It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (18 page)

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