew then that he had better try to like the next one. “I’m out of ammo,” he said to his wife. The next guy she brought home was me. She invited me to her parents’ in
Rye
,
New York
for Christmas, and by then I was already thinking of proposing, and hoping she would accept. After the holiday, I sent Kik’s mother, Ethel, an e-mail thanking her. I added, “You’ve raised a wonderful daughter.” Ethel wrote me back and said, “Thanks for the nice compliment, but are you sucking up?” I wrote back, “If it’s working, I’m sucking.” I proposed to Kik after just four months.

At our anniversary dinner, we realized all that we’d done since that time: we’d had four residences and three children, a bunch of bike-wrecks and various medical checkups, and we’d been through three
Tours
. We’d done it all fast. We fell in love fast, got married fast, had children fast, had success fast, and had more children fast. But we were about to have problems fast.

From the outside it looked graceful and easy, a golden, storybook life, and often it was. But there was a growing tension between appearances, what the rest of the world expected us to feel, and what we were actually feeling. The reality was that at the end of the day, we were like everybody else. The kids were tired and hungry, and the adults were, too. I’d walk through the door, physically spent. Kik would be worn out from a day with three small children under the age of three. It didn’t help that neither of us wanted to admit to problems or fatigue or the threat of slippage—we weren’t supposed to experience everyday unhappiness, because we’d been given so much. Neither one of us was able to say to the other, “This doesn’t feel quite right.” So we simply drifted on, doing our best.

A far more difficult test of endurance than a bike race is how you handle the smaller, common circumstances of your days, the more mundane difficulty of trying to make your life work. It’s a typical assumption that the lessons of athletic competition are transferable. But the truth is that sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t.

How do you measure whether you’re being a good mate and a consistent parent? If other versions of success aren’t as clear-cut as a bike race, frankly, they’re also harder to come by. They can’t be measured with data. They also provide an immeasurable satisfaction.

I was a beacon of survivorship—but I wasn’t immune to its effects, and one of the emotional traps of survivorship is a
rush
to happiness. You race toward joy, exhilarated, and tell yourself that you don’t have a moment to waste on anything that feels wrong or unpleasant. “Why am I doing this?” I’d say. But a rush to happiness is impossible to achieve. Pure happiness is a rope slipping through your fingers, a silky sense of something passing from your grip. It’s replaced by exigencies, hard work, renewals, chores, obligations, and another day.

CHAPTER 6

Blue Train (
Le Train Bleu
)

P
icture it: two hundred riders flying down a narrow road at 45 miles an hour, all of them trying to ride in front, bumping, jostling, punching, cutting each other off, and even jumping curbs in an effort to get ahead. Some of them will leave tire tracks on your back, if you let them. It’s just one of the ways in which the Tour de France accurately imitates real life.

It takes eight fellow U.S. Postal Service riders to get me to the finish line in one piece, let alone in first place. Cycling is far more of a team sport than spectators realize, and it’s an embarrassment worth cringing over that I’ve stood on the podium of the Tour de France alone, as if I got there by myself. I don’t just show up there after almost three thousand miles, and say, “Look what I did.” When I wear the yellow jersey, I figure I only deserve the zipper. The rest of it, each sleeve, the front, the back, belongs to the guys.

The Tour de France poses an interesting question about the nature of teamwork: why should eight riders sweat and suffer for three weeks when only one man, me, will get the trophy? This is asking for an extreme degree of self-sacrifice, perhaps even an unnatural amount. But the smart athlete, and person, knows that if self-sacrifice is hard, self-interest is worse. It dooms a team; you wind up a bunch of singletons that just happen to wear the same shirts.

A great team is a mysterious thing, hard to create, much less duplicate, and there are a lot more bad teams in the world than good ones. Just look around. Many groups who go through hardships together
don’t
bond—all you have to do is survey the NFL, the NBA, and corporate
America
to see that. People talk about teamwork all the time: it’s a shopworn and overused term, experts try to explain and define it, charlatans write books on the subject, but few really understand it.

And no wonder: teammates have an odd relationship; they float somewhere between acquaintances and relatives. But I contend that people are meant to work together in groups, not alone, and that a certain amount of self-sacrifice is not unnatural, but natural. Think about it: people have been gathering together in group efforts throughout time.

If you truly invest yourself in a team, you guarantee yourself a return on your investment, and that’s a big competitive advantage over other less-committed teams. On the Postal Service team, we invest in each other’s efforts—and the result is that we often have the sensation that we’re racing against teams that merely spend
themselves
. What’s smarter, to invest or spend? Investment implies a longer-term commitment; it’s not shallow or ephemeral; it’s enduring, and it suggests a long-term return.

There have been times when I’ve practically lived out of the same suitcase with George Hincapie. In cycling we’re on the side of a mountain for weeks, in small hotel rooms, sharing every ache, and pain, and meal. You get to know everything about each other, including things you’d rather not.

For instance, I know that George has such heavy stubble on his chin that he has to shave about every hour. I learned that one August when we roomed together on the road. One morning, George was in the bathroom shaving, when I heard him yell.

“God
dammit
.
It happened again!”

I went running toward the bathroom. “What happened?”

He stepped around the corner, beaming and clean-shaven.

“I just got better-looking,” he said.

You can’t always tell what makes a good team—but you know one when you see it, because the team members like each other. Sometimes we’ll stay at a hotel where two or three other teams are lodged, and we all end up in the dining room together. Our Postal team sits around the table laughing, and chucking dinner rolls, and even after we’re done we linger over our plates, enjoying each other’s company. But across the aisle is a team that’s full of free agents, with no one working very hard in anyone else’s behalf. They eat with their heads hanging down over their plates, not making conversation, and as soon as they finish their meals, they go to their rooms. And in a pack sprint to the finish line, a solo rider without allies or associates is a tired and losing one.

The 2002 U.S. Postal Service team was one of the best cycling teams that ever rode a road. What made the personalities of nine different men on bikes meld into a single agreeable entity? Reciprocity is the answer. Too many people (especially bosses) demand or try to foster teamwork without grasping its most crucial aspect: a team is just another version of a community. The same principles apply to any communal undertaking, whether you’re talking about a community garden, a neighborhood watch, or racing around
France
: if you want something, first you have to give it. You have to invest in it.

If I don’t want to get sideways with the guys on my team, it’s important to make them feel that when I’m winning, they are, too. One way to do so is to ride on their behalf in several races a year. I spend a portion of each spring working as a support rider and trying to help my teammates win races. I act as a domestique, shield them from the wind, protect them in the pack, and carry their water bottles—and it’s one of my favorite parts of the season. And you know what? It
feels
good. I don’t just do it so that they’ll do the same for me in the Tour de France. I also do it because it feels better than
solitude,
it’s more gratifying than riding purely alone.