A house without books is like a room without windows.
Heinrich Mann
Liên Kết Nhanh
Biên tập viên
Cập nhật: It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
ePub
A4CHAPTER SEVEN
K
IKLOVE AND CANCER WERE STRANGE COMPANIONS,
but in my case they came along at the same time. It was hardly the ideal situation in which to meet my future wife–but that’s exactly what happened. Why do two people get married? For
a future together, naturally. The question was whether or not I had one.
I didn’t have cancer anymore, but I didn’t not have it, either. I was in a state of anxiety called remission, and I was obsessed with the idea of a relapse. I would wake up in the night with
phantom pains in my chest, and I’d lie in bed in the darkness, covered in sweat and listening to the sound of my own breathing, convinced the tumors had come back. The next morning I’d go
directly to the doctor and ask for a chest X ray to calm myself down.
“The chemo works or it doesn’t,” Dr. Einhorn once said. “If it works, the patient lives a normal, cancer-free life. If it doesn’t and the cancer comes back, he will usually be dead in three or four
months.” It was that simple.
Getting on with my life, on the other hand, was much more complicated. I finished chemotherapy on December 13, 1996, and I met Kristin Richard a month later, at a press
conference to announce the launching of my cancer foundation and the Ride for the Roses. We spoke just briefly. She was a slim blond woman who everyone called Kik (pronounced Keek), an
account executive for an advertising and public-relations firm in town, assigned to help promote the event. I know I’m supposed to say the light changed when I saw her, but actually, it didn’t. I
just thought she was smart and pretty. She told me later her first impression of me was equally inconsequential. I was “a cute bald guy with a great smile.” It would be spring before we had
deeper feelings, and summer before we acted on them. For one thing, we were seeing other people, and for another, the first time we ever talked at length we had a fight.
It started on the phone. She represented a corporate client, a major title sponsor of the Ride for the Roses, and she felt I wasn’t doing enough to please them. One afternoon she got testy with a
foundation staffer. Who is this chick? I thought, and dialed her number, and as soon as she answered I said, “This is Lance Armstrong, and what do you mean by talking to my staff that
way?” I went off, barking at her. On the other end of the receiver, Kik rolled her eyes, thinking, Tliis guy acts like he is so big-time.
For the next ten minutes we argued back and forth. “Obviously, this conversation is going nowhere,” she snapped. “Damn right it’s going nowhere!” I snapped back. “You know what?”
she said. “We need to talk about this over a beer. That’s all I have to say to you.”
I was nonplussed. “Oh, uh, okay. We’ll go have a beer.”
I invited her to meet up with me and a couple of friends at a local bar. I don’t think either of us expected to be as drawn to the other as we were. I was still pale and washed out and fatigued
from the illness, but she didn’t seem to care. She was funnier and more easygoing than I had anticipated, and very bright. I asked her to join the weekly foundation meetings at my house,
and she agreed.
The foundation seemed like the perfect answer to the limbo I was in: I had completed chemo, and beaten back the cancer for the time being, but I had to figure out what to do next. To work
on something outside myself was the best antidote. I was a cancer survivor first and an athlete second, I decided. Too many athletes live as though the problems of the world don’t concern
them. We are isolated by our wealth and our narrow focus, and our elitism. But one of the redeeming things about being an athlete–one of the real services we can perform–is to redefine
what’s humanly possible. We cause people to reconsider their limits, to see that what looks like a wall may really just be an obstacle in the mind. Illness was not unlike athletic performance in
that respect: there is so much we don’t know about our human capacity, and I felt it was important to spread the message.
One of the more important events of that winter-spring was that I met a man named Jeff Garvey, a prominent Austin venture capitalist who would become a close friend in time, but
who at first I simply hoped would help guide the foundation. A mutual acquaintance introduced us, and Jeff invited me to lunch. I drove up to his place in my Explorer in shorts and a T-shirt.
We had a long rambling lunch, and talked about cycling–Jeff was an avid amateur rider and each year he made a trip through Spain, following the famous Camino de Santiago. Jeff had lost both
of his parents to cancer, and he was looking for some charitable work to do in fighting the disease. A few weeks later, I asked Jeff to have lunch with me again, and over the meal I asked
him if he would take over the running of the foundation. He agreed, and became our CEO.
For the next two months Kik and I worked together on the foundation. At first, she just seemed like a stylish girl who always had a quick comeback. Gradually though, I found myself noticing
her long fine blond hair, and the way she would make the most casual clothes look classy somehow. And then there was her Colgate commercial of a smile. It was hard not to get lost in
the view. Also, I liked her sass. Meanwhile, Kik had started reading up on me in her spare time, under the pretext of doing research for business purposes. But neither of us was willing to admit
how we felt yet.
We held the inaugural Ride for the Roses in March, and it was a big success. We raised over $200,000, and the Wallflowers played a concert, and friends and colleagues came from all over
the world to ride, including Miguel Indurain, Eddy Merckx, and Eric Heiden.
There was one donation I’ll never forget. I was sitting at a table doing an autograph signing, with a huge line stretching down the block, scribbling my name as fast as possible. I signed over
and over, barely glancing upward as each person stepped in front of me. A checkbook flew in my face and flopped open on the table. “How much do you want?” a voice said. Without
looking up, I said, “Goddamn.”
I started to laugh and shake my head. I knew that voice. It was the long-lost Jim Hoyt, my homeboy from Piano, the man who put me on my first bike and then took my beloved Camaro
away. He was standing right in front of me, and so was his wife, Rhonda. I hadn’t laid eyes on them since our bitter disagreement a decade earlier. I looked Jim in the eye.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I figured I owed him that.
“Accepted,” he said. “Now, how much do I make it out for?”
“Jim, you don’t have to do that.”
“No,” he said. “I want to help.”
“Aw, come on, don’t do this,” I said.
“How about five grand? Does that sound good?”
I burst out laughing. Five grand was what I had put into that Camaro.
“That’d be fine,” I said.
He wrote out the check, and we shook hands.
Every year, Jim always comes back for the Ride. And I mean to tell you, homeboy goes crazy with his checkbook, and he never asks me for a thing in return.
A little while later, another memorable person stepped in front of me: a little girl whose head was semi-bald like mine. Our eyes met, and we connected instantly. As I signed an autograph
for her, she recited all of my stats: she knew everything about my career. Her name was Kelly Davidson and she was a cancer patient, and for days afterward I couldn’t get her out of my
mind. I tracked her down and called her, and we became good friends.
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN I WAS IN TROUBLE WITH KlK
when we kept thinking up reasons to see each other after the Ride was over. We would exchange e-mails a lot, and talk on the phone, and find excuses to meet now and then beyond
foundation meetings. She continued to come to the weekly gatherings at my house, and one night she stayed after everybody else left. It was just the two of us, sitting in my living room
sipping beers and talking. I remember thinking, What am I doing? Why am I here alone with her? She was thinking the exact same thing. Finally, she stood up to call a cab, and I offered to
give her a ride home.
We drove through the empty dark streets, not saying much of anything, but feeling a lot. There was something there, but neither of us was ready to touch it yet. So we just drove.
BY SPRING OF ‘97, I WASN’T EXACTLY READY TO GO out for margaritas. The medical uncertainties were still a constant, nagging worry. “What’s it going to be?” I’d ask Dr. Nichols.
“Am I going to live or die? What?”
I felt pressure to get back on my bike, and yet I was unsure of my body. I counted and recounted my financial assets and sweated every mortgage payment, wondering if I would ever make
another dime from cycling. Finally, I decided to at least try to race; I could still lock Cofidis into the second year of the contract and relieve myself of financial worries if I appeared in four
events. I told Bill, “Let’s find some races.”
A month after leaving the hospital, I’d flown to France to appear at a Cofidis press conference. The team officials were shocked that I showed up, but I wanted them to see that I was not the
pale, bedridden victim they had left in Indianapolis. I told the Cofidis people that I wanted to try to come back in the spring, and I even spent a couple of days riding and working out with the
team. They seemed pleased. I began to train seriously, riding four hours a day, as much as 100 miles over some of the old routes I used to love, ranging from Austin to Wimberly, to Dripping
Springs, to New Sweden, towns with nothing but cotton fields and tractors and solitary church steeples in the distance. But I didn’t like how I was feeling. Sometimes I would ride for an hour
or so, just a little cruise, and it wore me out and I’d have to take a long nap afterward. I rode at a moderate pace, only about 130 heartbeats per minute, but I would feel strong one day and weak
the next.
I had a vague, run-down sensation that was all too familiar: it was the way I had felt before the diagnosis, I realized, with a knot in my stomach. Then I got a cold. I was sleepless and paralyzed
with fear for an entire night, certain the cancer had come back. Before the illness I had never been susceptible to colds; if I was coming down with something, it had to be cancer.
The next morning I raced to see Dr. Youman for a checkup, certain he would tell me I was ill again. But it was just a common infection that my body wasn’t strong enough to fight off. My
immune system was shot, and I was what the doctors called “neutrophilic”: my white blood cell count was still down, which meant I was susceptible to every little germ that came along.
My X rays had not entirely cleared up, either. There was a spot of some kind in my abdomen. The doctors didn’t know quite what it was, and decided just to keep an eye on it. I was a
nervous wreck.
That was it. Dr. Nichols recommended that I take the rest of the year off, and I agreed; there would be no serious cycling for me in ‘97. I was still convalescing, Nichols explained, and my
immune system hadn’t fully rebounded from a chemo regimen that had been far more strenuous than I realized. My lack of fitness was in no way related to lack of will, Nichols said, it was a
simple matter of how much the illness had taken out of me.
My friends and colleagues felt like I did, nervous. “Look,” Och said. “Whatever you decide, make sure the doctors know exactly what you’re doing, training-wise, how much you’re
working. Give them the details so they can make the determination as to how hard you should go.”
I had to admit it: I might never legitimately race again at the top level. Maybe my body just couldn’t deal with the rigors of a full-time training regimen.
Chris Carmichael called me and wanted to know what was going on.
“Chris, I’m scared,” I said. “I’m scared to train. I’m scared if I push myself too hard, it will come back.”
IN AN ODD WAY, HAVING CANCER WAS EASIER THAN RE-
covery–at least in chemo I was doing something, instead of just waiting for it to come back.
Some days I still called myself a bike racer, and some days I didn’t. One afternoon I went to play golf with Bill at a local country club. We were on the fifth hole, a par-5, and Bill hit a beautiful
six-iron for a chance at eagle. “I’ll be able to do that some day,” I said, admiringly.
Bill said, “It’s going to be a while before you play enough golf to hit a shot like that.”
“Bill, you don’t get it,” I said. “I’m retired.”
Bill and I had this argument all the time. I vacillated–one day I would plan my big comeback, and the next day I would tell him my career was over.
On the first tee, I’d say, “Well, now we’re just friends because I don’t need an agent anymore. I’m never riding again.” A few minutes later I’d be standing on the next tee, waggling a club,
and I’d say, “When I start riding again, what are we going to do, what’s the plan?” By the next hole, I would have reversed myself again.
“I hope you’re not hanging out with me because you think I’m going to make any more money,” I’d say. “Because I’m not riding.”
Bill knew I was prone to making sweeping statements, and he had learned to make a joke, or to put me off. He’d say to me, “Okay, fine, we’ll talk about this tomorrow.”
Then something happened that deepened my ambivalence: Bill’s assistant, our good friend Stacy Pounds, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Stacy had been a tremendous help to me during my
own illness and an integral partner in launching the foundation. She was a 55-year-old Texas
belle and chain-smoker, -with a gritty voice and exquisite manners. Stacy could basically tell you that you were the biggest jerk in the world, and to never call again, and that you smelled, too,
but you would hang up thinking, “That was the nicest lady.”
Stacy was not as fortunate as I was; her cancer was incurable. We were devastated, and all we could do was try to support her and make her more comfortable. My mother came across two
pretty silver crucifixes on chains, and bought them for me. I wore one, and I gave the other to Stacy. She was completely agnostic, just like me, but I said, “Stacy, I want to give you this
cross, and I’m going to wear one, too. This is going to be our bond. You wear it when you’re being treated, or wear it whenever you want. And I’ll wear mine forever.” We wore them not as
religious symbols but universal ones, symbols of our cancer kinship.
Stacy deteriorated quickly. One day she announced, “I’m not doing chemotherapy if I can’t get better.” Dr. Youman tried to treat her, but the chemo wasn’t working. It made her miserably
sick, and it wasn’t going to save her life, either. Ultimately, she stopped, and the doctor told us she had only a matter of weeks left.
Stacy had a son, Paul, who was a sailor serving with the Navy at sea, and we wanted to bring him home to see his mother, but nobody seemed able to get him off his ship. We called
congressmen and senators, everybody, but nothing happened. Finally I decided to pull a string; I knew a four-star general, Charles Boyd, who’d been based in Germany, and who had recently
retired and was living in Washington. I dialed his number, and I said, “General Boyd, I need a favor.”
I explained about Stacy, and I said, “This lady’s dying, and her son’s on board a ship.” General Boyd stopped me. “Lance,” he said, “you don’t need to say any more. I lost my wife two years
ago to cancer. I’ll see what I can do.” The next day, the kid was on his way home. That’s what the term “cancer community” means.
But before Paul got home, Stacy went into a nursing home for a few days. A group of us went to visit her there, Bill, me, and my mom, and we found her in an awful, crowded facility with
barely enough nurses to go around. Stacy said, “I’m in pain. I ring the bell in the night and they don’t bring me my pain medicine.” I was horrified.
I said, “Stacy, this is the deal. We’re going to pack up your shit, and we’re going to check you out of here. You’re going to go home, and I’m going to hire you a full-time nurse.”
A nursing-home official said, “You can’t check her out.” “She’s fucking leaving,” I said. “Now.”
I told Bill, “Back the car up. Open the door.” And we were gone. Stacy spent her last few weeks at home. Her son arrived, and we found a hospice nurse to help him care for her. She fought as
hard as she could, and held out for three weeks more than the doctors predicted. She was diagnosed in January, right after I finished my own chemo. She quit working in February, and by
March she was gravely ill. Then she slipped away, and broke all our hearts.
I was despondent, and still nervous about my own health, and half guilty over my good fortune in being alive. Cycling didn’t seem like a very important pursuit after losing Stacy, and I didn’t
think it was a realistic one, either. Steve Lewis came from Piano for a visit, and could see an obvious change in me. I don’t think he understood what the illness had done to me until he laid
eyes on me, so skinny and white, cheekbones sticking out, and defeated-seeming. I showed Steve the pictures of my lungs, and I told him, “I really thought I was going to die.”
I was still struggling to get past the idea that I could have lost my life, and it was difficult to know where to begin again. Decisions like whether to try to race, and how to deal with Cofidis,
were beyond me. I didn’t know what I wanted, or even what was possible, and I couldn’t help feeling that cycling was trivial.
Steve looked at a picture of me winning a stage of the Tour de France, and he said, “When are you going to do this again?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m done with that,” I said. “It’s too hard on your body.”
“You’re kidding,” Steve said, shocked. “I’ll never be able to ride in that race again,” I said. Steve was taken aback. He had never known me to give up at anything. “I think I’ve lost it,” I said. “I
just don’t feel good on the bike.” I told him I was afraid of losing my house, and that I had tried to adjust to certain spending restrictions. I had scaled things back proportionately, and tried to
come up with an alternate plan for the future, with no bikes in it. Steve knew me as a braggadocious kid, but now I was talking like a victim. I didn’t have the edge that he
remembered. As for my personal life, I was equally tentative. Lisa and I needed to make some decisions about our future together, and I had seriously considered marriage. She had stayed
with me throughout the cancer battle, every miserable step of the way, and that meant something. She gave me a kitten, and we named it Chemo.
“I think she’s the one,” I’d told Steve. “She stuck with me through this, and she’ll stick with me through anything.”
But when Steve came back to see me again two months later, Lisa and I had broken up. That tells you how chaotic my feelings were. Cancer does one of two things to a relationship: it either
brings you closer together, or it tears you apart. In our case, it tore us apart. As I began to slowly recover, we found that we had less and less to talk about. Maybe it was just a case of
exhaustion; we had spent so much energy fighting the illness and gotten through all of the hard parts, but in the end it left us numb, too. One day in March, she said, “Let’s see other people.”
“Okay,” I said.
But soon we were hardly seeing each other at all. Lisa certainly understood that I had been sick–but it was harder for her to understand why I didn’t have any emotional wherewithal left.
We continued to see each other on and off–you don’t just completely sever a relationship like
that. But it ended, just the same.
I was so confused about what to do with myself that one afternoon I went for a bike ride with Bill (ordinarily, I would never ride with such a novice), and as we pedaled slowly around my
neighborhood, I said, “I’m going back to college to be an oncologist. Or maybe I’ll go
to business school.”
Bill just shook his head. He had a master’s degree in business, and a law degree from the University of Texas as well. “You know, I went to college for eleven years,” Bill said. “I had to
sweat it out in school, and I’ll have to sweat it the rest of my life. You don’t ever have to do that, dude. Why do you want to go to work every day on a trading floor at four-thirty in the
morning, if you don’t have to?”
“You don’t get it, Bill,” I said. “I keep telling you, I’m not a biker now.”
FOR A WHILE, KlK STOPPED CALLING ME BACK; I
couldn’t reach her no matter how hard I tried. She was unsure about me, because she had heard about my reputation as a player, and she didn’t intend to be a casualty. I wasn’t used to being cut
dead, and it drove me crazy. I left message after message on her machine. “Are you ever going to call me back?” I demanded.
Finally, Kik relented. I didn’t know it, but her life was in transition, too. She split with the man she had been seeing, and she changed jobs, all within a few weeks. Finally, one afternoon she
answered her phone when I called.
I said, “Well, what’s new?”
“A lot. I just started this new job, and I’m busy.” “Oh,” I said. Then I took a deep breath. “Damn. I thought you were going to tell me that you were single.”
“Well, funny you should mention it. I am. I broke up two days ago.”
“Really?” I said, trying to sound casual. “You’re single?”
“Yeah.”
“So what are you doing tonight?” I asked.
“Something with you,” she said.
We’ve been together ever since.
I knew instantly I had met my match. Kik could handle herself; she was tough, independent, sensible, and unspoiled. Although she had grown up around money–her father was an executive
of a Fortune 500 company–she was used to taking care of herself and didn’t expect anything to be handed to her. I think I get it now, I thought to myself.
I felt safe with her. She liked me bald and sick with no eyebrows, and the insecurities I might have had about my hair, my scars, my body, didn’t seem to matter. Kik became my hairstylist.
She would take my head in her hands and gently trim my hair with a pair of clippers until I looked like a 1960s astronaut.
I’d always had the upper hand in my relationships, but not with Kik. Sometimes I would lead, and sometimes I would follow, but mostly I would go where she wanted me to go. Still do.
North, south, east, and all the rest. That summer, Kik had plans to go to Europe. She had never been overseas, and a friend of hers from college, an exchange student who lived in Spain,
wanted her to come visit. “Why are you going to Spain?” I said. “Spain’s a dustbowl.”
“Shut up,” Kik said. “Don’t ruin my fun, I’ve been saving for this for years.”
She would be gone for over a month. That was totally unacceptable, I decided. There was only one thing to do: go with her. I was supposed to make an appearance at the Tour de France, as a
courtesy to my sponsors and to show that I was still a potentially viable competitor, and I decided to time it with Kik’s trip. I was curious to see the Tour from a spectator’s point of view,
anyway, and I hoped it would revive my desire to cycle. I asked to go with her, and she agreed. -
It was an awakening. I felt like I had never seen Europe before, and the truth is, maybe I hadn’t. I had seen it from a bike, at 40 miles an hour, but I hadn’t seen it as a tourist, and I hadn’t seen it
in love. We went everywhere. I showed off my French, my Italian, and my Spanish.
I had missed most of my 20s. I was too busy being a pro athlete and making a living from the age of 15 on to do the things most people in their 20s do, to have fun the way Kik and her
college friends had fun. I’d completely skipped that phase of my life, but now I had a chance to go back and live it. I was still tentative about what would happen to my health, not knowing
what I had left, if it was just one day, or two years, or a long life. Carpe diem, I told myself, seize the day. Whatever I had, I was going to spend it well. And that’s how Kik and
I found each other.
I had never embraced my life. I had made something of it, and fought for it, but I had never particularly enjoyed it. “You have this gift,” Kik said. “You can teach me how to really love life,
because you’ve been on the brink, and you saw the other side. So you can show
me that.”
But she showed me. She wanted to see everything, and I was the guy who got to show it to her, and in showing it to her, I saw it for myself. In Italy, we sat at sidewalk cafes and ate ham with
shaved Parmesan cheese. Kik teased me, “Before I met you, Parmesan came
in a green can.”
We went to San Sebastian, where it had rained so hard that it hurt and the crowds had laughed at me as I finished last in my first pro race. This time, I gazed at the tiled roofs and the steppes
of the city along the Bay of Biscay and decided that, contrary to my dismissive statement about dustbowls, there was nothing more beautifully old than Spain.
In Pamplona we saw the running of the bulls. Kik said, “Let’s stay up all night long.”
I said, “Why?”
“For fun. You mean you’ve never stayed up all night, and walked home in the sunrise?”
“No,” I said.
“What do you mean, you’ve never stayed up all night?” she said. “That’s insane. What’s wrong with you?”
We stayed up all night. We went to every nightspot and dance club in Pamplona, and then we walked back to the hotel as the sun came up and lighted the gray plinth streets until they turned
gold. Kik seemed to think I was sensitive and romantic–although few of my friends would have believed it. Chris Carmichael had always described me “kind of like an iceberg. There’s a peak,
but there’s so much more below the surface.” Kik was certain of it.
In Monaco, I told her that I loved her.
We were dressing for dinner in our hotel room, when suddenly we both grew quiet. Up to that moment, it had all been undercurrents. But as I watched her from across the room, I knew
exactly what I was feeling, the tangled twisted strands of love. Only Kik was clear to me. Other than her, I was living in a state of utter confusion; I didn’t know if I was going to live or die, and
if I did live, I had no idea what I would do with my life. I didn’t know what I wanted out of cycling anymore. I didn’t know whether I wanted to ride, or retire, or go to college, or become a
stockbroker. But I loved Kik.
“I think I’m in love with you,” I said from across the room.
Kik stopped in the mirror and said, “You think you are? Or you know? Because I need to know. I really need to know.”
“I know.”
“I know it too,” she said.
If you could ever hope to meet someone and fall in love, it should happen just as it did for us, blissfully, perfectly. Our relationship tended to be unspoken, a matter of a lot of deep, intense
gazing, and a complex strum of emotions. The funny thing is, we never discussed my cancer–the only time we talked about it was when we talked about children. I told her that I did want them,
and about the trip to San Antonio.
But it was frightening for us, too. Kik used to say, “I would never do anything for a man. I would never change my life just for a guy.” §he was like me, always in control of her
relationships, emotions in check, independent, never the one to get hurt, didn’t want anything from anyone, too tough for that. But by now our guards were totally down. One night, she
admitted it to me. “If you want to just annihilate me, you can,” she said. “Because there’s nothing left to block you. So be careful what you do.”
We went to the Tour de France. I tried to describe the race to her; the chess match among riders and the ten million fans lining the roads, but when she saw the peloton for herself, the palette of
colors streaking by with the Pyrenees looming in the background, she screamed with joy.
I had business to do at the Tour, sponsors to see and reporters to talk to. By then I was so caught up in Kik and enjoying my second life that I sounded ambivalent about ever riding
again.
“I’m just not as competitive as before,” I told reporters. “Maybe I’m just a recreational cyclist now.” Even though I was back on my bike, I told them, “I’m a participant, not a competitor.”
The Tour, I said, “is most likely impossible.”
“Look,” I said. “Cycling for me was really a job. It was very good to me. I did it for five or six years, lived all over Europe, did all the traveling. Now I have time to spend with my friends and
family, do the stuff I missed doing my entire childhood.”
BY THE END OF THE SUMMER I RESEMBLED A HEALTHY
person. I no longer looked sick, and I had all of my hair. But I still worried constantly about a relapse, and I had continuing ghost pains in my chest.
I had nightmares. I had strange physical reactions; for no apparent reason I would break out in a sweat. The slightest stress or anxiety would cause my body to become shiny with perspiration.
While I was being treated I was actively killing the cancer, but when the treatment stopped, I
felt powerless, like I wasn’t doing anything but waiting for the other shoe to fall. I was such an active, aggressive person that I would have felt better if they’d given me chemo for a year. Dr.
Nichols tried to reassure me. “Some people have more trouble after treatment than during. It’s common. It’s more difficult to wait for it to come back than it is to attack it.”
The monthly checkups were the worst. Kik and I would fly to Indianapolis and check into the hotel adjacent to the medical center. The next day I would rise at 5 A.M. to drink a contrast dye
for the various MRIs and scans and X rays, nasty stuff that tasted like a combination of Tang and liquid metal. It was a grim experience to wake up in that hotel again, and to know that I
would have to sit in another doctor’s office and perhaps hear the words You have cancer.
Kik would wake up and sit with me as I choked down the cocktail of dye, slumped over and miserable. She would rub my back while I swallowed it down. Once, to make me feel better, she
even asked to taste it. She took a swig and made a face. Like I say, she’s a stud.
Then we’d walk over to the hospital to face the blood tests and the MRIs. The doctors would line the chest X rays up on the light box and flip the switch, and I would duck my head, afraid
that I would see those white spots again. Kik didn’t know how to read an X ray, and the tension was racking for both of us. Once, she pointed at something and said, nervously, “What’s this?”
“That’s a rib,” I said.
As we sat there, we both thought the same thing: I’ve finally found the love of my life, the person who means everything in the world to me, and if anything takes that away now I will
come unglued. It was a sickening sensation then, and it’s still sickening now, just to think about it.
But each X ray was clear, and the blood tests remained normal. With every passing month the chances of a relapse lessened.
I was no longer strictly convalescing. For all intents and purposes, I was healthy. As the one-year mark approached, Chris Carmichael began to urge me to race again. Finally, he flew to
Austin to have it out with me. He believed I needed to get on my bike in earnest, that I had some unfinished business in the sport and that I was starting to seem empty without it, and he
wasn’t afraid to say so, either.
Chris had a long conversation with Bill Stapleton and said, “Everyone tells him to do what he wants, and no one will talk to him about racing his bike.” He thought I needed a push, and our
relationship had always been based on his ability to give me one when I needed it.
I knew exactly why Chris had come to see me. I told John Korioth, “Carmichael is in town to try to get me to race again, and I don’t know if I want to.” Chris and I went out to lunch at my
favorite Tex-Mex place, Chuy’s, and my prediction was correct.
“Lance,” Chris said, “what is with this playing golf? Cycling is what you’re about.”
I shook my head skeptically. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Are you afraid?”
I was. I had been strong as a bull on the bike, and what if I wasn’t anymore? Or what if racing could make me sick again?
“None of your doctors will say that you can race again,” Chris said. “But none of them will say that you can’t, either. I think you should try it, give it a run. I know it’s a big unknown, a big
risk, a big challenge, and a big scare. There are no givens. But here you are, back to life, and now you need to get back to living.”
I thought it over for a couple of days. It’s one thing to undergo chemo and go back to work as an accountant. But to be a cyclist? I didn’t know about that. Chemo had made the worst climb
in the Alps seem flat.
There was another factor to consider: I had a disability policy that would pay for five years. But if I made a comeback, I would forfeit the policy. I would be jumping off a financial cliff to race
again.
Chris hung out and met Kik, and continued to badger me about getting back on the bike. I explained to him that I just wasn’t clear on what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life,
but he refused to believe it. At one point, he turned to Kik, and said, “Do you think he should race again?
“I don’t really care,” she said. “I’m in love with this man.”
Chris looked at me. “Okay,” he said. “You can marry her.”
FINALLY, I MADE MY MIND UP: I WOULD TRY TO RACE again. I got back on the bike, and this time, I felt good about it. I told Bill and Kik, “I think I can do this.” I asked Chris to
formulate a training program for me, and I began to ride hard. But oddly enough, my body refused to take its previous shape. The old me had weighed 175 pounds. Now I was 158, my
face looked narrow and hawkish, and you could see every sinew in my legs.
Bill called Cofidis and told them I was up and riding. “I want to talk to you about his racing program; he’s ready to make a comeback,” Bill said. The Cofidis people suggested that Bill
come to France for a meeting.
Bill flew to Paris overnight, and then drove four hours into the country to reach the Cofidis executive offices. He arrived in time for an elegant lunch. Among those at the table were Alain
Bondue and the Cofidis executive officer, Francois Migraine.
Migraine gave a five-minute speech, welcoming Bill to France. And then he said, “We want to thank you for corning here, but we want you to know that we’re going to exercise our right to
terminate his contract. We need to go in a different direction.” Bill looked at Bondue and said, “Is he serious?” Bondue looked down at his plate and simply said, “Yes.” “Is there a reason I had
to fly all the way over here for you to tell me that?” Bill asked.
“We thought it was important that we tell you person-to-person,” Bondue said.
“Look, you only have to pay him a minimal amount to ride,” Bill said. “Just let him race. He really wants to make a comeback. It’s serious. It’s not that we think he’ll ride, we know he
will.”
Cofidis wasn’t confident that I would ever ride at that level again, and what’s more, if I did ride, and I happened to get sick again, it would be bad publicity for Cofidis.
It was over. Bill was desperate. “Look, he’s been part of your team; you paid him. At least make us an offer.” Finally, the Cofidis people said they would consider it.
Bill left without finishing lunch, and got back in his car for the long drive back to Paris. He couldn’t stand to break the news to me, and he drove to Paris unable to make the call. Finally,
he found a little cafe by the Eiffel Tower, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed my number.
“What?” I said.
“They terminated your deal.”
I paused. “Why’d they make you fly all the way over there?”
Over the next few days, I held out hope that the Cofidis executives would change their minds. Finally, Cofidis called and offered me about $180,000, with a big incentive clause to pay more if
I earned International Cycling Union (ICU) bonus points based on performance in various races. The base salary they were offering was the equivalent of a league minimum, but it was all we
had.
Bill had a Plan B. In the first week of September, there was a large annual Interbike Expo in Anaheim, California, and all the top team representatives would be there. Bill felt that if I
showed up healthy and announced I was ready to ride, I was sure to catch on with someone. “Lance, we need to get in front of the press and tell everybody that you’re serious about this, and
you’re available,” Bill said.
On September 4, 1997,1 went with Bill to the Interbike Expo to announce my return to cycling for the 1998 season. I held a press conference and drew a roomful of newspaper writers and
cycling experts, and informed them of my plans to race. I explained the Cofidis situation and made it clear that I felt jilted. I had missed a full calendar year with cancer, and Cofidis doubted
me just when I felt healthy and ready to compete again, I said. Now the whole cycling world knew I was on the auction block. I sat back and waited for the offers to come in.
None did.
They didn’t want me. One of France’s top cycling managers talked to Bill briefly, but when he heard what Bill was asking for my services, $500,000, he said dismissively, “That’s a champion’s
wage. You’re expecting the money of a big rider.” Another team, Saeco–Cannondale, said they might make an offer, and scheduled a meeting with Bill for the following day. No one showed
up. Bill had to go hunting for the guy, and finally found him in another business meeting. Bill said, “What’s going on?”
The executive replied, “We can’t do it.”
No European team would sign me. For every twenty calls Bill put out, maybe three were returned.
As the days went by and no one made a solid offer, I got angrier and angrier. Bill Stapleton caught the brunt of it, and it put a severe strain on our friendship. For a year and a half, he was
the guy who had nothing but bad news for me. He was the person who had to tell me that I had no health insurance, that Cofidis had cut my contract. Now he had to tell me that no one
wanted me.
I called my mother and told her about Cofidis, and I explained that no other team would make an offer. Not one. I could hear her tense up on the other end of the line, and the old feistiness
crept into her voice.
“You know what?” she said. “That’s all they’ve got to tell us. Because, by golly, you’ll show them. They’ve made a terrible mistake.”
All around, I encountered people who had given up on me, or who thought I was something less than I had been. One night, Kik and I went to a cocktail party with a bunch of people from the
new high-tech firm she worked for. We got separated at the party, and Kik was talking across the room from me with two executives at the firm, when one of them said to her, “So that’s your
new boyfriend?” and then made a vulgar reference to my testicles.
“Are you sure he’s good enough for you?” he said. “He’s only half a man.”
Kik froze. She said, “I won’t even dignify that with a response, because it is so beyond not funny.” She turned her back on him, and found me across the room, and told me what had
happened. I was beside myself. To say something like that to her he had to be incredibly stupid, or maybe he was just a fool who drinks too much at cocktail parties, but I wasn’t going to let
him get away with it. I went to the bar on the pretext of getting another drink, and as I walked by him, I shouldered him, hard.
Kristin objected to my behavior, so then we got into an argument. I was angry way past the point of conversation. After I dropped her off at her house, I went home and sat down and
composed a scathing e-mail to the guy, explaining the nature of testicular cancer and some of the statistics. I wrote dozens of different versions. “I can’t believe you’d say this to anybody, let
alone my girlfriend,” I wrote. “And you’ve got a real problem if you think something like this is funny. This is a life-and-death situation. It’s not about whether I have one ‘nut,’ or two, or fifty.”
But when I got done I was still upset, so I went over to Kik’s house in the middle of the night, and we had a long discussion. By now she was worried that the guy would try to fire her, and
we talked for a while about principles versus employment.
BlLL CONTINUED TO SEARCH FOR A TEAM THAT WOULD
take me on. He felt like he was running around as the agent for some B-rate swimmer that nobody wanted to talk to. People treated him like a pest. Bill just kept at it, and sheltered me
from the more brutal comments. “Come on,” one person said. “That guy will never ride in the peloton again. It’s a joke that he could ever ride at that speed.”
Finally, Bill had what he thought was a good possibility with the U.S. Postal Service team, a new organization that was American-funded and -sponsored. The chief investor in the team was
Thomas Weisel, a financier from San Francisco, an old friend of mine and the former owner of the Subaru-Montgomery team.The only catch was the money. Postal, too, was offering a low
base salary. Bill flew to San Francisco, and negotiations with the team’s general manager, Mark Gorski, seesawed back and forth over several tense days. We were unable to reach an
agreement.
I was on the verge of giving up. We still had the offer from Cofidis, but my resentment had reached the point at which I almost preferred not to race at all rather than to race for them. My
disability policy was worth $20,000 a month for five years, which amounted to $1.5 million, tax-free. If I tried to race again, Lloyds of London informed Bill, I would forfeit the policy. I
decided that if I was going to risk a comeback attempt, my heart should be in it. Otherwise it just didn’t make sense to jeopardize my disability.
Before Bill left San Francisco, we decided he should swing by Thorn Weisel’s office just to say goodbye and to speak with Thorn face-to-face to see if there was any chance we could work
things out. Thorn’s office was an imposing suite in the Transamerica building »with sweeping views, and Bill went there with some trepidation.
Bill sat down with Thorn and Mark Gorski. Abruptly, Thorn said, “Bill, what does he want?”
“He wants a base salary of $215,000,” Bill said. “Also, he wants an incentive clause.”
The International Cycling Union awarded bonus points on the basis of performances in big races, and if I got enough good results, I could make up in bonuses what they wouldn’t pay me
in salary. Bill told him I wanted $500 for every bonus point I collected up to 150, and $1,000 for every point after that.
“Would you consider a cap on the maximum number of ICU points?” Thorn asked.
In a way that was a compliment, because it meant they were concerned that I might perform so well that it would cost them big money.
“No way,” Bill said.
Thorn stared at Bill with the long cold gaze of an expert negotiator. For weeks now, we had gotten no results at the negotiating table, and Thorn Weisel was as tough and unflinching as
they came. But he also knew me and believed in me. Thorn opened his mouth to speak. Bill braced himself.
“I’ll cover it,” Thorn said. “Consider it done.”
Bill almost sighed aloud with relief. We had a deal; I was a racer again. I signed the agreement, and we held a big press conference to introduce me as a team member. At the press conference,
I said, “I don’t feel like damaged goods. I just feel out of shape, which I am.” I would spend November and December training in the States, and then go overseas in January to resume
racing for the first time in 18 long months. It meant returning to my old life of living out of a suitcase and riding all over the continent.
But there was a complication now: Kik. I went to Piano to see my mother. Over coffee on a Saturday morning, I said, “Let’s go look at diamonds today.” My mother beamed. She knew
exactly what I was talking about, and we spent the day touring the best jewelers in Dallas.
I returned to Austin and planned a dinner at home for just Kik and me. We sat on the seawall behind my house, watching the sunset over Lake Austin. Finally, I said, “I have to go back to
Europe, and I don’t want to go without you. I want you to come with me.”
The sun disappeared behind the riverbank, and dusk settled over us. It was still and dark except for the glow spilling out of my house.
I stood up. “Something came today,” I said. “I want to show it to you.”
I reached into my pocket and clasped the small velvet box.
“Step into the light,” I said.
I opened the box, and the diamond collected the light.
“Marry me,” I said.
Kik accepted.
We had never talked about my prognosis. She had come with me to my monthly checkups, and sat with me in front of those X rays, but we never felt the need to discuss the big picture. When
we became engaged, however, a friend of her mother’s said, “How could you let your daughter marry a cancer patient?” It forced us to think about it for the first time. Kik just said, “You
know, I would rather have one year of wonderful than seventy years of mediocre. That’s how I feel about it. Life’s an unknown. You don’t know. Nobody knows.”
Kik and I packed up all our things and drove cross-country to Santa Barbara, California, where I entered an intense two-month training camp. We rented a small house on the beach, and we
became so sentimental about it that we decided we wanted to be married there. We planned a wedding for May. First, however, we would move to Europe in January and spend the ‘98
winter and spring racing season overseas. I got back in the gym and did basic rebuilding work, leg presses and squats, and I steadily lengthened my training rides. I surprised everyone with
how well I rode during training camp in Santa Barbara. One afternoon I rode some hills with Frankie Andreu, and he said, “Man, you’re killing everybody and you had cancer.”
I was now officially a cancer survivor. On October 2,1 had celebrated the one-year anniversary of my cancer diagnosis, which meant that I was no longer in remission. According to my
doctors, there was only a minimal chance now that the disease would come back. One day, I got a note from Craig Nichols. “It’s time to move on with your life,” he wrote. But how do you
survive cancer? That’s the part no one gives you any advice on. What does it mean? Once you finish your treatment, the doctors say, You’re cured, so go off and live. Happy trails. But there
is no support system in place to help you to deal with the emotional ramifications of trying to return to the world after being in a battle for your existence.
You don’t just wake up one morning and say, “Okay, I’m done with cancer, and now it’s time to go right back to the normal life I had.” Stacy Pounds had proved that to me. I was physically
recovered, but my soul was still healing. I was entering a phase called survivorship. What shape was my life supposed to take? What now? What about my recurring nightmares, my dreams?
