Love is like a roller coaster,
Once you have completed the ride,
you want to go again.
Unknown
Liên Kết Nhanh
Biên tập viên
Cập nhật: It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
ePub
A4CHAPTER TWO
T
HE START LINEPAST FORMS YOU, WHETHER YOU LIKE IT or not. Each encounter and experience has its own effect, and you’re shaped the way the wind shapes a mesquite tree on a plain.
The main thing you need to know about my childhood is that I never had a real father, but I never sat around wishing for one, either. My mother was 17 when she had me, and from day one
everyone told her we wouldn’t amount to anything, but she believed differently, and she raised me with an unbending rule: “Make every obstacle an opportunity.” And that’s what we did.
I was a lot of kid, especially for one small woman. My mother’s maiden name was Linda Mooneyham. She is 5-foot-3 and weighs about 105 pounds, and I don’t know how somebody so
tiny delivered me, because I weighed in at 9 pounds, 12 ounces. Her labor was so difficult that she lay in a fever for an entire day afterward. Her temperature was so high that the nurses
wouldn’t let her hold me.
I never knew my so-called father. He was a non-factor–unless you count his absence as a factor. Just because he provided the DNA that made me doesn’t make him my father, and as far as I’m
concerned, there is nothing between us, absolutely no connection. I have no idea who he is, what he likes or dislikes. Before last year, I never knew where he lived or worked.
I never asked. I’ve never had a single conversation with my mother about him. Not once. In 28 years, she’s never brought him up, and I’ve never brought him up. It may seem strange, but it’s
true. The thing is, I don’t care, and my mother doesn’t either. She says she would have told me about him if I had asked, but frankly, it would have been like asking a trivia question; he was
that insignificant to me. I was completely loved by my mother, and I loved her back the same way, and that felt like enough to both of us.
Since I sat down to write about my life, though, I figured I might as well find out a few things about myself. Unfortunately, last year a Texas newspaper traced my biological father and printed
a story about him, and this is what they reported: his name is Gunderson, and he’s a route manager for the Dallas Morning News. He lives in Cedar Creek Lake, Texas, and is the father of
two other children. My mother was married to him during her pregnancy, but they split up before I was two. He was actually quoted in the paper claiming to be a proud father, and he said
that his kids consider me their brother, but those remarks struck me as opportunistic, and I have no interest in meeting him.
My mother was alone. Her parents were divorced, and at the time her father, Paul Mooneyham, my grandfather, was a heavy-drinking Vietnam vet who worked in the post office and lived in a
mobile home. Her mother, Elizabeth, struggled to support three kids. Nobody in the family had much help to give my mother–but they tried. On the day
I was born my grandfather quit drinking, and he’s been sober ever since, for 28 years, exactly as long as I’ve been alive. My mother’s younger brother, Al, would baby-sit for me. He later joined
the Army, the traditional way out for men in our family, and he made a career of it, rising all the way to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He has a lot of decorations on his chest, and he and his
wife have a son named Jesse who I’m crazy about. We’re proud of each other as a family.
I was wanted. My mother was so determined to have me that she hid her pregnancy by wearing baby-doll shirts so that no one would interfere or try to argue her out of it. After I was born,
sometimes my mother and her sister would go grocery shopping together, and one afternoon my aunt held me while the checkout girls made cooing noises. “What a cute baby,” one of them
said. My mother stepped forward. “That’s my baby,” she said.
We lived in a dreary one-bedroom apartment in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas, while my mother worked part-time and finished school. It was one of those neighborhoods with shirts flapping on
clotheslines and a Kentucky Fried on the corner. My mother worked at the Kentucky Fried, taking orders in her pink-striped uniform, and she also punched the cash register at the Kroger’s
grocery store across the street. Later she got a temporary job at the post office sorting dead letters, and another one as a file clerk, and she did all of this while she was trying to study and to
take care of me. She made $400 a month, and her rent was $200, and my day-care was $25 a week. But she gave me everything I needed, and a few things more. She had a way of creating
small luxuries.
When I was small, she would take me to the local 7-Eleven and buy a Slurpee, and feed it to me through the straw. She would pull some up in the straw, and I would tilt my head back, and she
would let the cool sweet icy drink stream into my mouth. She tried to spoil me with a 50-cent drink.
Every night she read a book to me. Even though I was just an infant, too young to understand a
word, she would hold me and read. She was never too tired for that. “I can’t wait until you can read to me,” she would say. No wonder I was reciting verses by the age of two. I did everything
fast. I walked at nine months.
Eventually, my mother got a job as a secretary for $12,000 a year, which allowed her to move us into a nicer apartment north of Dallas in a suburb called Richardson. She later got a job at a
telecommunications company, Ericsson, and she has worked her way up the ladder. She’s no longer a secretary, she’s an account manager, and what’s more, she got her real-estate license on
the side. That right there tells you everything you need to know about her. She’s sharp as a tack, and she’ll outwork anybody. She also happens to look young enough to be my sister.
After Oak Cliff, the suburbs seemed like heaven to her. North Dallas stretches out practically to the Oklahoma border in an unbroken chain of suburban communities, each one exactly like the
last. Tract homes and malls overrun miles of flat brown Texas landscape. But there are good schools and lots of open fields for kids to play in.
Across the street from our apartment there was a little store called the Richardson Bike Mart at one end of a strip mall. The owner was a small, well-built guy with overly bright eyes named Jim
Hoyt. Jim liked to sponsor bike racers out of his store, and he was always looking to get kids started in the sport. One morning a week my mother would take me to a local shop for fresh, hot
doughnuts and we would pass by the bike store. Jim knew she struggled to get by, but he noticed that she was always well turned out, and I was neat and well cared for. He took an
interest in us, and gave her a deal on my first serious bike. It was a Schwinn Mag Scrambler, which I got when I was about seven. It was an ugly brown, with yellow wheels, but I loved it.
Why does any kid love a bike? It’s liberation and independence, your first set of wheels. A bike is freedom to roam, without rules and without adults.
There was one thing my mother gave me that I didn’t particularly want–a stepfather. When I was three, my mother remarried, to a guy named Terry Armstrong. Terry was a small man with a
large mustache and a habit of acting more successful than he really was. He sold food to grocery stores and he was every cliche ot a traveling salesman, but he brought home a second paycheck
and helped with the bills. Meanwhile, my mother was getting raises at her job, and she bought us a home in Piano, one of the more upscale suburbs.
I was a small boy when Terry legally adopted me and made my name Armstrong, and I don’t remember being happy or unhappy about it, either way. All I know is that the DNA donor,
Gunderson, gave up his legal rights to me. In order for the adoption to go through, Gunderson had to allow it, to agree to it. He picked up a pen and signed the papers.
Terry Armstrong was a Christian, and he came from a family who had a tendency to tell my mother how to raise me. But, for all of his proselytizing, Terry had a bad temper, and he used to
whip me, for silly things. Kid things, like being messy.
Once, I left a drawer open in my bedroom, with a sock hanging out. Terry got out his old fraternity paddle. It was a thick, solid wood paddle, and frankly, in my opinion nothing like that
should be used on a small boy. He turned me over and spanked me with it.
The paddle was his preferred method of discipline. If I came home late, out would come the paddle. Whack. If I smarted off, I got the paddle. Whack. It didn’t hurt just physically, but also
emotionally. So I didn’t like Terry Armstrong. I thought he was an angry testosterone geek, and as a result, my early impression of organized religion was that it was for hypocrites.
Athletes don’t have much use for poking around in their childhoods, because introspection doesn’t get you anywhere in a race. You don’t want to think about your adolescent resentments
when you’re trying to make a 6,500-foot climb with a cadre of Italians and Spaniards on your wheel. You need a dumb focus. But that said, it’s all stoked down in there, fuel for the fire.
“Make every negative into a positive,” as my mother says. Nothing goes to waste, you put it all
to use, the old wounds and long-ago slights become the stuff of competitive energy. But back then I was just a kid with about four chips on his shoulder, thinking, Maybe if I ride my bike on
this road long enough it will take me out of here.
Piano had its effect on me, too. It was the quintessential American suburb, with strip malls, perfect grid streets, and faux-antebellum country clubs in between empty brown wasted fields. It
was populated by guys in golf shirts and Sansabelt pants, and women in bright fake gold jewelry, and alienated teenagers. Nothing there was old, nothing real. To me, there was
something soul-deadened about the place, which may be why it had one of the worst heroin problems in the country, as well as an unusually large number of teen suicides. It’s home to
Piano East High School, one of the largest and most football-crazed high schools in the state, a modern structure that looks more like a government agency, with a set of doors the size of
loading docks. That’s where I went to school.
In Piano, Texas, if you weren’t a football player you didn’t exist, and if you weren’t upper middle class, you might as well not exist either. My mother was a secretary, so I tried to play football.
But I had no coordination. When it came to anything that involved moving from side to side, or hand-eye coordination–when it came to anything involving a ball, in fact–I was no good.
I was determined to find something I could succeed at. When I was in fifth grade, my elementary school held a distance-running race. I told my mother the night before the race, “I’m
going to be a champ.” She just looked at me, and then she went into her things and dug out a 1972 silver dollar. “This is a good-luck coin,” she said. “Now remember, all you have to do is
beat that clock.” I won the race.
A few months later, I joined the local swim club. At first it was another way to seek acceptance with the other kids in the suburbs, who all swam laps at Los Rios Country Club, where their
parents were members. On the first day of swim practice, I was so inept that I was put with the seven-year-olds. I looked around, and saw the younger sister of one of my friends. It was
embarrassing. I went from not being any good at football to not being any good at swimming.
But I tried. If I had to swim with the little kids to learn technique, then that’s what I was willing to do. My mother gets emotional to this day when she remembers how I leaped headfirst into
the water and flailed up and down the length of the pool, as if I was trying to splash all the water out of it. “You tried so hard,” she says. I didn’t swim in the worst group for long.
Swimming is a demanding sport for a 12-year-old, and the City of Piano Swim Club was particularly intense. I swam for a man named Chris MacCurdy, who remains one of the best
coaches I ever worked with. Within a year, Chris transformed me; I was fourth in the state in the 1,500-meter freestyle. He trained our team seriously: we had workouts every morning from 5:30
to 7. Once I got a little older I began to ride my bike to practice, ten miles through the semi-dark early-morning streets. I would swim 4,000 meters of laps before school and go back for another
two-hour workout in the afternoon–another 6,000 meters. That was six miles a day in the water, plus a 20-mile bike ride. My mother let me do it for two reasons: she didn’t have the option of
driving me herself because she worked, and she knew that I needed to channel my temperament.
One afternoon when I was about 13 and hanging around the Richardson Bike Mart, I saw a flyer for a competition called IronKids.
It was a junior triathlon, an event that combined biking, swimming, and running. I had never heard of a triathlon before–but it was all of the things I was good at, so I signed up. My mother
took me to a shop and bought me a triathlon outfit, which basically consisted of cross-training shorts and a shirt made out of a hybrid fast-drying material, so I could wear it through each
phase of the event, without changing. We got my first racing bike then, too. It was a Mercier, a slim, elegant road bike.
I won, and I won by a lot, without even training for it. Not long afterward, there was another triathlon, in Houston. I won that, too. When I came back from Houston, I was full of
self-confidence. I was a top junior at swimming, but I had never been the absolute best at it. I was better at triathlons than any kid in Piano, and any kid in the whole state, for that matter. I
liked the feeling.
What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potential embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint. I was discovering that if it was a matter of gritting my teeth, not
caring how it looked, and outlasting everybody else, I won. It didn’t seem to matter what the sport was–in a straight-ahead, long-distance race, I could beat anybody.
If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it.
I COULD HAVE DEALT WITH TERRY ARMSTRONG’S PADdle. But there was something else I couldn’t deal with.
When I was 14, my mother went into the hospital to have a hysterectomy. It’s a very tough operation for any woman, physically and emotionally, and my mother was still very young when
it happened. I was entered in a swim meet in San Antonio, so I had to leave while she was still recuperating, and Terry decided to chaperone me. I didn’t
want him there; I didn’t like it when he tried to play Little League Dad, and I thought he should be at the hospital. But he insisted.
As we sat in the airport waiting for our flight, I gazed at Terry and thought, Why are you here? As I watched him, he began to write notes on a pad. He would write, then ball up the paper and
throw it into the garbage can and start again. I thought it was peculiar. After a while Terry got up to go to the bathroom. I went over to the garbage can, retrieved the wadded papers, and
stuffed them into my bag.
Later, when I was alone, I took them out and unfolded them. They were to another woman. I
read them, one by one. He was writing to another woman while my mother was in the hospital having a hysterectomy.
I flew back to Dallas with the crumpled pages in the bottom of my bag. When I got home, I went to my room and pulled my copy of The Guinness Book of World Records off the shelf. I
got a pair of scissors, and hollowed out the center of the book. I crammed the pages into the hollow and stuck the book back on the shelf. I wanted to keep the pages, and I’m not quite sure
why. For insurance, maybe; a little ammunition, in case I ever needed it. In case Terry decided to use the paddle again.
If I hadn’t liked Terry before, from then on, I felt nothing for him. I didn’t respect him, and I began to challenge his authority.
Let me sum up my turbulent youth. When I was a boy, I invented a game called fireball, which entailed soaking a tennis ball in kerosene, lighting it on fire, and playing catch with it wearing a
pair of garden gloves.
I’d fill a plastic dish-tub full of gasoline, and then I’d empty a can of tennis balls into the tub and let them float there. I’d fish one out and hold a match to it, and my best friend Steve Lewis and I
would throw the blazing ball back and forth until our gloves smoked. Imagine it, two boys standing in a field in a hot Texas breeze, pitching flames at each other. Sometimes the gardening
gloves would catch on fire, and we’d flap them against our jeans, until embers flew into the air around our heads, like fireflies.
Once, I accidentally threw the ball up onto the roof. Some shingles caught fire, and I had to scramble up there and stamp out the fire before it burned down the whole house and then
started on the neighbors’ place. Then there was the time a tennis ball landed squarely in the middle ot the tray full of gas, and the whole works exploded. It went up, a wall of flame and a
swirling tower of black smoke. I panicked and kicked over the tub, trying to put the fire out. Instead, the tub started melting down into the ground, like something out of The China
Syndrome.
A lot of my behavior had to do with knowing that my mother wasn’t happy; I couldn’t understand why she would stay with Terry when they seemed so miserable. But being with him
probably seemed better to her than raising a son on her own and living on one paycheck.
A few months after the trip to San Antonio, the marriage finally fell apart. One evening I was going to be late for dinner, so I called my mother. She said, “Son, you need to come home.”
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“I need to talk to you.”
I got on my bike and rode home, and when I got there, she was sitting in the living room.
“I told Terry to leave,” she said. “I’m going to file for divorce.”
I was beyond relieved, and I didn’t bother to hide it. In fact, I was downright joyful. “This is great,” I said, beaming.
“But, son,” she said, “I don’t want you to give me any problems. I can’t handle that right now. Please, just don’t give me any problems.”
“All right,” I said. “I promise.”
I waited a few weeks to say anything more about it. But then one day when we were sitting around in the kitchen, out of the blue, I said to my mother, “That guy was no good.” I didn’t tell
her about the letters–she was unhappy enough. But years later, when she was cleaning, she found them. She wasn’t surprised.
For a while, Terry tried to stay in touch with me by sending birthday cards and things like that. He would send an envelope with a hundred one-dollar bills in it. I’d take it to my mother and
say, “Would you please send this back to him? I don’t want it.” Finally, I wrote him a letter telling him that if I could, I would change my name. I didn’t feel I had a relationship with him, or
with his family.
After the breakup, my mother and I grew much closer. I think she had been unhappy for a while, and when people are unhappy, they’re not themselves. She changed once she got divorced. She
was more relaxed, as if she had been under some pressure and now it was gone. Of course, she was under another kind of pressure as a single woman again, trying to support both of us, but
she had been through that before. She was single for the next five years.
I tried to be dependable. I’d climb on our roof to put up the Christmas lights for her–and if I mooned the cars on the avenue, well, that was a small, victimless crime. When she got home
from work, we would sit down to dinner together, and turn off the TV, and we’d talk. She taught me to eat by candlelight, and insisted on decent manners. She would fix a taco salad or a
bowl of Hamburger Helper, light the candles, and tell me about her day. Sometimes she would talk about how frustrated she was at work, where she felt she was underestimated because she
was a secretary.
“Why don’t you quit?” I asked.
“Son, you never quit,” she said. “I’ll get through it.”
Sometimes she would come home and I could see she’d had a really bad day. I’d be playing something loud on the stereo, like Guns ‘N Roses, but I’d take one look at her and turn the
heavy stuff off, and put something else on. “Mom, this is for you,” I’d say. And I’d play Kenny G for her–which believe me was a sacrifice.
I tried to give her emotional support, because she did so many small things for me. Little things. Every Saturday, she would wash and iron five shirts, so that I had a freshly pressed shirt for each
school day of the week. She knew how hard I trained and how hungry I got in the afternoons, so she would leave a pot of homemade spaghetti sauce in the refrigerator, for a snack. She taught
me to boil my own pasta and how to throw a strand against the wall to make sure it was done.
I was beginning to earn my own money. When I was 15,1 entered the 1987 President’s Triathlon in Lake Lavon, against a field of experienced older athletes. I finished 32nd, shocking the other
competitors and spectators, who couldn’t believe a 15-year-old had held up over the course. I got some press coverage for that race, and I told a reporter, “I think in a few years I’ll be right
near the top, and within ten years I’ll be the best.” My friends, guys like Steve Lewis, thought I was hilariously cocky. (The next year, I finished fifth.)
Triathlons paid good money. All of a sudden I had a wallet full of first-place checks, and I started entering triathlons wherever I could find them. Most of the senior ones had age
restrictions–you had to be 16 or older to enter–so I would doctor my birth date on the entry form to meet the requirements. I didn’t win in the pros, but I would place in the top five. The other
competitors started calling me “Junior.”
But if it sounds like it came easy, it didn’t. In one of the first pro triathlons I entered, I made the mistake of eating badly beforehand– I downed a couple of cinnamon rolls and two Cokes–and I
paid for it by bonking, meaning I ran completely out of energy. I had an empty tank. I was first out of the water, and first off the bike. But in the middle of the run, I nearly collapsed. My
mother was waiting at the finish, accustomed to seeing me come in among the leaders, and she couldn’t understand what was taking me so long. Finally, she walked out on the course and
found me, struggling along.
“Come on, son, you can do it,” she said.
“I’m totally gone,” I said. “I bonked.”
“All right,” she said. “But you can’t quit, either. Even if you have to walk to the finish line.”
I walked to the finish line.
I began to make a name in local bike races, too. On Tuesday nights there was a series of criteriums–multi-lap road races–held on an old loop around those empty Richardson fields. The
Tuesday-night “crits” were hotly contested among serious local club riders, and they drew a large crowd. I rode for Hoyt, who sponsored a club team out of the Richardson Bike Mart, and
my mother got me a toolbox to hold all of my bike stuff. She says she can still remember me pedaling around the loop, powering past other kids, lapping the field. She couldn’t believe how
strong I was. I didn’t care if it was just a $100 cash prize, I would tear the legs off the other riders to get at it.
There are degrees of competitive cycling, and they are rated by category, with Category 1 being the highest level, Category 4 the lowest. I started out in the “Cat 4″ races at the Tuesday-night
crits, but I was anxious to move up. In order to do so you had to have results, win a certain number of races. But I was too impatient for that, so I convinced the organizers to let me ride in
the Cat 3 race with the older and more experienced group. The organizers told me, “Okay, but whatever you do, don’t win.” If I drew too much attention to myself, there might be a big stink
about how they had let me skip the requirements.
I won. I couldn’t help it. I dusted the other riders. Afterward there was some discussion about what to do with me, and one option was suspending me. Instead, they upgraded me. There were
three or four men around there who were Cat 1 riders, local heroes, and they all rode for the Richardson Bike Mart, so I began training with them, a 16-year-old riding with guys
in their late 20s.
By now I was the national rookie of the year in sprint triathlons, and my mother and I realized that I had a future as an athlete. I was making about $20,000 a year, and I began keeping a
Rolodex full of business contacts. I needed sponsors and supporters who were willing to front my airfare and my expenses to various races. My mother told me, “Look, Lance, if you’re going
to get anywhere, you’re going to have to do it yourself, because no one is going to do it for you.”
My mother had become my best friend and most loyal ally She was my organizer and my motivator, a dynamo. “If you can’t give 110 percent, you won’t make it,” she would tell me.
She brought an organizational flair to my training. “Look, I don’t know what you need,” she’d say. “But I recommend that you sit down and do a mental check of everything, because you
don’t want to get there and not have it.” I was proud of her, and we were very much alike; we understood each other perfectly, and when we were together we didn’t have to say much. We
just knew. She always found a way to get me the latest bike I wanted, or the accessories that went with it. In fact, she still has all of my discarded gears and pedals, because they were so
expensive she couldn’t bear to get rid of them.
We traveled all over together, entering me in 10K runs and triathlons. We even began to think that I could be an Olympian. I still carried the silver-dollar good-luck piece, and now she gave
me a key chain that said “1988″ on it–the year of the next summer Olympics.
Every day after school I’d run six miles, and then get on my bike and ride into the evening. I learned to love Texas on those rides. The countryside was beautiful, in a desolate kind of way.
You could ride out on the back roads through vast ranchland and cotton fields with nothing in the distance but water towers, grain elevators, and dilapidated sheds. The grass was chewed to
nubs by livestock and the dirt looked like what’s left in the bottom of an old cup of coffee. Sometimes I’d find rolling fields of wildflowers, and solitary mesquite trees blown into strange
shapes. But other times the countryside was just flat yellowish-brown prairie, with the
occasional gas station, everything fields, fields of brown grass, fields of cotton, just flat and awful, and windy. Dallas is the third-windiest city in the country. But it was good for me.
Resistance.
One afternoon I got run off the road by a truck. By then, I had discovered my middle finger, and I flashed it at the driver. He pulled over, and threw a gas can at me, and came after me. I ran,
leaving my beautiful Mercier bike by the side of the road. The guy stomped on it, damaging it.
Before he drove off I got his license number, and my mom took the guy to court, and won. In the meantime, she got me a new bike with her insurance, a Raleigh with racing wheels.
Back then I didn’t have an odometer on my bike, so if I wanted to know how long a training ride was, my mother would have to drive it. If I told her I needed to measure the ride, she got in
the car, even if it was late. Now, a 30-odd-mile training ride is nothing for me, but for a woman who just got off work it’s long enough to be a pain to drive. She didn’t complain.
My mother and I became very open with each other. She trusted me, totally. I did whatever I wanted, and the interesting thing is that no matter what I did, I always told her about it. I never
lied to her. If I wanted to go out, nobody stopped me. While most kids were sneaking out of their houses at night, I’d go out through the front door.
I probably had too much rope. I was a hyper kid, and I could have done some harm to myself. There were a lot of wide boulevards and fields in Piano, an invitation to trouble for a teenager
on a bike or behind the wheel of a car. I’d weave up and down the avenues on my bike, dodging cars and racing the stoplights, going as far as downtown Dallas. I used to like to ride in traffic,
for the challenge.
My brand-new Raleigh was top-of-the-line and beautiful, but I owned it only a short time before I wrecked it and almost got myself killed. It happened one afternoon when I was running
stoplights. I was spinning through them one after the other, trying to beat the timers. I got five of them. Then I came to a giant intersection of two six-lanes, and the light turned yellow.
I kept going anyway–which I did all the time. Still do.
I got across three lanes before the light turned red. As I raced across the fourth lane, I saw a lady in a Ford Bronco out of the corner of my eye. She didn’t see me. She accelerated–and smashed
right into me.
I went flying, headfirst across the intersection. No helmet. Landed on my head, and just kind of rolled to a stop at the curb.
I was alone. I had no ID, nothing on me. I tried to get up. But then there were people crowding around me, and somebody said, “No, no, don’t move!” I lay back down and waited for the
ambulance while the lady who’d hit me had hysterics. The ambulance arrived and took me to the
hospital, where I was conscious enough to recite my phone number, and the hospital people called my mother, who got pretty hysterical, too.
I had a concussion, and I took a bunch of stitches in my head, and a few more in my foot, which was gashed wide open. The car had broadsided me, so my knee was sprained and torn up, and it
had to be put in a heavy brace. As for the bike, it was completely mangled.
I explained to the doctor who treated me that I was in training for a triathlon to be held six days later at Lake Dallas in Louisville. The doctor said, “Absolutely no way. You can’t do anything
for three weeks. Don’t run, don’t walk.”
I left the hospital a day later, limping and sore and thinking I was out of action. But after a couple of days of sitting around, I got bored. I went out to play golf at a little local course, even
though I still had the leg brace on. It felt good to be out and be moving around. I took the leg brace off. I thought, Well, this isn’t so bad.
By the fourth day, I didn’t see what the big deal was. I felt pretty good. I signed up for the triathlon, and that night I told my mother, “I’m doing that thing. I’m racing.”
She just said, “Okay. Great.”
I called a friend and said, “I gotta borrow your bike.” Then I went into my bathroom and cut the stitches out of my foot. I was already good with the nail clippers. I left the ones in my head,
since I’d be wearing a swim cap. Then I cut holes in my running shoe and my bike shoe so the gash in my foot wouldn’t rub.
Early the next morning, I was at the starting line with the rest of the competitors. I was first out of the water. I was first off the bike. I got caught by a couple of guys on the 10K run, and took
third. The next day, there was a big article in the paper about how I’d been hit by a car and still finished third. A week later, my mom and I got a letter from the doctor. “I can’t believe it,” he
wrote.
NOTHING SEEMED TO SLOW ME DOWN. I HAVE A LOVE of acceleration in any form, and as a teenager I developed a fascination with high-performance cars. The first thing I did
with the prize money from my triathlon career was buy a little used red Fiat, which I would race around Piano–without a driver’s license.
One afternoon when I was in llth grade, I pulled off a serious piece of driving that my old friends still marvel at. I was cruising down a two-lane road with some classmates when we approached
two cars moving slowly.
Impatiently, I hit the gas.
I drove my little Fiat right between the two cars. I shot the gap, and you could have stuck your
finger out of the window and into the open mouths of the other drivers.
I took the car out at night, which was illegal unless an adult was with me. One Christmas season, I got a part-time job working at Toys “.H” Us, helping carry stuff out to customers’ cars.
Steve Lewis got a job at Target, and we both had night shifts, so our parents let us take the cars to work. Bad decision. Steve and I would drag-race home, doing 80 or 90 through the streets.
Steve had a Pontiac Trans Am, and I upgraded to a Camaro IROC Z28, a monster of a car. I was in a cheesy disco phase, and I wanted that car more than anything. Jim Hoyt helped me buy
it by signing the loan, and I made all the monthly payments and carried the insurance. It was a fast, fast car, and some nights, we’d go down to Forest Lane, which was a drag-strip area, and
get it up to 115 or 120 mph, down a 45-mph road.
I had two sets of friends, a circle of popular high-school kids who I would carouse with, and then my athlete friends, the bike racers and runners and triathletes, some of them grown men.
There was social pressure at Piano East, but my mother and I couldn’t begin to keep up with the Joneses, so we didn’t even try. While other kids drove hot cars that their parents had given
them, I drove the one I had bought with my own money.
Still, I felt shunned at times. I was the guy who did weird sports and who didn’t wear the right labels. Some of my more social friends would say things like, “If I were you, I’d be embarrassed
to wear those Lycra shorts.” I shrugged. There was an unwritten dress code; the socially acceptable people all wore uniforms with Polo labels on them. They might not have known it,
but that’s what they were: uniforms. Same pants, same boots, same belts, same wallets, same caps. It was total conformity, and everything I was against.
IN THE FALL OF MY SENIOR YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL I
entered an important time trial in Moriarty, New Mexico, a big race for young riders, on a course where it was easy to ride a fast time. It was a flat 12 miles with very little wind, along a stretch
of highway. A lot of big trucks passed through, and they would belt you with a hot blast of air that pushed you along. Young riders went there to set records and get noticed.
It was September but still hot when we left Texas, so I packed light. On the morning of my ride I got up at 6 and headed out the door into a blast of early-morning mountain air. All I had on
was a pair of bike shorts and a short-sleeved racing jersey. I got five minutes down the road, and thought, I can’t handle this. It was frigid.
I turned around and went back to the room. I said, “Mom, it’s so cold out there I can’t ride. I need a jacket or something.” We looked through our luggage, and I didn’t have a single piece of
warm clothing. I hadn’t brought anything. I was totally unprepared. It was the act of a complete amateur.
My mom said, “Well, I have a little windbreaker that I brought,” and she pulled out this tiny pink jacket. I’ve told you how small and delicate she is. It looked like something a doll would
wear.
“I’ll take it,” I said. It was that cold.
I went back outside. The sleeves came up to my elbows, and it was tight all over, but I wore it all through my warmup, a 45-minute ride. I still had it on when I got to the starting area. Staying
warm is critical for a time trial, because when they say “go,” you’ve got to be completely ready to go, boom, all-out for 12 miles. But I was still cold.
Desperate, I said, “Mom, get in the car, and turn on the heat as hot and high as it’ll go.”
She started the car and let it run, and put the heat on full blast. I got in and huddled in front of the heating vents. I said, “Just tell me when it’s time to go.” That was my warmup.
Finally, it was my turn. I got out of the car and right onto the bike. I went to the start line and took off. I smashed the course record by 45 seconds.
The things that were important to people in Piano were becoming less and less important to me. School and socializing were second to me now; developing into a world-class athlete was first.
My life’s ambition wasn’t to own a tract home near a strip mall. I had a fast car and money in my wallet, but that was because I was winning races– in sports none of my classmates understood
or cared about.
I took longer and longer training rides by myself. Sometimes a bunch of us would go camping or waterskiing, and afterward, instead of riding home in a car with everyone else, I’d cycle all the
way back alone. Once, after a camping trip in Texoma with some buddies, I rode 60 miles home.
Not even the teachers at school seemed to understand what I was after. During the second semester of my senior year, I was invited by the U.S. Cycling Federation to go to Colorado
Springs to train with the junior U.S. national team, and to travel to Moscow for my first big international bike race, the 1990 Junior World Championships. Word had gotten around after
my performance in New Mexico.
But the administrators at Piano East objected. They had a strict policy: no unexcused absences. You’d think a trip to Moscow would be worth extra credits, and you’d think a school would be
proud to have an Olympic prospect in its graduation rolls. But they didn’t care.
I went to Colorado Springs anyway, and then to Moscow. At the Junior Worlds, I had no idea what I was doing, I was all raw energy with no concept of pacing or tactics. But I led for several
laps anyway, before I faded, out of gas from attacking too early. Still, the U.S. federation officials were impressed, and the Russian coach told everybody I was the best young cyclist he
had seen in years.
I was gone for six weeks. When I got back in March, my grades were all zeroes because of the missed attendance. A team of six administrators met with my mother and me, and told us that
unless I made up all of the work in every subject over just a few weeks, I wouldn’t graduate with my class. My mother and I were stunned.
“But there’s no way I can do that,” I told them.
The suits just looked at me.
“You’re not a quitter, are you?” one of them said.
I stared back at them. I knew damn well that if I played football and wore Polo shirts and had parents who belonged to Los Rios Country Club, things would be different.
“This meeting is over,” I said.
We got up and walked out. We had already paid for the graduation announcements, the cap and gown, and the senior prom. My mother said, “You stay in school for the rest of the day, and by
the time you get home, I’ll have this worked out.”
She went back to her office and called every private school in the Dallas phone book. She would ask a private school to accept me, and then confess that she couldn’t pay for the tuition,
so could they take me for free? She dialed schools all over the area and explained our dilemma. “He’s not a bad kid,” she’d plead. “He doesn’t do drugs. I promise you, he’s going places.”
By the end of the day, she’d found a private academy, Bending Oaks, that was willing to accept me if I took a couple of make-up courses. We transferred all of my credits from Piano East, and I
got my degree on time. At the graduation ceremony, all of my classmates had maroon tassels on their caps, while mine was Piano East gold, but I wasn’t a bit embarrassed.
I decided to go to my senior prom at Piano East anyway. We’d already paid for it, so I wasn’t about to miss it. I bought a corsage for my date, rented a tuxedo, and booked a limousine. That
night, as I was getting dressed in my tux and bow tie, I had an idea. My mother had never been in a limo.
I wanted her to experience that ride. How do you articulate all that you feel for and owe to a parent? My mother had given me more than any teacher or father figure ever had, and she had
done it over some long hard years, years that must have looked as empty to her at times as those brown Texas fields. When it came to never quitting, to not caring how it looked, to gritting your
teeth and pushing to the finish, I could only hope to have the stamina and fortitude of my mother, a single woman with a young son and a small salary–and there was no reward for her at
the end of the day, either, no trophy or first-place check. For her, there was just the knowledge
that honest effort was a transforming experience, and that her love was redemptive. Every time she said, “Make an obstacle an opportunity, make a negative a positive,” she was talking about
me, I realized; about her decision to have me and the way she had raised me.
“Get your prom dress on,” I told her.
She owned a beautiful sundress that she liked to call her “prom dress,” so she put it on and got in the car with my date and me, and together we rode around town for more than an hour,
laughing and toasting my graduation, until it was time to drop us off at the dance.
My mother was happy again, and settling into a new relationship. When I was 17, she met a man named John Walling, a good guy who she eventually married. I liked him, and we became
friends, and I would be sorry when they split up in 1998.
It’s funny. People are always saying to me, “Hey, I ran into your father.” I have to stop and think, Exactly who do they mean? It could be any of three people, and frankly, my birth father I don’t
know from a bank teller, and I have nothing to say to Terry. Occasionally, some of the Armstrongs try to get in touch with me, as if we’re family. But we aren’t related, and I wish they
would respect my feelings on the subject. My family are the Mooneyhams. As for Armstrong, it’s as if I made up my name, that’s how I feel about it.
I’m sure the Armstrongs would give you 50,000 different reasons why I needed a father, and what great jobs they did. But I disagree. My mother gave me everything. All I felt for them was
a kind of coldness, and a lack of trust.
FOR A FEW MONTHS AFTER GRADUATION, I HUNG
around Piano. Most of my Piano East classmates went on to the state-university system; my buddy Steve, for instance, got his degree from North Texas State in 1993. (Not long ago, Piano
East held its 10th reunion. I wasn’t invited.)
I was getting tired of living in Piano. I was competing in bike races all over the country for a domestic trade team sponsored by Su-baru-Montgomery, but I knew the real racing scene was in
Europe, and I felt I should be there. Also, I had too much resentment for the place after what had happened before my graduation.
I was in limbo. By now I was regularly beating the adult men I competed against, whether in a triathlon, or a 10K run, or a Tuesday-night crit at the Piano loop. To pass the time, I still hung
around the Richardson Bike Mart, owned by Jim Hoyt.
Jim had been an avid rider as a young man, but then he got shipped off to Vietnam when he was 19, and served two years in the infantry, the toughest kind of duty. When he came home, all he
wanted to do was ride a bike again. He started out as a distributor for Schwinn, and then he opened his own store with his wife, RJionda. For years Jim and Rhonda have cultivated young
riders in the Dallas area by fronting them bikes and equipment, and by paying them stipends. Jim believed in performance incentives. We would compete for cash and free stuff he’d put up, and
we raced that much harder because of it. All through my senior year in high school, I earned $500 a month riding for Jim Hoyt.
Jim had a small office in the back of his store where we’d sit around and talk. I didn’t pay much attention to school principals, or stepfathers, but sometimes I liked to talk to him. “I work my
butt off, but I love who I am,” he’d say. “If you judge everybody by money, you got a lot to learn as you move through this life, ’cause I got some friends who own their own companies, and I
got some friends who mow yards.” But Jim was tough too, and you didn’t fool with him. I had a healthy respect for his temper.
One night at the Tuesday crits, I got into a sprint duel with another rider, an older man I wasn’t real fond of. As we came down the final stretch, our bikes made contact. We crossed the finish
line shoving each other, and we were throwing punches before our bikes came to a stop. Then we were on each other, in the dirt. Jim and some others finally pried us apart, and everybody
laughed at me because I wanted to keep duking it out. But Jim got mad at me, and wasn’t going to allow that kind of thing. He walked over and picked up my bike, and wheeled it away. I was
sorry to see it go.
It was a Schwinn Paramount, a great bike that I had ridden in Moscow at the World Championships, and I wanted to use it again in a stage race the following week. A little later, I
went over to Jim’s house. He came out into the front yard.
“Can I have my bike back?” I said.
“Nope,” he said. “You want to talk to me, you come to my office tomorrow.”
I backed away from him. He was irate, to the point that I was afraid he might take a swing at me. And there was something else he wasn’t too happy about: he knew I had a habit of speeding
in the Camaro.
A few days later, he took the car back, too. I was beside myself. I had made all the payments on that car, about $5,000 worth. On the other hand, some of that money had come from the stipend
he paid me to ride for his team. But I wasn’t thinking clearly, I was too mad. When you’re 17 and a man takes a Camaro IROC Z away from you, he’s on your hit list. So I never did go see
Jim. I was too angry, and too afraid of him.
It was years before we spoke again.
Instead, I split town. After my visit to Colorado Springs and Moscow, I was named to the U.S. national cycling team, and I got a call from Chris Carmichael, the team’s newly named director.
Chris had heard about my reputation; I was super strong, but I didn’t understand a lot about the tactics of racing. Chris told me he wanted to develop a whole new group of young American
cyclists; the sport was stagnant in the U.S. and he was seeking fresh kids to rejuvenate it. He named some other young cyclists who showed potential, guys like Bobby Julich and George
Hincapie, and said he wanted me to be one of them. How would I like to go to Europe?
It was time to get out of the house.
