Cái tốt đẹp nhất trong mọi cái là việc học. Tiền có thể bị mất, sức khỏe và sức mạnh có thể bị mất, nhưng những gì trong đầu bạn thì là của bạn mãi mãi.
Louis L’Amour
Liên Kết Nhanh
Biên tập viên
Cập nhật: It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
ePub
A4CHAPTER EIGHT
S
URVIVORSHIPWHHILE I WAS SICK, I TOLD MYSELF I’D NEVER
cuss again, never drink another beer again, never lose my temper again. I was going to be the greatest and the most clean-living guy you could hope to meet. But life goes on. Things change,
intentions get lost. You have another beer. You say another cussword.
How do you slip back into the ordinary world? That was the problem confronting me after cancer, and the old saying, that you should treat each day as if it might be your last, was no help
at all. The truth is, it’s a nice sentiment, but in practice it doesn’t work. If I lived only for the moment, I’d be a very amiable no-account with a perpetual three-day growth on my chin. Trust
me, I tried it.
People think of my comeback as a triumph, but in the beginning, it was a disaster. When you have lived for an entire year terrified of dying, you feel like you deserve to spend the rest of your
days on a permanent vacation. You can’t, of course; you have to return to your family, your peers, and your profession. But a part of me didn’t want my old life back.
We moved to Europe in January with the U.S. Postal team. Kik quit her job, gave away her dog, leased her house, and packed up everything she owned. We rented an apartment in Cap Ferrat,
halfway between Nice and Monaco, and I left her there alone while I went on the road with the team. A race wasn’t an environment for wives and girlfriends. It was no different from the
office; it was a job, and you didn’t take your wife to the conference room.
Kristin was on her own in a foreign country, with no friends or family, and she didn’t speak the language. But she reacted typically, by enrolling herself in a language-intensive French school,
furnishing the apartment, and settling in as if it was a great adventure, with absolutely no sign of fear. Not once did she complain. I was proud of her.
My own attitude wasn’t as good. Things weren’t going so well for me on the road, where I had to adjust all over again to the hardships of racing through Europe. I had forgotten what it was
like. The last time I’d been on the continent was on vacation with Kik, when we’d stayed in the best hotels and played tourists, but now it was back to the awful food, the bad beds in dingy
road pensions, and the incessant travel. I didn’t like it.
Deep down, I wasn’t ready. Had I understood more about survivorship, I would have recognized that my comeback attempt was bound to be fraught with psychological problems. If I had a bad
day, I had a tendency to say, “Well, I’ve just been through too much. I’ve been through three surgeries, three months of chemo, and a year of hell, and that’s the reason I’m not riding well.
My body is just never going to be the same.” But what I really should have been saying was.
“Hey, it’s just a bad day.”
I was riding with buried doubts, and some buried resentments, too. I was making a fraction of
my old salary, and I had no new endorsements. I sarcastically called it “an eighty-percent cancer tax.” I’d assumed that the minute I got back on the bike and announced a comeback, corporate
America would come knocking, and when they didn’t, I blamed Bill. I drove him nuts, constantly asking him why he wasn’t bringing me any deals. Finally, we had a confrontation via
phone–I was in Europe, he was back in Texas. I began complaining again that nothing was happening on the endorsement front.
“Look, I’ll tell you what,” Bill said. “I’m going to find you a new agent. I’m not putting up with this anymore. I know you think I need this, but I don’t. So I quit.”
I paused and said, “Well, that’s not what I want.”
I stopped venting on Bill, but I still brooded about the fact that no one wanted me. No European teams wanted me, and corporate America didn’t want me.
My first pro race in 18 months was the Ruta del Sol, a five-day jaunt through Spain. I finished 14th, and caused a stir, but I was depressed and uncomfortable. I was used to leading, not
finishing 14th. Also, I hated the attention of that first race. I felt constrained by performance anxiety and distracted by the press circus, and I wished I could have just shown up unannounced
and ridden without a word, fighting through my self-doubts anonymously. I just wanted to ride in the peloton and get my legs back.
Two weeks later, I entered Paris-Nice, among the most arduous stage races outside of the Tour de France itself, an eight-day haul notorious for its wintry raw weather. Before the race itself
was the “prologue,” a time-trial competition. It was a seeding system of sorts; the results of the prologue would determine who rode at the front of the peloton. I finished in 19th place, not bad
for a guy recovering from cancer, but I didn’t see it that way. I was used to winning.
The next morning I woke up to a gray rain and blustering wind, and temperatures in the 30s. As soon as I opened my eyes I knew I didn’t want to ride in that weather. I ate my breakfast
morosely. I met with the team to discuss the strategy for the day, and we decided as a squad that if our team leader, George Hincapie, fell behind for any reason, we would all wait for him and
help him catch up.
In the start area, I sat in a car trying to keep warm and thought about how much I didn’t want to be there. When you start out thinking that way, things can’t possibly get any better. Once I got
out in the cold, my attitude just deteriorated. I sulked as I put on leg warmers and fought to keep some small patch of my skin dry.
We set off on a long, flat stage. The rain spit sideways, and a cross-wind made it seem even colder than 35 degrees. There is nothing more demoralizing than a long flat road in the rain. At
least on a climb your body stays a little bit warm because you have to work so hard, but on a flat road, you just get cold and wet to the bone. No shoe cover is good enough. No jacket is good
enough. In the past, I’d thrived on being able to stand conditions that made everyone else crack. But not on this day.
Hincapie got a flat.
We all stopped. The peloton sped up the road away from us. By the time we got going again, we were 20 minutes behind the leaders, and in the wind it would take an hour of brutal effort
for us to make up what we had lost. We rode off, heads down into the rain.
The crosswind cut through my clothes and made it hard to steady the bike as I churned along the side of the road. All of a sudden, I lifted my hands to the tops of the handlebars. I
straightened up in my seat, and I coasted to the curb.
I pulled over. I quit. I abandoned the race. I took off my number. I thought, This is not how I want to spend my life, freezing and soaked and in the gutter.
Frankie Andreu was right behind me, and he remembers how I looked as I rose up and swung off the road. He could tell by the way I sat up that I might not race again for a while–if ever.
Frankie told me later that his thought was “He’s done.”
When the rest of the team arrived back at the hotel at the end of the stage, I was packing. “I quit,” I told Frankie. “I’m not racing anymore, I’m going home.” I didn’t care if my teammates
understood or not. I said goodbye, slung my bag over my shoulder, and took off.
The decision to abandon had nothing to do with how I felt physically. I was strong. I just didn’t want to be there. I simply didn’t know if cycling through the cold and the pain was what I
wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Kik was grocery shopping after school when I reached her on her cell phone. “I’m coming home tonight,” I said. She couldn’t hear because the reception wasn’t great, and she said, “What?
What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell you about it later,” I said.
“Are you hurt?” She thought I had crashed.
“No, I’m not hurt,” I said. “I’ll see you tonight.”
A couple of hours later, Kik picked me up at the airport. We didn’t say much until we got in the
car and began the drive home. Finally, I said, “You know, I’m just not happy doing this.”
“Why?” she said.
“I don’t know how much time I have left, but I don’t want to spend it cycling,” I said. “I hate it. I hate the conditions. I hate being away from you. I hate this lifestyle over here. I don’t want to be
in Europe. I proved myself in Ruta del Sol, I showed that I could come back and do it. I have nothing left to prove to myself, or to the cancer community, so that’s it.”
I braced myself for her to say, “What about my school, what about my job, why did you make me move here?” But she never said it. Calmly, she said, “Well, okay.”
On the plane back to Cap Ferrat I’d seen an advertisement for Harley-Davidson that summed up how I felt. It said, “If I had to live my life over again I would . . .” and then it listed several
things, like, “see more sunsets.” I had torn it out of the magazine, and as I explained to Kik how I felt, I handed her the ad, and I said, “This is what’s wrong with cycling. It’s not what my life
should be.”
“Well, let’s get a good night’s sleep, and wait a couple of days and then make a decision,” she said.
The next day Kik went back to her language school, and I didn’t do a thing. I sat alone in the apartment all day by myself, and I refused to even look at my bike. Kik’s school had a strict rule
that you weren’t supposed to take phone calls. I called her three times. “I can’t stand sitting around here doing nothing,” I said. “I’ve talked to the travel agent. That’s it. We’re leaving.” Kik
said, “I’m in class.”
“I’m coming to get you. That school’s a waste of time.” Kik left the classroom and sat on a bench outside, and cried. She had fought the language barrier for weeks. She had managed to
set up our household, figured out how to do the marketing, and mastered the currency. She had learned how to drive the autoroute, and how to pay the French tolls. Now all of her effort was
for nothing.
When I arrived to pick her up she was still crying. I was alarmed. “Why are you crying?” I said.
“Because we have to leave,” she said.
“What do you mean? You’re here with no friends. You can’t speak the language. You don’t have your job. Why do you want to stay here?” “Because it’s what I set out to do, and I want to finish
it. But if you think we need to go home, then let’s do it.”
That night was a whirlwind of packing, and Kik attacked it with as much energy as she had getting us unpacked in the first place. In 24 hours we did more than most people do in two
weeks. We called Kevin Livingston, and gave him all of our stuff–towels, silverware, lamps,
pots, pans, plates, vacuum cleaner. I said to Kevin, “We’re never coming back. I don’t want this junk.” Kevin didn’t try to talk me out of it–he knew better. Instead, he was very quiet. I could
see on Kevin’s face that he didn’t think I was doing the right thing, but he wasn’t going to say a word. He had always worried about my coming back, anyway. “Just watch your body,” he’d say.
“Take it easy.” He had lived through the whole realm of the disease with me, and the only thing he cared about was my health. As I loaded him down with boxes he was so sad I thought he
might cry. “Take this,” I said, handing him boxes full of kitchenware. “Take all of it.”
It was a nightmare, and my only good memory of that time is of Kik, and how serene she seemed in the midst of my confusion. I couldn’t have blamed her if she was about to break; she
had quit her job, moved to France, sacrificed everything, and almost overnight I was ready to move back to Austin and retire. But she stood by me. She was understanding and supportive
and endlessly patient.
Back home in the States, everybody was wondering where I was. Carmichael was at home at eight o’clock in the morning when his phone rang. It was a French reporter. “Where is Lance
Armstrong?” the reporter asked. Chris said, “He’s in Paris–Nice.” The reporter said in broken English, “No, he is stop.” Chris hung up on him. A minute later the phone rang again–it was
another French reporter.
Chris called Bill Stapleton, and Bill said he hadn’t heard from me. Neither had Och. Chris tried my cell phone, and my apartment. No answer. He left messages, and I didn’t return them, which
was unusual.
Finally I called Chris from the airport. I said, “I’m flying home. I don’t need this anymore. I don’t need the crappy hotels, the weather, the lousy food. What is this doing for me?”
Chris said, “Lance, do whatever you want. But don’t be rash.” He continued calmly, trying to buy me a little time. “Don’t talk to thepress, don’t announce anything, don’t say you’re going to
quit,” he warned me.
After I called Chris, I reached Stapleton. “I’m done, man,” I said. “I showed them I could come back, and I’m done.”
Bill kept his cool. “Okaaaay,” he said. He had already talked to Chris, and he knew everything. Like Chris, he stalled.
Bill suggested that I should wait on the retirement announcement. “Let’s just give it a week or so, Lance. It’s too crazy right now.” “No, you don’t understand. I want to do it now.” “Lance,”
Bill said, “I understand you’re retiring. That’s fine, but we need to discuss a few things. Let’s just give it a couple of days.” Next, I called Och. We had one of our typical conversations. “I quit
Paris-Nice,” I said. “That’s not such a big deal.” “I’m out. I’m not racing anymore.” “Don’t make the decision today.”
Kik and I flew back to Austin in a trail of jet lag. As we walked in the door, the phone was ringing constantly, with people looking for me and wondering why I had disappeared. Finally,
things quieted down, and after a day of sleeping off the jet lag, Kik and I met with Bill in his downtown law office.
I said, “I’m not here to talk about whether I’m riding again. That’s not up for discussion. I’m done, and I don’t care what you think about it.”
Bill looked at Kik, and she just looked back at him, and shrugged. They both knew I was in one of those moods that couldn’t be argued with. By now, Kik was a shell of a woman, exhausted
and frustrated, but in her glance to Bill, something passed between them. Kik’s look got the point across. It said, Be patient with him, he’s a mess.
There was about a 20-second pause before Bill spoke. Then he said, “Well, we need to at least make a statement, do this formally. Let’s get it done right.”
“Just issue a press release,” I said. “What about that?”
“It’s a bad idea.”
“Why?”
“You know those races, Ruta del whatever, and Paris-whatever?” Bill said. “Nobody in America has ever heard of those, pal. Nobody here even knows you got back on a bike. So you can
certainly have a press conference and tell everybody you’re retired. I know you think you had this fabulous comeback, and I agree with you. I mean, what you’ve done is amazing. Just
beating cancer is a comeback. But nobody else knows it.”
“I was 14th at Ruta del Sol,” I said, defensively. “Lance,” Bill said, “you will be the guy who got cancer and never rode again. That’s what it’s going to be.”
There was another long pause. Next to me, Kik’s eyes began to well up.
“Well,” I said, “we can’t have that.”
Stapleton finessed me: he cited a thousand things that had to be done before I could formally retire. “I understand you’re retiring,” Bill said. “But how are you going to retire?” He asked me if
I wanted to hold a live press conference, and suggested that we needed to have meetings with sponsors. Then he said, “Shouldn’t you ride at least one farewell race?” I couldn’t leave the sport
without a final appearance in the U.S.
“Why not race at the national championships in June, and make that your last race?” he said. “You can win that; you know you can. That’s a comeback; that’s something people will know
about.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I want to get back on a bike.”
Bill patiently manipulated me into holding off on a retirement announcement. With every complication he summoned up, he bought more time. At the very least I couldn’t retire before
the Ride for the Roses, he said, and that wasn’t until May.
Finally, Bill wore me down. I told him I would wait to announce anything. But in the meantime, I decided I would take a few days off.
My Postal team was patient. Thorn Weisel offered to wait. But a few days off turned into a week, and then a week turned into a month. I didn’t even unpack my bike. It sat in its bag in the
garage, collecting dust.
I WAS A BUM. I PLAYED GOLF EVERY DAY, I WATER-SKIED,
I drank beer, and I lay on the sofa and channel-surfed.
I went to Chuy’s for Tex-Mex, and violated every rule of my training diet. Whenever I came home from Europe, it was a tradition for me to stop at Chuy’s straight from the airport, no
matter how jet-lagged I was, and order a burrito with tomatillo sauce and a couple of margaritas or Shiner Bocks. Now I was eating practically every meal there. I never intended to deprive
myself again; I’d been given a second chance and I was determined to take advantage of it.
But it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t lighthearted or free or happy. It was forced. I tried to re-create the mood I’d shared with Kik on our European vacation, but this time, things were different, and I
couldn’t understand why. The truth was, I felt ashamed. I was filled with self-doubt and embarrassed by what I’d done in Paris–Nice. Son, you never quit. But I’d quit.
I was behaving totally out of character, and the reason was survivorship. It was a classic case of “Now what?” I’d had a job and a life, and then I got sick, and it turned my life upside-down, and
when I tried to go back to my life I was disoriented, nothing was the same– and I couldn’t handle it.
I hated the bike, but I thought, What else am I going to do? Be a coffee boy in an office? I didn’t exactly feel like a champ at much else. I didn’t know what to do, so for the moment, I just
-wanted to escape, and that’s what I did. I evaded my responsibilities.
I know now that surviving cancer involved more than just a convalescence of the body. My mind and my soul had to convalesce, too.
No one quite understood that–except for Kik. She kept her composure when she had every right to be distraught and furious with me for pulling the rug out from under her. While I was out
playing golf every day, she was homeless, dogless, and jobless, reading the classifieds and
wondering how we were going to support ourselves. My mother sympathized with what she was going through. She would call us, ask to speak with Kik, and say, “How are you doing?”
But after several weeks of the golf, the drinking, the Mexican food, Kik decided it was enough–somebody had to try to get through to me. One morning we were sitting outside on the
patio having coffee. I put down my cup and said, “Well, okay, I’ll see you later. It’s my tee time.”
“Lance,” Kik said, “what am / doing today?”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t ask me what I was going to do today. You didn’t ask me what I wanted to do, or if I minded if you played golf. You just told me what you were going to do. Do you care what I’m
doing?”
“Oh, sorry,” I said.
“What am I doing today?” she said. “What am I doing? Tell me that.”
I was silent. I didn’t know what to say.
“You need to decide something,” she told me. “You need to decide if you are going to retire for real, and be a golf-playing, beer-drinking, Mexican-food-eating slob. If you are, that’s fine. I love
you, and I’ll marry you anyway. But I just need to know, so I can get myself together and go back on the street, and get a job to support your golfing. Just tell me.
“But if you’re not going to retire, then you need to stop eating and drinking like this and being a bum, and you need to figure it out, because you are deciding by not deciding, and that is so
un-Lance. It is just not you. And I’m not quite sure who you are right now. I love you anyway, but you need to figure something out.”
She wasn’t angry as she said it. She was just right: I didn’t really know what I was trying to accomplish, and I was just being a bum. All of a sudden I saw a reflection of myself as a retiree
in her eyes, and I didn’t like it. She wasn’t going to live an idle life, and I didn’t blame her.
Quietly, she said, “So tell me if we’re going to stay in Austin. If so, I’m going to get a job, because I’m not going to sit at home while you play golf. I’m so bored.”
Normally, nobody could talk to me like that. But she said it almost sweetly, without fighting. Kik knew how stubborn I could be when someone tried to butt heads with me; it was my old
reflex against control and authority. I don’t like to be cornered, and when I am, I will fight my way out, whether physically or logically or emotionally. But as she spoke to me I didn’t feel
attacked or defensive, or hurt, or picked on, I just knew the honest truth when I heard it. It was, in a quietly sarcastic way, a very profound conversation. I stood up from the table.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me think about it.”
I went to play golf anyway, because I knew Kik didn’t mind that. Golf wasn’t the issue. The issue was finding myself again.
KIK AND STAPLETON AND CARMICHAEL AND OCH conspired against me, talking constantly behind my back about how to get me back on the bike. I continued to say that I was
retiring, but as the days wore on, I began to waver. Bill persuaded me to commit to one last race, the U.S. Pro Championships, which would be held in Philadelphia in May.
Chris Carmichael flew to Austin. He took one look in my garage, at the bike still in its carrying bag, and shook his head. Chris felt like Kik did, that I needed to make a conscious decision
about whether I belonged back on the bike. “You’re alive again, and now you need to get back to living,” he repeated. But he knew I wasn’t ready to commit to another full-scale comeback
yet, so the surface excuse he gave for coming to Austin was simply to put together a training plan for the U.S. Championships. Also, the second Ride for the Roses was coming up, and the
race would be a criterium around downtown Austin requiring that I be at least minimally fit. “You can’t go out like this,” Chris said, gesturing at my body. “You don’t want to embarrass
your foundation.”
Chris insisted that regardless of what I decided about retirement, I needed an eight- to ten-day intensive training camp to get back to form–and I needed to do it somewhere other than Austin.
“Let’s get out of town,” he said. “You can’t focus here, there’s too much golf, too many distractions.”
We tried to think of a place to go. Arizona? Too hot. Colorado? Too high altitude. Then I said, “Remember Boone? That little hippie town in North Carolina?”
Boone was high in the Appalachians on the route of the old Tour Du Pont, and I had fond memories of it. I had won the Tour Du Pont twice there, and I had spent many afternoons
cycling and suffering on its biggest peak, Beech Mountain, which was the crucial climbing stage of the race. It was arduous but beautiful country, and Boone itself was a college town full of
students and professors from nearby Appalachian State University. Conveniently, it had a training facility at the university, and plenty of cabins for rent in the woods.
I got on the Internet and rented a cabin sight unseen. Next, I decided to invite an old friend named Bob Roll to be my training partner; Bob was a high-spirited 38-year-old former road
racer who had switched over to mountain biking, and he would be easy company for ten days.
We flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, and drove three hours into the mountains. Our first stop was Appalachian State, where Chris arranged with the athletic training center to do some
testing with me on a stationary bike, to find out where I stood fitness-wise. Chris looked at my VO
2 max and lactate threshold numbers, and they confirmed what he already knew: I was fat and in lousy shape. Usually, my physiological values were the elite of the elite. My VO
2 rate, ordinarily at 85, was now at 64.
Chris said to the Appalachian State trainers who helped us, “Watch. When we come back he’s going to be at 74, and he’ll do it after only a week.”
Chris knew that my body responded to new thresholds after a very short period, and he felt I could be back in peak shape in just a few days. But just to challenge me, he made me a bet that I
couldn’t up my wattage–the amount of work in pedaling–in the space of a week. “A hundred bucks says you can’t get over 500,” he said. I took the bet.
From then on, all we did was eat, sleep, and ride bikes. Spring had just begun moving up into the mountains, creating a constant fog and drizzle that seemed to muffle the piney woods. We
rode in the rain every day. The cold seared my lungs, and with every breath I blew out a stream of white frost, but I didn’t mind. It made me feel clean. We rode winding back roads, only some
of which were paved and mapped. We cycled over gravel and hardpan and beds of pine needles, and under hanging boughs.
At night, Chris made big pots of pasta and baked potatoes and we sat around the table wolfing down the food and having unprintable conversations. We told stories and laughed about old
times and the start of our friendship, and my first years as a pro.
I called home each night, and Kristin could tell that I was starting to sound like my old self; I was having fun, joking, I didn’t seem depressed. When I would tell her about the cold and rainy
weather or how far we had ridden, I would laugh. “I’m feeling really good,” I said, almost puzzled.
I began to enjoy the single-mindedness of training, riding hard during the day and holing up in the cabin in the evenings. I even appreciated the awful weather. It was as if I was going back to
Paris-Nice and staring the elements that had defeated me in the eye. What had cracked me in Paris were the cold, wet conditions, but now I took satisfaction in riding through them, the way
I’d used to.
Toward the end of the camp, we decided to ride Beech Mountain. Chris knew exactly what he was doing when he suggested it, because there was a time when I owned that mountain. It was
a strenuous 5,000-foot climb with a snowcapped summit, and it had been the crucial stage in my two Tour Du Pont victories. I remembered laboring on up the mountainside with crowds lined
along the route, and how they had painted my name across the road: “Go Armstrong.”
We set out on yet another cold, raining, foggy day with a plan to ride a 100-mile loop before we returned and undertook the big finishing ascent of Beech Mountain. Chris would follow in a car,
so we could load the bikes up on the rack after we reached the summit and drive back to the
cabin for dinner.
We rode and rode through a steady rain, for four hours, and then five. By the time we got to the foot of Beech, I’d been on the bike for six hours, drenched. But I lifted myself up out of the
saddle and propelled the bike up the incline, leaving Bob Roll behind.
As I started up the rise, I saw an eerie sight: the road still had my name painted on it.
My wheels spun over the washed-out old yellow and white lettering. I glanced down between my feet. It said, faintly, Viva Lance.
I continued upward, and the mountain grew steeper. I hammered down on the pedals, working hard, and felt a small bloom of sweat and satisfaction, a heat under my skin almost like a liquor
blush. My body reacted instinctively to the climb. Mindlessly, I rose out of my seat and picked up the pace. Suddenly, Chris pulled up behind me in the follow car, rolled down his window,
and began driving me on. “Go, go, go!” he yelled. I glanced back at him. “Allez Lance, allez, allez!” he yelled. I mashed down on the pedals, heard my breath grow shorter, and I
accelerated.
That ascent triggered something in me. As I rode upward, I reflected on my life, back to all points, my childhood, my early races, my illness, and how it changed me. Maybe it was the
primitive act of climbing that made me confront the issues I’d been evading for weeks. It was time to quit stalling, I realized. Move, I told myself. If you can still move, you aren’t sick.
I looked again at the ground as it passed under my wheels, at the water spitting off the tires and the spokes turning round. I saw more faded painted letters, and I saw my washed-out name: Go
Armstrong.
As I continued upward, I saw my life as a whole. I saw the pattern and the privilege of it, and the purpose of it, too. It was simply this: I was meant for a long, hard climb.
I approached the summit. Behind me, Chris could see in the attitude of my body on the bike that I was having a change of heart. Some weight, he sensed, was simply no longer there.
Lightly, I reached the top of the mountain. I cruised to a halt. Chris put the car in park and got
out. We didn’t talk about what had just happened. Chris just looked at me, and said, “I’ll put your bike on top of the car.”
“No,” I said. “Give me my rain jacket. I’m riding back.” I was restored. I was a bike racer again. Chris smiled and got back in the car.
I passed the rest of the trip in a state of near-reverence for those beautiful, peaceful, soulful mountains. The rides were demanding and quiet, and I rode with a pure love of the bike, until
Boone began to feel like the Holy Land to me, a place I had come to on a pilgrimage. If I ever have any serious problems again, I know that I will go back to Boone and find an answer. I got
my life back on those rides.
A day or two later we went to the university training center to test my wattage. I pedaled so hard I blew out the odometer. I spun the machine so fast Chris couldn’t get a digital readout.
Laughing, he smacked $100 into my palm.
That night at dinner, I said to Chris casually, “I wonder if I could get into that race in Atlanta.”
“Let’s do it,” Chris said.
‘That evening, we started figuring out my comeback. Chris placed a bunch of calls, trying to find me some new racing wheels. Then he called Bill Stapleton, and said, “Get ready. He’s coming
back a different guy. The guy we used to know.”
I DIDN’T JUST JUMP BACK ON THE BIKE AND WIN. THERE were a lot of ups and downs, good results and bad results, but this time I didn’t let the lows get to me.
After Boone, I enjoyed every day on the bike. Every day. Even when I was in bad shape, suffering, crashing, trying to come back, I never once, never, ever, ever, thought about
abandoning again.
I even took the bike to my wedding. My trip to Boone was in April of ‘98, and Kik and I were married that May in Santa Barbara. We invited about a hundred people, and we exchanged
vows in a small Catholic ceremony–Kik is Catholic–and afterward we had a dance party. No one sat down for the duration of the night, people were too busy rocking all over the room, and
it was such a good time that Kik and I didn’t want it to end. We ended up in the hotel bar with our guests in our wedding getups, and had cocktails and cigars.
We stayed on in a beach house for a few days, but it wasn’t the ideal honeymoon, because I was so intent on training after my Boone experience. I rode every day. Finally we returned home to
Austin for the Ride for the Roses, which had grown to be a big-time event. Part of downtown was blocked off, lights were strung up through the streets. I won the criterium over a pretty
good field. When I took the podium, Kik shrieked and jumped around, as thrilled as if it were the Tour de France. It struck me that she had never seen me win anything before. “That’s
nothing,” I said, shrugging, but I was secretly delighted.
It was nice to have a little taste of competition again. I got another in June, when I made my official return to the cycling circuit and finished fourth in the U.S. Pro Championships, while my
friend and teammate George Hincapie won it.
One morning I said to Kik, “Okay, maybe it’s time to try Europe again.” She just nodded cheerfully and started packing. The thing is, I could have said to her: “We’re going back to
Europe,” and when we got to Europe, I could have said, “We’re going back to Austin,” and when we got to Austin, I could have said, “You know what? I made a mistake. We’re going
back to Europe,” and she would have made every trip without complaint. Nothing was a huge crisis to her.
Kik liked the challenge of a new place and a new language, so when I said: “Okay, let’s try it one more time,” that was an easy one for her. Some wives would have thought it was hard, but
that’s why I didn’t marry some wives. A lot of wives wouldn’t have made it over there in the first place. My wife, on the other hand, is a stud.
Kik and I tentatively rented a little apartment in Nice, and she enrolled back in school and started French lessons again, while I continued to race. I entered the Tour of Luxembourg–and I
won it. After the first stage, I called home, and Kik wanted to know why I wasn’t more excited, but by now I was so wary of the psychological pitfalls of a comeback that I kept my emotions
and expectations in check. It was just a four-day race, not the kind that the major riders would have celebrated as a big victory. But from a morale standpoint it was great, because it meant I
could win again–and it was worth some ICU bonus points, too. It erased the last lingering bit of self-doubt.
Next, I traveled to the weeklong Tour of Holland, and finished fourth. In July, I skipped the Tour de France, not yet ready for the strenuous routine of a three-week stage race. Instead, I did
some TV commentary and watched from the side of the road as it turned into the most controversial and traumatic bike race in history. In a series of raids On team cars, French police
found trunkloads of EPO and anabolic steroids. Team members and officials were thrown in French jails, everyone was under suspicion, and the cyclists were furious at the tactics used by
authorities. Of the 21 teams that began the race, only 14 finished. One team was expelled and the other six quit in protest. Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling, or any other
endurance sport for that matter. Inevitably, some teams and riders feel it’s like nuclear weapons–that they have to do it to stay competitive within the peloton. I never felt that way,
and certainly after chemo the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was especially repulsive. Overall, I had extremely mixed feelings about the 1998 Tour: I sympathized with the
riders caught in the firestorm, some of whom I knew well, but I also felt the Tour would be a more fair event from then on.
I continued to make steady progress on the bike through the summer, and in August Kik and I felt secure enough about my future as a rider to buy a house in Nice. While Kik employed her
stumbling French to handle the bankers and buy furniture and move us into the new home, I went off with the team for the three-week Vuelta a Es-pana (Tour of Spain), one of the most
strenuous races on the face of the earth. There are three grand tours in cycling, of Italy, Spain, and France.
On October 1, 1998, nearly two years to the day after I was diagnosed, I completed the Vuelta. I finished fourth, and it was as important an achievement as any race I’d ever won. I rode 2,348
miles over 23 days, and missed making the awards podium by only six seconds. The winner,
Abraham Olano of Spain, had ridden just 2 minutes and 18 seconds faster than I had. What’s more, I nearly won the toughest mountain stage of the race, in gale-force winds and freezing
temperatures. The race was so tough that almost half the field retired before the finish. But I didn’t quit.
To place fourth in the Vuelta meant more than just a comeback. In my previous life, I’d been a great one-day racer, but I’d never been competitive in a three-week stage race. The Vuelta
meant I was not only back, I was better. I was capable of winning any race in the world. I swept up ICU ranking points right and left, and all of a sudden I was the real deal.
WHILE I WAS RIDING IN THE VUELTA, KIK WAS IN AN endurance contest of her own called moving. Our apartment was on the third floor, and she would call up the elevator, load it
with our things–boxes of clothes, cycling gear, and kitchenware. She would ride down and unload everything in the lobby, and then she’d move it all from the lobby to the front door of the
building, and from there into the back of the car. She’d drive to the new house, unload the car, carry the boxes up a set of steep stairs ascending a hillside, and dump them in the house. Then
she’d drive back to the apartment and repeat the routine all over again, elevator load by elevator load. Kik worked for two days straight, until she was bleary-eyed with fatigue.
When I arrived home, my clothes were put away, the refrigerator was full of groceries, and Kik handed me a new set of keys. For some reason, it made me ridiculously happy. That house
seemed like the culmination of the whole year. We had done it, we had established ourselves in Europe and regained my career. Kik could speak some French now, and we had a home and a
life together, and it meant everything to us. “Oh, my God,” she said. “We did it. We started over.”
To celebrate we spent a few days in Lake Como, which was still one of my favorite places anywhere. I treated us to a wonderful hotel, and handpicked the room we stayed in, with a
gigantic terrace and sweeping view, and all we did was sleep and stroll and go to elegant dinners. Finally, we went home to Austin for the fall and winter holidays. Not long after we got
back, I received an e-mail from the U.S. Postal team director, Johan Bruyneel. He congratulated me on the Vuelta. “I think that fourth was better than you expected,” he wrote. Then he made
an interesting reference. “You will look great on the podium of the Tour de France next year,” Johan wrote, cryptically.
That was the end of the message. I saved his e-mail to a disk, printed it out, and looked at the words. The Tour? Johan didn’t just think I could be a stage racer again, he thought I could be a
Tour rider. He thought I could win the whole thing. It was worth considering.
Over the next few days, I read and reread the e-mail. After a year of confusion and self-doubt, I now knew exactly what I should do. I wanted to win the Tour de France.
WHAT YOU LEARN IN SURVIVORSHIP is THAT AFTER ALL the shouting is done, after
the desperation and crisis is over, after you have accepted the fact of your illness and celebrated the return of your health, the old routines and habits, like shaving in the morning with a
purpose, a job to go to, and a wife to love and a child to raise, these are the threads that tie your days together and that give them the pattern deserving of the term “a life.”
One of the things I loved about Boone was the view it offered. When I cycled around an unexpected bend in the road, suddenly the landscape opened up, the line of trees parted, and I
could see thirty mountain ranges stretching to the horizon. I was beginning to see my life in the same way.
I wanted to have a child. When I was sick, fatherhood was something obscured around the next bend, perhaps impossible, a lost chance. Now my view was as clear and crystallized as those
mountain ranges in the distance, and I didn’t want to postpone fatherhood any longer. Fortunately, Kik was as ready as I was. We understood each other perfectly despite the
upheavals of the last year, and we’d held on to a sweet harmony, the kind that makes you want to join with another and create a new human being.
Ironically, the process would be almost as medically intricate as a cancer treatment: it would require as much research and planning, and a raft of syringes, drugs, and two surgeries. I was
sterile. In order to get pregnant, Kik would need in-vitro fertilization (IVF), using the sperm I had banked in San Antonio on that awful day.
What follows in these pages is an attempt to render the experience truthfully and openly. A lot of couples are private about their IVF treatment and don’t want to talk about it at all, which is
their right. We aren’t. We understand we may be criticized for being so free with the details, but we have decided to share them because so many couples deal with infertility and are
faced with the fear that they may not be able to have a family. We want them to hear the specifics of IVF so they understand what’s ahead of them. For us, it was forbidding but worth
it.
We planned to start our family right after the New Year, and I began to research in-vitro as thoroughly as cancer, scouring the Internet and consulting with physicians. We scheduled a trip
to New York City to visit the IVF experts at Cornell University. But as the date drew closer on the calendar, we started having second thoughts. The experience was going to be clinical and
impersonal enough, and we were so tired of travel that the idea of being in a strange hotel room for weeks in New York sounded as unappealing as a chemo cycle. We changed course and
decided to seek an IVF specialist at home in Austin, Dr. Thomas Vaughn.
On December 28, we had our first consultation with Dr. Vaughn. Both of us were nervous as we sat on the couch in his office, and out of habit I wore what Kik called my “medical
demeanor,” which I put on in any clinical situation, a tight-lipped, hard look. Kik smiled a lot to offset my grimness, so Dr. Vaughn would think we were fit to be parents.
As we discussed the IVF procedure, I noticed Kik blushed slightly. She wasn’t used to the
clinical language, but after testicular cancer, discussing sexual matters publicly with strangers was no big deal to me. We left the office with a rough plan in place and a sense of surprise that
it could happen so fast–if things worked, Kik could be pregnant by February. The timing was important, because we’d have to plan the arrival of the new baby along with my cycling
schedule if I wanted to win the Tour de France.
Two days later, Kik went to an X-ray lab for her first appointment. Nurses strapped her to a sliding X-ray table and stuck a torture device inside her that sprayed dye. The X ray was to
make sure she didn’t have any blocked tubes or other problems. Well, the nurses messed up twice before they finally got it right, and it hurt Kik to the point that she sobbed. But, typical
Kik, she was impatient with herself for crying. “I’m so pathetic,” she said.
The next night was New Year’s Eve, the last night of libations for her. As of the New Year she forswore alcohol and caffeine. The following morning my Java Queen nursed a hangover and
caffeine withdrawal, and from then on she didn’t touch a drop. We wanted our baby to be pristine.
A week later, we had an appointment at the hospital for what we thought was a simple meeting with an IVF nurse. Wrong. We walked into the room and it was, no joke, staged like an
intervention. Two long tables faced each other, with tense couples holding hands in utter silence. A too-chipper nurse said she had to take our photo for her files, so we gritted our teeth
and smiled, and we sat down for two hours of Sex Ed, complete with old films of sperm swimming up the tubes. We’d all seen it in high school, and we didn’t want to see it again. The
nurses handed out information packets and proceeded to go through them page by page. I squirmed in my seat, and kept Kik amused by drawing pictures of a sperm with a circle and a
slash through it, and whispering jokes. I told Kik I felt like I was at an Al-Anon meeting: “Hi, my name is Lance and I have no sperm.”
I elbowed Kik to go, but there was never a good time to leave. We both sat there, dying to bolt, but we couldn’t find the right, polite break. Finally we couldn’t take one more minute. Kik
gathered her pamphlets, stood up, and race-walked out of the room with me right on her wheel. We burst out of the room, giddy as school kids, and ran to our car laughing and out of breath,
and wondered aloud if we were too immature to be parents.
A few days later we returned to the IVF office for blood tests. Kik turned bedsheet white when she had her blood drawn. I told her she was a skirt, but I actually sympathized. She has
needle-phobia–and she was in for a rough few weeks.
That night she took her first Lupron shot. Lupron is a drug that prevents women from ovulating, and she required ten units every 24 hours–which meant a shot every night until the
doctors told her to stop. For someone with an aversion to needles, those shots were highly unnerving. To make matters worse, she had to administer them to herself.
Every night at exactly 8:30 P.M., Kik had to go into the bathroom and give herself a shot in the
thigh. The first time she did it, her hands shook so badly that she couldn’t get the tiny bubbles out of the syringe. Finally she pinched her thigh hard, swore out loud, and stuck herself.
In the middle of the week, the U.S. Postal team came to Austin to do wind-tunnel testing. Kik and I took everybody out to dinner, but just as the entrees arrived Kik looked at her watch. It
was 8:30 P.M. She excused herself, and went to the bathroom and “shot up like some junkie,” as she delicately put it.
After wind-tunnel testing, the U.S. Postal team went to California for a training camp and I had to go with them, which meant Kik would be alone in the pregnancy project for several days.
While I was away, Kik made a grand pilgrimage to the clinic in San Antonio where my frozen sperm was stored. I had been paying rent on it, $100 every year.
Early that morning, Kik went to the IVF office in Austin and picked up a big frozen tank, which filled the passenger seat next to her. She drove an hour to San Antonio and lugged the tank
inside the building and up to the 13th floor, where she read a House Beautiful magazine while one of the nurses prepared our family for the icy trip back to Austin. At my request, the nurse
opened the tank briefly to show Kik the initials LA etched into the vial.
“I said a silent prayer that the vial didn’t belong to some guy named Larry Anderson,” she told me later.
On her way back she drove very carefully and answered several inquiring calls from me, checking her progress. I didn’t feel quite safe until she had deposited the tank back into the
hands of the IVF staff. It was not quite the romantic candlelight interlude we had in mind, but we were now prepared to conceive a child.
Kik continued to shoot herself up. One night she had a bunch of girlfriends to the house for dinner, and when 8:30 came around none of them could believe she was actually going to stick
herself with a needle, so they joined her in the master bath to watch. Call it stage fright, call it slippery fingers–but she dropped her last glass vial of Lupron on the bathroom tile and it
shattered. She stared at it, disbelieving and horrified, knowing full well that if she missed her shot, she would also miss the entire cycle and have to start all over again in another month. Her
eyes filled up with tears. While her friends cleaned up the shards before the dog ate them, Kik frantically searched through her info binder for the name of the nurse on call, and reached her. It
was 8:45 on a Saturday night, and Kik tearfully explained the situation. The nurse said, “Oh, dear.” They both called around town to find a pharmacy that was open. Finally Kik found one,
and raced down the freeway. The pharmacist kept the store open, waited for her to arrive, and gave her a good-luck pat as she left.
A couple of days later, Kik went back to Dr. Vaughn for a baseline sonogram to count and measure her eggs. It was hard for Kik to go to the doctor by herself. All of the other women at
the clinic always had their husbands with them, and she could feel them looking at her as she leafed through People magazine. She read their thoughts: they wondered why someone so
young would need IVF, and why she was always alone.
Doctor Vaughn started her on Gonal-F. This was the drug that would stimulate the follicle and make her produce more eggs. From now on she would have to take two shots: five units of
Lupron and three full vials of Gonal-F. She told me that her body, once a temple, was now “a cross between a pincushion and a henhouse.”
Mixing the Gonal-F was hard to do. It came in powder form in glass vials. Kik had to take a syringe with a long needle, which made her ill just to look at, and draw a half-unit of a sterile
water solution. Then she broke the tops off the vials of powder and shot the liquid into each vial. She filled the syringe with the mixture, flicked it to remove a fat air bubble at the top, and
squirted until the air pocket moved up and out of the needle. Then she injected the evil needle’s contents into her thigh.
On January 22, Kik went to Dr. Vaughn at 7 A.M. to have blood drawn yet again. Another needle. She looked as far away from it as possible and focused on the Far Side cartoons taped to
the wall, wondering how she was going to handle childbirth if she couldn’t even give blood without feeling woozy. Then, at 4 P.M. the same day, she went back to Dr. Vaughn’s office to
get her second sonogram. It revealed 12 eggs, all of them growing right on schedule.
It was the height of irony: on the same day that she had the sonogram, I went from California to Oregon to see Dr. Nichols for my six-month cancer checkup. Dr. Nichols had moved from
Indianapolis to Portland, but I continued to visit him for my periodic monitoring. I couldn’t help remarking on the fact that while I was seeing one kind of doctor, she was seeing another, for
entirely different purposes. But we told ourselves they had one thing in common: each confirmed the possibility of life.
Kik was almost ready for “retrieval,” the surgery to harvest her eggs. The day before she was due to have the procedure I arrived back home, to our mutual relief. That day she underwent one
more round of blood tests and sonograms, and yet another shot, a dose of HCG, the blood marker that had haunted my life during chemo. In this case, HCG was a good thing; it would
mature the egg in Kik’s body for retrieval.
She had the shot at exactly 7:30 P.M., 36 hours before surgery, at a local clinic. It was the longest needle yet, but a very gentle nurse administered the shot while Kik lay on a table
quivering.
That night, she dreamed of knives and henhouses.
On the day of the procedure, we rose at 6 A.M. and went to the day-surgery center, where Kik was given hospital attire to change into, complete with a blue shower cap and patient’s gown.
The anesthesiologist explained his procedure and handed us a stack of releases to sign. Nervously, we scribbled our names on each of them, including one that gave the doctors the
right to cut open her abdomen to retrieve the eggs if the traditional way of extracting them via a
needle didn’t work. Then Kik walked into the surgery room.
She was literally strapped to a table, with her arms outstretched like a crucifixion. She doesn’t remember anything after the anesthesia IV began. It’s a good thing. The doctor harvested her
eggs using a very long needle and a catheter.
When she woke up in the recovery room, she saw me leaning over her. “Will you get in bed with me?” she asked. I crawled in next to her, and kept her company while she dozed on and off for
another hour. Finally she woke up, and the hospital released us. I pushed her in a wheelchair out to our car, and for only the second time in my life, I drove the speed limit home.
Kik spent the weekend resting, sleeping, and watching movies while I cooked and looked after her. Bart Knaggs’ wife, Barbara, came by with some flowers and handed us a carton of eggs.
“Since you no longer have any,” she said. It hurt Kik to laugh, but it didn’t hurt as badly as the progesterone shot I gave her. The latest doctor’s order was a nightly dose of progesterone, and
this was the longest and most oily-looking needle yet. I had to do it for her.
SURVIVORSHIP
On February 1, Dr. Vaughn called with our fertilization report. They had defrosted the frozen sperm and fertilized Kik’s eggs via a procedure called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI),
whereby they physically injected one sperm into each egg. We had nine viable eggs, he said. Of those nine, six were perfect, two were possible, and one was broken. We decided to implant
three of the perfect ones in Kik’s womb, and to freeze the other three. It was strange to think that we were freezing our future children.
After we hung up, we had a moment of panic. I wondered aloud, “What would we would do if all three worked?” We could end up with three screaming, scampering, spoon-banging toddlers
all at the same time.
Three days after the retrieval, we went back to the hospital for the “transfer,” which was the clinical, bus-station term for what we considered the most important day in our lives apart from
our wedding. We were ushered to the day-surgery area, where our embryologist, Beth Williamson, explained that she had spent the weekend fertilizing our embryos. She said that
when she thawed the sperm she was happy to find that they were alive and swimming, which was a relief because this is not always the case after cryo-preservation. She said the fertilization
went smoothly–and she even had photos for us. “Here’s the group shot,” she said, which was her hilarious term for a fuzzy image of three embryos together, followed by individual shots of each.
The embryos had eight cells, and they were dividing right on schedule.
“Can you tell the gender?” Kik asked.
Dr. Williamson said no, that the gender at this stage could only be determined by removing one of the cells and doing DNA testing. I’d had enough procedures to last me a lifetime. “Uh, no
thanks,” I said. “We’d rather be curious.”
After Beth left, a nurse came in with two sets of scrubs–one for Kik and one for me. As we got dressed, Kik said, “You look like some hunk from ER.” Giggling, we asked Dr. Vaughn to take
a picture of us, to mark our last moment as a couple without children. Then we went into a darkened surgery room. The lights were dimmed to make everything as relaxing as possible. We
weren’t anxious; we were only very excited, and both grinning like idiots. Finally, the doctor indicated to the embryologist team that it was time, and they came in with our three embryos in
a syringe. I sat on a stool next to Kik, and I held both of her hands under the sheet. Within five minutes it was complete. We never took our eyes off of each other.
Next, the team lifted Kik very carefully onto a gurney and wheeled her into the small recovery room, where she had to lie motionless for one hour. I sprawled out on a bed next to her. We just
lay there together, looking up at the ceiling, and teasing each other about having triplets.
After our hour was up, a nurse came in and explained that Kik would have to spend the next two days doing absolutely nothing. I drove carefully home, and put her in bed, and waited on
her. I delivered her lunch on a tray, and for dinner I set the table with pretty cloth napkins.
“Armstrong, party of five,” I announced.
I served dinner like a headwaiter. Kik was only allowed to sit up while we ate, and in between the salad and the main course I made her lie down on the sofa. She dubbed me “the warden.”
Kik woke up the next morning to me kissing her stomach. That day she began taking medications we called “hatching drugs.” The embryology team had poked a microscopic hole in
each of the fertilized follicles before they transferred them, and the hatching drugs, along with that tiny hole, would help the embryos hatch out of the follicle and implant.
We wouldn’t know for two weeks, until February 15, whether Kik was actually pregnant, and we could barely wait. We kept trying to notice any subtle changes in the way she felt. But
considering that she had been taking shots and pills for weeks on end, it was hard to make a comparison to “normal.” “Do you feel anything different?” I kept asking, anxiously. “What is it
supposed to feel like?” We wondered about it all the time.
“Am I?” she’d say.
Finally, on the eleventh day after the transplant, Kik went back to the hospital early in the morning to have blood drawn for her HCG (pregnancy) test. She was so nervous that she turned
the radio off and prayed to herself on the way there and back. The results would be back by 1:30 P.M., so we tried to pass the time by fixing a big breakfast, showering, and packing for
Europe.
Just as Kik was taking the dog out for a walk, the phone rang. I picked it up and I said,
“Uh-huh,” and listened, and my eyes filled with tears. I hung up the phone, and I grabbed her in a huge hug, and I said, “Babe, you’re pregnant.” Kik threw her arms around me and said, “Are
you sure?” I laughed, and then we both cried.
Now that we knew she was pregnant, the question became, how many babies was she carrying? I cheerfully announced that I hoped she was carrying triplet boys. “The more the better,” I
said.
Kik rolled her eyes. “My husband has a rich fantasy life,” she said. “Either that or he finds humor in tormenting me.”
“I picture you on an eleven-hour international flight with the triplets,” I said. “See also: insanity, fatigue, catatonic state, insomnia.”
Kik was sure to do everything carefully. She ate from all the major food groups, she walked four miles a day, she took her prenatal vitamins, and she napped. She bought a stack of pregnancy
books, and we looked at cribs. Friends kept asking if she had been sick yet, which she hadn’t. In fact, she felt so good that she began to wonder if maybe the hospital mixed up her blood test
and she wasn’t pregnant after all.
She did a home pregnancy test just to ease her fears. Two lines popped right up.
“Okay, just checking,” she said.
Finally, I had to return to Europe and the U.S. Postal team. Kik stayed behind for a couple more tests, but she would join me overseas as soon as possible. On March 5, she had a sonogram to
judge the number of babies she was carrying. I had almost convinced her that she was going to bear triplet boys–but the sonogram showed that we had one healthy baby. Not twins, not
triplets. She was relieved, but a tiny part of her was oddly disappointed, not because she wanted us to be the parents of multiples, but because she couldn’t ignore the vague loss she felt,
wondering what happened to the other two. Kik asked Dr. Vaughn if there was any possible thing we could have done wrong that might have kept the other two from living. He said
absolutely not, and that there are still some things that are natural and inexplicable, even in a seemingly sterile, scientific procedure.
Then Dr. Vaughn said, “That’s quite a strong heartbeat we have here.”
He pointed to a tiny blinking bean on the screen. The entire thing was flashing. Kik laughed and said, “It definitely isn’t my genes that made a heart beat like that. That’s Lance.” Dr. Vaughn
printed out an obscure photo of the bean for Kik to take to Europe for me.
A couple of days later, Kik arrived in Nice. She handed me the picture. I studied it, awestruck, absolutely mesmerized. That bean with a flashing heartbeat made me feel more alive than
anything I had experienced yet. It made me feel as clean and reverent as Boone. It made me feel
as if I had survived, at last.
“Ride like the wind,” Kik told me. “Big Daddy Armstrong has a family to support.”
