Every Second Counts by Armstrong Lance

Author:Armstrong, Lance
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER 5

Headwinds

WHEN YOUR VALUE is constantly measured, and you’re compensated for it, as an athlete is, you can get confused and start equating winning with a good and happy life.

The trouble is, nobody who does what I do for a living is happy-go-lucky. I don’t bomb down a hill at 70 miles an hour with a smile on my face. If you want to win something, you’ve got to have single-mindedness, and it’s all too easy to wind up lonesome while you’re at it.

A race is an exercise in leaving others behind, and sometimes that can include the ones you love. It’s a delicate problem, one I’ve yet to solve. For instance, one day I took my son bike-riding with me. I put him in a little trailer and hitched it to my bike, and we went pedaling off.

Luke said, out of nowhere, “No more airplane, Daddy.”

“What?” I said, turning around.

“Daddy, no more airplane. Stay home with me now.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

Spending life on the seat of a bike is a solitary exercise, and things go by in constant accelerated motion. Speed is a paradoxical equation: a thousand small, dully repetitive motions go into the act of going really, really fast, and you can get so fixed on the result, on the measurements and numbers and cadences, that you miss other things. Your strength as an athlete can be a weakness: the qualities that make someone fast don’t always make them perceptive. Life becomes a blur.

Like every other season of my adult life, I entered the 2001–2002 cycling season with a sense of urgency, put there by cancer. When I wasn’t trying to pedal faster on the bike, I was still trying to outrun the disease, and I focused on two sets of numbers, my pedaling cadence, and my blood markers, to tell me how I was doing. But maybe I missed some things, too.

That September, I had an irrational sense that the cancer was back. The battle with cancer is started and ended, and won and lost, on a cellular level, and I worried that the disease could lie dormant, hide out, and come back in ten years, or 20 years, just when I had strolled off into the sunset. I didn’t ever want to disrespect the illness, or its track record. You could never turn your back on it.

I wasn’t feeling well, and it made me uneasy. I was tired, and it wasn’t from drinking unseemly amounts of beer, either, though that may have had something to do with it. I was stressed and physically exhausted from the long year, but I felt more than the usual fatigue. I was sleeping for 12 and 14 hours every night, long bouts of black, unconscious sleep. Monstrous sleep. It reminded me exactly of how I’d felt when I was sick.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought about it. I thought about it every hour.

Finally, I called my friend and general practitioner, Dr. Ace Alsup.

“Ace,” I said, “I gotta come in for some tests.

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