Every Second Counts (4 page)

My ranch, which I bought with my father-in-law, Dave Richard, is on a bluff near a town called Dripping Springs. I’ve named the property Mirasol, which means, “to watch the sun.” The house will be positioned on the highest point of the 204 acres, and turned at an angle so that it catches the sun as it meanders down in the summer, or as it sinks more hurriedly in winter.

The first time I ever went out to Dead Man’s Hole, I traipsed around it with Dave. I studied the waterfall and took a picture of it. Afterward, it stayed with me. I kept looking at the picture, and I showed it to Kik, and I said, “I’m jumping off that sucker.” She just said, “Okay.”

Finally, I went back out there with Dave and my friend and architect,

“Maybe you should go deeper,” I said uncertainly.

“I’d get the bends,” he said.

We climbed back up, and then stepped carefully through the rocks, looking for a good place to jump from. Finally we found the spot we were looking for. I stood there, shaky in my knees, with that parchedness in the roof of my mouth.

“Don’t touch me,” I said to Ryan.

“I’m nowhere near you,” he said.

Knees bent, I peered over the edge. “Oh, man,” I said.

Down below, I saw Dave sitting on a fallen tree by the pool. I yelled at him over the noise of the waterfall.

“Hey!” I hollered. “Why aren’t you jumping?”

“I qualify for Social Security next year,” he yelled back. “I don’t want to screw it up!”

I laughed at that. And then I straightened up, and I jumped. I fell, and fell some more. My arms started to pinwheel, until I remembered to gather them in and hold them tight to my body. When my sneakers hit the water, it sounded like cement breaking.

I came up laughing. I could hear Dave applauding and cheering from the side of the pond. I climbed out, and we toweled off, and then we hiked back up the ridge. We strolled to a small creek where there’s a dammed-up fishing
hole
, through a pasture of waving rye grass, the kind that used to brush against the bellies of horses as they made their way. We paused there and I scanned the pond, looking for fish.

While I stood there on a rock, I saw a pure red dragonfly, the reddest-winged bug I’d ever seen. And then here came a blue dragonfly, right next to it. I marveled at the two vivid creatures buzzing around each other. “Where’s the white one?” I wondered aloud. And then for the fun of it, I burst out singing the national anthem at the top of my lungs, my voice banging off the walls of the little wash.

I was stupidly happy, as if I had a new skin. The scare of Dead Man’s Hole made me feel fresh. It was a freshness put there by fear—cleansing, clarifying,
sharpening
fear.
Fear that opened the senses, and brought everything into clearer view.
Like I say, a little fear is good for you—assuming you can swim.

But not everyone approved of my pulse-checking methods, especially my friend Bill Stapleton, who also happens to be my lawyer and agent and therefore has a certain interest in my future and all. When he heard I’d made the leap into Dead Man’s Hole, he grimaced, and delivered a lecture on how foolish it was, and how I could break something or tear something. But even as he was talking, Bill knew it was useless. “I’m doing it again,” I said. Bill knew I was serious, because he knows something else about me, too. He knows I need the action.

“That’s great, that’s just great,” he says. “Why don’t you make it the stuff of legend?”

CHAPTER 2

A Regular Guy

I
’m just a regular guy.
A regular, hardworking, T-shirt-wearing guy.
A regular, hardworking, motivated, complicated, occasionally pissed-off, T-shirt guy.

There are some obvious contradictions in that statement, I know. I can’t promise to resolve them: even if I could dismantle my psyche, and explain all the neuron-firings of my brain, and the subsequent messages to my muscles and from there to my ventricles, I’m not sure it makes a worthwhile map. Self-examination has not always been my strength; for one thing, it takes too long, and for another, I have the suspicion that it’s the old secrets in me, the cheats and slights of childhood, all melted down into one purpose, that make me turn the wheels.

Meanwhile, people hopefully understand that beneath the competitiveness I’m a more sensitive sort than I seem at times, and when I say something like “So?” what it really means is, “I care more than I let on.” But it may get wearying doing the work of interpreting me.

We only have inklings as to why we are the way we are. Which parts of any of us are made, which parts self-made, and which parts born? The question isn’t an easy one to answer, and we can’t answer it solely; we define ourselves in our relations to other people: parents, mates, adversaries, bosses, kids. What surviving cancer teaches you is the magnitude of your dependence on others, not just for self-definition, but for your mere existence. Cancer robs you of your independence; you’re reliant on friends, family, and complete strangers, stoic doctors and nurses, and when you finally recover, you’re never casual again about your place in the human chain.

Sometimes we define ourselves through people we don’t even know. That was the case with Sally Reed and me; without cancer there would have been no likely connection between a bike rider and a fiftysomething woman who, as she jokingly puts it, would have otherwise spent most of her time watching daytime TV. We were strangers in the spring of 1999, but our paths crossed due to what Sally calls a “universe wink”: I was en route to winning my first Tour de France when Sally was diagnosed with cancer. The day after Sally’s first chemo treatment, a friend told her to tune in and watch me ride in the Tour, because I had made an amazing return from the disease.

I had just launched the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and a volunteer there who knew Sally asked me if I’d sign a poster for a nice lady who lived in the
Austin
suburbs and who was fighting a tough case of breast cancer. So I did.

“Be brave, and fight like hell,” I wrote to her.

Sally put the poster up in her kitchen, and she looked at it every day as she endured six months of radiation and chemotherapy treatments. When she finally finished radiation in December of ’99, she began to volunteer at the foundation, even though her hair hadn’t grown back yet. She came in without fail every Tuesday and Thursday, driving an hour each way, to answer mail and requests from cancer patients all over the world. She became the most devoted volunteer in the office, dispensing information, advice, and sympathy.

The peculiar thing was, for the longest time we never met face to face. I heard all about her and she heard all about me, but we kept missing each other. I usually went to the foundation on Wednesdays or Fridays, and she was never there. After a while, Sally started joking that I didn’t really exist. Once, she left a copy of
It’s Not
About
the Bike
for me to sign, along with a note: “I’m leaving this book but I’m not sure there’s an author.”

Sally started a Lance Sighting Chart on a big eraser-board in the volunteer room at the center. She made columns for the date, place, and time of each Lance Sighting. One column said,
WITNESS OF SIGHTING.
The next column said,
VERIFICATION OF SIGHTING.
And so on. It became a running cause of hilarity in the foundation.

The board filled up with Lance Sightings; all the volunteers marked their columns each time I stopped by. But Sally and I continued to miss each other. She liked to joke that even the delivery man had made a Lance Armstrong sighting, but she never had. One afternoon, her husband saw me out training on my bike. Sally started a new category:
SIGHTINGS BY PROXY.

Finally, after about a year of this, I went by the foundation and wrote a note and stuck it in her mailbox. “I am here,” I said. “Where are you?” I added, scribbling, “When they let me stop traveling, then you’ll have a sighting. In November and December I have no travel, and we’ll hook up then.”

Sally put a new column up on the board:
LANCE LETTER SIGHTING.

About a month later, I got back to town, and I went over to the foundation office. I burst through the door, yelling, “Where’s Sally?”

And there she was. She had spent a thousand hours at the foundation before we finally met face to face. We hugged, and liked each other instantly. She was as sweet-faced and good-natured as I’d expected, but there was also an interesting hint of no-nonsense about her. She was a well-to-do wife and mother whose life had been derailed by breast cancer not once, but three times; both of her sisters had also been diagnosed with it. We visited for a while, talking about the foundation a little bit, about how to make people feel strong. And we talked about cars, because we both liked fast ones.

But we’ve never really talked about cancer itself, and I can’t quite say why. Maybe we simply have a kind of telepathy about it. Or maybe we’re accustomed to being alone in our thoughts about it, since relatively few of the people in our lives can fully understand the experience. Or maybe we simply choose not to dwell on the horrors of it. What’s important is the connection; and through Sally I connect with others, too. She forwards correspondence and special requests from all kinds of people in the cancer kinship, and she sets up encounters between us. What we both understand is that it’s a source of strength to someone diagnosed to know someone who has survived. Shared experience makes people feel strong. Sally says that if we can give one patient even five minutes of hope, “then we’ve done the most important thing.”

S
ometimes it’s the
absence of a person that complicates the question of who we are. In my case, I never knew my own father. Eddie Gunderson might as well have been an anonymous DNA donor; he left my mother shortly after I was born, and he surrendered all legal parental rights to her. My mother and I never discussed him. I read in a newspaper story that he once tried to contact me after the 1999 Tour, but I didn’t welcome it, and found that I didn’t have any interest in knowing him, or in dwelling on him, either. That price was paid. He was the keeper of the secret, the man with the answer to the unanswerable. I intended to investigate the meanings of family through my own children—by looking ahead, not back.

Sometimes one person can be all you need, and that was the case with my mother. She managed to be two parents and a best friend, packed into one 5-foot-3 person, although it wasn’t easy. “You were a survivor even before you had cancer,” she says. If that’s true, it’s because of her; she supported us on a secretary’s salary, and she was always looking for a way to make our lives better. “If anything is going to get done, you’ve got to do it,” she’d tell me.
Plano
was a wealthy suburb, and other families had a lot of things compared to us. Whatever we wanted to buy, we had to earn. I didn’t have a whole lot of anything—but thanks to my mother, I had enough.

Now that I’m a father, I understand how much she must have wanted to give me. I also understand the hundred small anxious moments I must have caused her—there was always some childhood injury to nurse, from my various bike wrecks and stunts. She laughs at the way I worry over and indulge my own kids. “I’m seeing a side of my son I’ve never seen,” she says. She also wonders if, now that I’m a father, I’ll be more inclined to examine the past, and I wonder the same.

I’ve never wanted to look over my shoulder. Occasionally, friends asked me why I wasn’t more curious about the past. “I don’t like going backwards,” I said. “It just creates a headache.” Looking backwards went against my nature; I did my self-seeking on a bike, facing front, at high speed. What I knew how to do best was move forward.

When I was young, I rode to amount to something. Then, later, I rode to prove I could survive, and to astonish all the skeptics who’d left me for dead. But what would be the motive now? What would keep me in the saddle in the fifth and sixth hour, when the snow turned black? That was the question I’d confront in the 2000 Tour de France. I had every intention of winning the Tour again. It never occurred to me to rest on my past victory. An athlete doesn’t particularly want a past; that means he’s done. He only wants a present and a future.

I know this much about myself: the surest way to get me to do something is to tell me I can’t. Explain to me that I can’t possibly win the Tour de France again, and I have no choice but to try to win the Tour de France again. That winter and spring, most people doubted whether I was capable of it, for various reasons. The rewards of winning the Tour had ruined more than one rider, made them complacent and killed their careers, and now I knew why.

Generally, one of the hardest things in the world to do is something twice. When you’ve done it once, there’s less reason to do it again, because there are so many other things you might be doing instead. This was truer than I liked to admit. I was struggling to maintain a balance between home, work, training, and commercial endorsements. The days only got busier, not less busy, and I struggled to adjust to new responsibilities, to my family, cancer advocacy, cycling, and endorsements. Whenever I overcommitted to any one of them, I seemed to be neglecting something else, especially Kik and Luke. None of this was to mention routine errands, and business headaches, traffic jams, the daily work of living that could clutter up a day, and obscure that sparkling awareness I thought was mine.