Every Second Counts (3 page)

Most people, I discovered, just wanted to be heard, or sometimes they just wanted to be touched. I met a boy named Cameron Stewart who has leukemia, got it when he was about six.

“Did you have a port?” he asked me.

“Did I have a port? Look at this,” I said.

I unbuttoned my shirt and showed him the scar on my chest. He took off his shirt, too. He had a small port inserted in his tiny little bird chest.

Cameron and I have kept in touch; he came to
Austin
with his family for our annual foundation bike race. He’s in remission, and he’s growing into a healthy kid. He likes to say, “I have Lance Armstrong legs.”

I met other athletes with cancer, and we swapped stories and anecdotes. I laughed with Eric Davis, the great baseball player, about trying to eat during chemo. “Caesar salad with chicken,” he said. “I ate two of them, every day, right before the chemo. Because when you take chemo, you throw up. And if you don’t have anything in you, you can’t throw up. And
not
being able to throw up is even worse than throwing up. So I’d eat my Caesar salad. It went in, just so it could come out.”

Doctors got cancer, too. A prominent physician in
New York
was diagnosed with prostate cancer. We got to know each other via e-mail. He wrote, “I hope I live for ten more years.” I wrote him back: “I hope you were joking about living only ten years,” I said. “I’ll see you in thirty.”

I never tired of the subject, of talking about it or hearing about it or reliving it. I celebrated the three-year anniversary of my diagnosis on
October 2, 1999
, and I called it “Carpe Diem Day,” meaning, “Seize the Day.” It remained the most important day of the year, larger than any birthday or anniversary or holiday, and it was a day filled with introspection, of thinking about second chances.

Every so often a friend or a family member discovered just how much cancer occupied my mind. One afternoon my coach, Chris Carmichael, told me that he had begun working with other athletes who had cancer. Chris wanted my counsel. “You have a great template for me to work from,” he said. “You’ve been
there,
you know exactly what those athletes are facing.” I did: the long days with an IV in the arm, the heaving nausea, and the scars and chemical burns that would tattoo their bodies. But I didn’t feel like an expert on how to beat cancer, I just felt lucky.

“You don’t know, this thing could come back tomorrow, come back in me,” I said to Chris. “It only went away because mine was treatable. But it’s not really gone and it’s not something that ever does disappear. I still worry about it.”

“Lance, it’s not coming back,” he said.

“Who says? Who says it can’t come back?”

At no point could I say, “That’s over.” Even with a Tour victory, and a new baby on the way, I still had the lingering impression that everything might go away overnight, that I might not be able to ride again, or even that I’d get sick again.

M
y son came
in the early hours of a mid-October morning, and his birth was hectic and difficult: at first, he had trouble breathing and the nurses took him away to clear his lungs. Finally, he let go a beautiful howl.

The fear at that moment when he wasn’t breathing trumped any fear I’d ever known. Kik and I looked at each other, and we instantly realized the truth about parenthood: it’s the most vulnerable state in the world. Later, Kik said, “Now we’re both capable of being emotionally annihilated.” To be a parent was to be totally stripped down, emotionally naked, and that would be true for the rest of our lives.

After Luke was cleaned and wrapped in a blanket, we settled into a room to get some rest. But the reverberations and anxieties lasted all night and made it impossible to sleep. I shifted on the plastic hospital mattress. I thought about the difference in the fear I had for myself during cancer, and the fear I had for someone else’s well-being now that I was a father.

I thought about my mother, and wondered at the risks she had watched me take without interfering, the things she had watched me climb, the high dives and hard falls, the times I wrecked my bike, and of course, the time I got sick. Nothing could be as emotionally hazardous, or interesting, or rewarding, as the job of being a parent.

Having a child was an excellent way to feel alive, I decided. Not unlike jumping
off
a cliff.

Cancer made me want to do more than just live: it made me want to live in a certain way. The near-death experience stripped something away. Where others have a little bit of trepidation—
Am I ready for a child, what happens if people don’t like me, should I do this or is it too dangerous
—I didn’t anymore. To me, there were some lives where you might as well be dead. Illness had left me with a clear view of the difference between real fear and mere
disquiet,
and of everything worth having, and doing.

The trick was to make sure it wasn’t also a recipe for disaster. I was a confirmed risk-taker, but now I was also a husband, father, and businessman responsible for others. Did that mean I had to make concessions, become more conservative? It was an essential question. I wanted to live a life of action, but I also wanted to live a life of vigilance.

It was an uneasy balance, much easier in theory than in practice. I wanted to be a father—and I also wanted a motorcycle. My friends lectured me to slow down; for years my pal John Korioth had been yelling at me to drive more slowly. Korioth was the best man at our wedding, and we call him “College,” which is short for College Boy. We call him that because he played college basketball, and one night he and another of my best friends, Bart Knaggs, got into a beer-fueled game of one-on-one. Bart started taunting John. “Come on, College,” he said, “let’s see you make one.” He’s been College to us ever since.

When I had a Porsche, before the birth of my kids, College was always begging me to ease off the accelerator. I’d roar down the freeways, while he flinched in the passenger seat, white-knuckled and cussing in anger. “Son of a bitch!” he’d scream, “Slow down!” I’d just die laughing.

I also thought it was hysterically funny to make him turn pale on bike rides. We would ride out to a place called
Red
Bud
Trail
, where there’s a hill that sweeps down into a blind left-hand turn. I’d descend the hill at high speed, swing wide into the opposite lane, and then suddenly dive into the turn. It scared him every time. I explained to him that compared to a high-speed mountain descent, it was an elementary move, and it looked much more dangerous than it really was. But College didn’t believe me, until one day in
France
I showed him what race-pace was really like. One minute we were gliding down an alp, side by side. The next minute I was gone, rocketing downhill into the mist. He’s never bothered me again about
Red
Bud
Trail
.

But with the arrival of children, I’ve reprioritized. I got rid of the Porsche in favor of a family-friendly car. Not long ago, a gentleman invited me to tour a Ferrari factory.

“You don’t understand,” I said, “I need something with three baby seats.”

College claims that the craziest and most dangerous thing I do these days is argue with truckers, and he might be right. Over the years, I’ve been run off the road by too many pickups and rock trucks to count.
Texas
truck drivers hate cyclists; we have an ongoing war with them on the state byways. I’ve been blown into ditches, hit by stones, and threatened with tire irons. So I have a tendency to want to take on trucks personally.

A few years ago, College and I were blown off the road by an 18-wheeler. College flipped over on his bike, and the chain came off. I was livid. I spat the grit out of my mouth and went chasing after the truck, pedaling hard. Behind, I could hear College hollering at me, “Stop, at least wait for me!”

The truck pulled up at a light. I braked and leaped off my bike. Just then a guy stepped out . . . and then another guy got out . . . and then another. The last guy pulled a knife out of his back pocket, just a pocketknife, I noted, but still, it looked ready to unfold. By now, however, I was too angry to be scared.

“Are you trying to kill me?” I asked.

“You don’t belong on this road,” one of them said.

“What do you mean we don’t belong?”

“I pay taxes on this road,” another one said.

I burst out laughing. “Yeah, taxes are a hot issue with me, too,” I said. Just then, fortunately, College arrived, and stepped between us, and advised me to calm down. We haggled about the tax issue a bit more, and all of us decided to get back to our respective vehicles and move on.

Things like that have happened again and again. Sometimes it’s dangerous, and sometimes it’s funny, and sometimes it’s a little of both. There’s a particularly bad stretch of road we call Redneckville, a desolate sector where trucks roar through the intersections and the only businesses for miles are a couple of convenience stores. One morning, I was out riding with another local
Austin
cyclist over the blacktop when an old pickup truck came right for us. It aimed its windshield toward us and never wavered, a game of chicken. We veered off the road and sailed into a ditch, both of us flying over our handlebars.

We lay there, scraping the dirt off, when we heard a disembodied voice speak to us from above.

A telephone repairman was high on a pole, peering down at us. He’d watched the whole thing. His voice floated down to us from the phone wires.

“If you-all don’t call the cops, I’m calling ’em. ’
Cause that’s not right.”

The result of these adventures is that I’m more careful riding my bike around
Austin
. These days I travel with somebody following me in a car, or on a motorbike, to help shield me from the trucks, the rocks, and the cranks in their pickups. I can’t afford to get hit or hurt by some guy coming from behind.

I still like to ride out on isolated roads with friends, though. We ride, and we think aloud, and talk. Once when College and I were out riding, we discussed risk, and recklessness, and the difference between the two. What’s adventurous and what’s plainly imprudent? To me, what I do on my bike or with my body is not high-risk, because I’m a professional. I have expertise in handling my own limbs, and what might seem risky to others is mundane to me. Chasing truckers, on the other hand, is purely reckless.

“I’m going to give you a hypothetical situation,” College said. “You die. Luke has no father.”

He was obviously trying to scare me. I was silent.

“And your twins grow up having never really met you.”

I thought it over.

“Well, look,” I said. “First of all, ain’t
nobody
killing me.”

College threw back his head and shouted with laughter. “Lance Armstrong, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.

He was right, of course, but I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction. The truth is, I may never be reformed, may never find the proper balance between risk and caution. But I try to be more careful, and my caution grows in direct proportion to the number of people I love, my circle of family and my friends. When I’m descending a mountain, I’m less aggressive than I used to be. In the old days I’d descend so fast, sometimes I’d catch cars. Now I don’t need to, I just get down the mountain, because the fact that I have a family is in the back of my mind. You can’t win a race on a descent, but you can lose one, and you can lose your life, too. I don’t want to lose my life, all I have, on a mountainside.

The real reason I drive a family car now isn’t just for the kids. I drive it simply so that I’ll slow down.

But some things in me won’t change: I like to control things, like to win things, like to take things to the limit. A life spent defensively, worried, is to me a life wasted.

You know when I need to die?
When I’m done living.
When I can’t walk, can’t eat, can’t see, when I’m a crotchety old bastard, mad at the world. Then I can die.

Maybe I didn’t do enough cannonballs when I was a kid, because I was so busy working hard, making my own living and trying to get out of
Plano
. Or maybe I have a different appreciation of what limits really are. Who knows? Maybe one thing the pitched-back experience does is make the barriers different, one threshold higher. Life, to me, is a series of false limits and my challenge as an athlete is to explore the limits on a bike. It was my challenge as a human being to explore them in a sickbed. Maybe cancer is a challenge no one needs, but it was mine.

All I know is
,
something makes me want to jump.

So this is about life.
Life after cancer.
Life after kids.
Life after victories.
Life after some personal losses.
It’s about risk, it’s about agenda, and it’s about balance. It’s about teeing the ball up high and hitting it hard while trying not to lose control. And if you shank it, then go and find your ball and try it again . . . because the way you live your life, the perspective you select, is a choice you make every single day when you wake up. It’s yours to decide.