It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (3 page)

If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it.

I COULD HAVE DEALT WITH TERRY ARMSTRONG’S PADdle. But there was something else I couldn’t deal with.

When I was 14, my mother went into the hospital to have a hysterectomy. It’s a very tough operation for any woman, physically and emotionally, and my mother was still very young when

it happened. I was entered in a swim meet in San Antonio, so I had to leave while she was still recuperating, and Terry decided to chaperone me. I didn’t

want him there; I didn’t like it when he tried to play Little League Dad, and I thought he should be at the hospital. But he insisted.

As we sat in the airport waiting for our flight, I gazed at Terry and thought, Why are you here? As I watched him, he began to write notes on a pad. He would write, then ball up the paper and

throw it into the garbage can and start again. I thought it was peculiar. After a while Terry got up to go to the bathroom. I went over to the garbage can, retrieved the wadded papers, and

stuffed them into my bag.

Later, when I was alone, I took them out and unfolded them. They were to another woman. I

read them, one by one. He was writing to another woman while my mother was in the hospital having a hysterectomy.

I flew back to Dallas with the crumpled pages in the bottom of my bag. When I got home, I went to my room and pulled my copy of The Guinness Book of World Records off the shelf. I

got a pair of scissors, and hollowed out the center of the book. I crammed the pages into the hollow and stuck the book back on the shelf. I wanted to keep the pages, and I’m not quite sure

why. For insurance, maybe; a little ammunition, in case I ever needed it. In case Terry decided to use the paddle again.

If I hadn’t liked Terry before, from then on, I felt nothing for him. I didn’t respect him, and I began to challenge his authority.

Let me sum up my turbulent youth. When I was a boy, I invented a game called fireball, which entailed soaking a tennis ball in kerosene, lighting it on fire, and playing catch with it wearing a

pair of garden gloves.

I’d fill a plastic dish-tub full of gasoline, and then I’d empty a can of tennis balls into the tub and let them float there. I’d fish one out and hold a match to it, and my best friend Steve Lewis and I

would throw the blazing ball back and forth until our gloves smoked. Imagine it, two boys standing in a field in a hot Texas breeze, pitching flames at each other. Sometimes the gardening

gloves would catch on fire, and we’d flap them against our jeans, until embers flew into the air around our heads, like fireflies.

Once, I accidentally threw the ball up onto the roof. Some shingles caught fire, and I had to scramble up there and stamp out the fire before it burned down the whole house and then

started on the neighbors’ place. Then there was the time a tennis ball landed squarely in the middle ot the tray full of gas, and the whole works exploded. It went up, a wall of flame and a

swirling tower of black smoke. I panicked and kicked over the tub, trying to put the fire out. Instead, the tub started melting down into the ground, like something out of The China

Syndrome.

A lot of my behavior had to do with knowing that my mother wasn’t happy; I couldn’t understand why she would stay with Terry when they seemed so miserable. But being with him

probably seemed better to her than raising a son on her own and living on one paycheck.

A few months after the trip to San Antonio, the marriage finally fell apart. One evening I was going to be late for dinner, so I called my mother. She said, “Son, you need to come home.”

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“I need to talk to you.”

I got on my bike and rode home, and when I got there, she was sitting in the living room.

“I told Terry to leave,” she said. “I’m going to file for divorce.”

I was beyond relieved, and I didn’t bother to hide it. In fact, I was downright joyful. “This is great,” I said, beaming.

“But, son,” she said, “I don’t want you to give me any problems. I can’t handle that right now. Please, just don’t give me any problems.”

“All right,” I said. “I promise.”

I waited a few weeks to say anything more about it. But then one day when we were sitting around in the kitchen, out of the blue, I said to my mother, “That guy was no good.” I didn’t tell

her about the letters–she was unhappy enough. But years later, when she was cleaning, she found them. She wasn’t surprised.

For a while, Terry tried to stay in touch with me by sending birthday cards and things like that. He would send an envelope with a hundred one-dollar bills in it. I’d take it to my mother and

say, “Would you please send this back to him? I don’t want it.” Finally, I wrote him a letter telling him that if I could, I would change my name. I didn’t feel I had a relationship with him, or

with his family.

After the breakup, my mother and I grew much closer. I think she had been unhappy for a while, and when people are unhappy, they’re not themselves. She changed once she got divorced. She

was more relaxed, as if she had been under some pressure and now it was gone. Of course, she was under another kind of pressure as a single woman again, trying to support both of us, but

she had been through that before. She was single for the next five years.

I tried to be dependable. I’d climb on our roof to put up the Christmas lights for her–and if I mooned the cars on the avenue, well, that was a small, victimless crime. When she got home

from work, we would sit down to dinner together, and turn off the TV, and we’d talk. She taught me to eat by candlelight, and insisted on decent manners. She would fix a taco salad or a

bowl of Hamburger Helper, light the candles, and tell me about her day. Sometimes she would talk about how frustrated she was at work, where she felt she was underestimated because she

was a secretary.

“Why don’t you quit?” I asked.

“Son, you never quit,” she said. “I’ll get through it.”

Sometimes she would come home and I could see she’d had a really bad day. I’d be playing something loud on the stereo, like Guns ‘N Roses, but I’d take one look at her and turn the

heavy stuff off, and put something else on. “Mom, this is for you,” I’d say. And I’d play Kenny G for her–which believe me was a sacrifice.

I tried to give her emotional support, because she did so many small things for me. Little things. Every Saturday, she would wash and iron five shirts, so that I had a freshly pressed shirt for each

school day of the week. She knew how hard I trained and how hungry I got in the afternoons, so she would leave a pot of homemade spaghetti sauce in the refrigerator, for a snack. She taught

me to boil my own pasta and how to throw a strand against the wall to make sure it was done.

I was beginning to earn my own money. When I was 15,1 entered the 1987 President’s Triathlon in Lake Lavon, against a field of experienced older athletes. I finished 32nd, shocking the other

competitors and spectators, who couldn’t believe a 15-year-old had held up over the course. I got some press coverage for that race, and I told a reporter, “I think in a few years I’ll be right

near the top, and within ten years I’ll be the best.” My friends, guys like Steve Lewis, thought I was hilariously cocky. (The next year, I finished fifth.)

Triathlons paid good money. All of a sudden I had a wallet full of first-place checks, and I started entering triathlons wherever I could find them. Most of the senior ones had age

restrictions–you had to be 16 or older to enter–so I would doctor my birth date on the entry form to meet the requirements. I didn’t win in the pros, but I would place in the top five. The other

competitors started calling me “Junior.”

But if it sounds like it came easy, it didn’t. In one of the first pro triathlons I entered, I made the mistake of eating badly beforehand– I downed a couple of cinnamon rolls and two Cokes–and I

paid for it by bonking, meaning I ran completely out of energy. I had an empty tank. I was first out of the water, and first off the bike. But in the middle of the run, I nearly collapsed. My

mother was waiting at the finish, accustomed to seeing me come in among the leaders, and she couldn’t understand what was taking me so long. Finally, she walked out on the course and

found me, struggling along.

“Come on, son, you can do it,” she said.

“I’m totally gone,” I said. “I bonked.”

“All right,” she said. “But you can’t quit, either. Even if you have to walk to the finish line.”

I walked to the finish line.

I began to make a name in local bike races, too. On Tuesday nights there was a series of criteriums–multi-lap road races–held on an old loop around those empty Richardson fields. The

Tuesday-night “crits” were hotly contested among serious local club riders, and they drew a large crowd. I rode for Hoyt, who sponsored a club team out of the Richardson Bike Mart, and

my mother got me a toolbox to hold all of my bike stuff. She says she can still remember me pedaling around the loop, powering past other kids, lapping the field. She couldn’t believe how

strong I was. I didn’t care if it was just a $100 cash prize, I would tear the legs off the other riders to get at it.

There are degrees of competitive cycling, and they are rated by category, with Category 1 being the highest level, Category 4 the lowest. I started out in the “Cat 4″ races at the Tuesday-night

crits, but I was anxious to move up. In order to do so you had to have results, win a certain number of races. But I was too impatient for that, so I convinced the organizers to let me ride in

the Cat 3 race with the older and more experienced group. The organizers told me, “Okay, but whatever you do, don’t win.” If I drew too much attention to myself, there might be a big stink

about how they had let me skip the requirements.

I won. I couldn’t help it. I dusted the other riders. Afterward there was some discussion about what to do with me, and one option was suspending me. Instead, they upgraded me. There were

three or four men around there who were Cat 1 riders, local heroes, and they all rode for the Richardson Bike Mart, so I began training with them, a 16-year-old riding with guys

in their late 20s.

By now I was the national rookie of the year in sprint triathlons, and my mother and I realized that I had a future as an athlete. I was making about $20,000 a year, and I began keeping a

Rolodex full of business contacts. I needed sponsors and supporters who were willing to front my airfare and my expenses to various races. My mother told me, “Look, Lance, if you’re going

to get anywhere, you’re going to have to do it yourself, because no one is going to do it for you.”

My mother had become my best friend and most loyal ally She was my organizer and my motivator, a dynamo. “If you can’t give 110 percent, you won’t make it,” she would tell me.

She brought an organizational flair to my training. “Look, I don’t know what you need,” she’d say. “But I recommend that you sit down and do a mental check of everything, because you

don’t want to get there and not have it.” I was proud of her, and we were very much alike; we understood each other perfectly, and when we were together we didn’t have to say much. We

just knew. She always found a way to get me the latest bike I wanted, or the accessories that went with it. In fact, she still has all of my discarded gears and pedals, because they were so

expensive she couldn’t bear to get rid of them.

We traveled all over together, entering me in 10K runs and triathlons. We even began to think that I could be an Olympian. I still carried the silver-dollar good-luck piece, and now she gave

me a key chain that said “1988″ on it–the year of the next summer Olympics.

Every day after school I’d run six miles, and then get on my bike and ride into the evening. I learned to love Texas on those rides. The countryside was beautiful, in a desolate kind of way.

You could ride out on the back roads through vast ranchland and cotton fields with nothing in the distance but water towers, grain elevators, and dilapidated sheds. The grass was chewed to

nubs by livestock and the dirt looked like what’s left in the bottom of an old cup of coffee. Sometimes I’d find rolling fields of wildflowers, and solitary mesquite trees blown into strange

shapes. But other times the countryside was just flat yellowish-brown prairie, with the

occasional gas station, everything fields, fields of brown grass, fields of cotton, just flat and awful, and windy. Dallas is the third-windiest city in the country. But it was good for me.

Resistance.

One afternoon I got run off the road by a truck. By then, I had discovered my middle finger, and I flashed it at the driver. He pulled over, and threw a gas can at me, and came after me. I ran,

leaving my beautiful Mercier bike by the side of the road. The guy stomped on it, damaging it.

Before he drove off I got his license number, and my mom took the guy to court, and won. In the meantime, she got me a new bike with her insurance, a Raleigh with racing wheels.

Back then I didn’t have an odometer on my bike, so if I wanted to know how long a training ride was, my mother would have to drive it. If I told her I needed to measure the ride, she got in

the car, even if it was late. Now, a 30-odd-mile training ride is nothing for me, but for a woman who just got off work it’s long enough to be a pain to drive. She didn’t complain.

My mother and I became very open with each other. She trusted me, totally. I did whatever I wanted, and the interesting thing is that no matter what I did, I always told her about it. I never

lied to her. If I wanted to go out, nobody stopped me. While most kids were sneaking out of their houses at night, I’d go out through the front door.

I probably had too much rope. I was a hyper kid, and I could have done some harm to myself. There were a lot of wide boulevards and fields in Piano, an invitation to trouble for a teenager