Every Second Counts (13 page)

But there’s one thing you can’t lose, and that’s yourself. I had my own innocence; that was something no one could mess with.

I’d lost races, health, and an old sense of self, and each loss had its own place in the scheme of a life. Other losses, if they came, would have their places, too. There are certain inevitabilities. You will grow older. You will be forced to compromise in ways you never imagined and confront problems you thought you were immune to. You will find a job, and perhaps lose it. You will fight with your mate, shoulder unwanted responsibilities, and cope with rank unfairness. You can allow all that to demoralize you. Or you can let it shape you, and trust that the shape will be more interesting because of it.

“Get altitude,” Kik said.

That’s what we tried to do. And then something happened that made it easier. In April, we found out that Kik was pregnant. In fact she was more than pregnant, she was
extremely
pregnant. She kept saying, “I feel so weird,” and with good reason, as we were about to find out.

I was in
Spain
when she went to the obstetrician for an exam. She said to her doctor, Marco Uribe, “I’m scared that I’m having triplets.”

He said, “Well, don’t you want to know?”

She wasn’t supposed to have a sonogram for another week and a half. But the doctor explained that if it was a multiple pregnancy perhaps he could see telltale signs.

“Do you want to see now?”

Kik was alone. It was about
six o’clock
at
night,
and half a world away, it was the middle of the night and I was sleeping. She hesitated, and then she said, “Yeah, I want to know. Of course I want to know.”

He performed the sonogram, and there on the screen she saw it, a vibrant dual blip. Kik was going to wait until morning to call me, but she was so beside herself that she picked up her cell phone and dialed my number in Europe and left a message, her voice caught somewhere between profundity and weeping and hilarity, while I slept.

“
It’s
twins,” she said.

CHAPTER 4

Faith and Doubt

P
eople give me things, things they want me to have, and things they suppose I need: bibles with my name inscribed, and prayer books, with passages marked. The main thing they seem to think I need is belief. I do believe, just not necessarily the same way they do. I’m a spiritual person who lacks a vocabulary for it. But that’s asking for trouble.

A guy came up to me in an airport. “Lance, I want to talk to you about your relationship with God,” he said.

“It’s not going to be a long talk,” I said.

Any account of my life begs for larger explanation: why did I live? I refuse the pat answer. God didn’t do it. I don’t mean to offend anyone, and I realize it upends the traditional expectation for me to say this, but I don’t believe in a neat religious reckoning. I’m not much for prayer, don’t belong to any religion that involves buildings, and I’m leery of proselytizing. Yet I wear a crucifix. How do I explain that to a stranger in an airport between flights?

What do I believe? I believe in mystery. I believe faith keeps a lot of the world straight. I believe if you squint hard and try to see the pattern of things, you can put them in their proper place: taxes, scandal, gossip, headache, traffic jams. I believe in restraint on the subject of religion, and I believe that the responsible person seriously questions it, because it’s only right to question the administration of a church that shields child molesters, or the legitimacy of a faith that encourages repression and terror. Anything else is deficient use of your mind and morals.

I think too many people look to religion as an excuse, or a crutch, or a bailout. I think that what you’ve got is what you’ve got, here and now. Even when I was looking straight at death, I never thought there was something on the other end. J. Craig Ventner, in discussing the genome, said something that I’d never been able to articulate for myself, but which summed up everything I felt about cancer, and religion, and things in general.

“It’s unequivocally clear that life begins at birth and ends at death,” he said, “and if most people on this planet understood that, they would lead their lives very differently. We find religious or mysterious forces to fill in for our inadequacies, but heaven and hell are both here on earth every day, and we make our lives around them.”

I viewed my cancer from a scientific standpoint. I was fighting a malignant cell that had invaded my body, and I wanted
scientific
tools with which to fight it, things I could measure: data, medicine, and information. I wanted to be as educated as possible about the illness, because statistics showed incontrovertibly that the more knowledgeable the cancer patient, the better his or her chances of survival. Studies also show that a person who has faith has a higher-quality experience. I don’t deny that. All I mean to say is that when I was sick I saw too many people who evaded personal responsibility, wouldn’t take a role in the cure. I flinched each time I heard someone say, “It’s in God’s hands,” or, “God will provide.”

I was sleeping so much that I wondered if sleeping was almost like dying. Maybe I was dying. “Am I?”
I wondered. You believe you’ll live, but you don’t know.

My friend Scott MacEachern from Nike came to visit me. He knocked on the front door and I answered, standing in the foyer of my big house, all by myself, with no hair, no eyebrows, and my face drawn. It was the first time Scott had seen me since I’d gotten sick. While we were still standing there, I dipped my head and showed Scott the big horseshoe scars from my brain surgery, and then I lifted up my shirt and showed him the other places where they had cut me.

That evening Scott and I sat around and talked about the
illness,
and about life after death. I remember the flow of our conversation, and being scared but trying to be courageous, and telling him that I was trying to stay in front of it and to educate myself, and that I was so tired, but that I was determined, too.

The next morning Scott got up and went for a run, and when he came back, he heard music blasting from the garage. Scott walked around the house and peered into the garage. I was inside, astride a stationary bike. I was clipped into the trainer, in my cycling shoes and shorts, bald as a cue ball and cut up.

I was out of the saddle. I was attacking, on the trainer. Scott told me later, “I knew at that point that whether you lived or died, either way, there was a fight going on.”

None of these tendencies of mine meets with the usual definition of spirituality. Some people even see me as a cause, “There’s a guy that needs help.”

But I can live with the conflict, if you want to call it “conflict.” I’m conflicted for a good reason: when I was a boy I got a poor impression of organized religion. My stepfather, Terry Armstrong, was a church deacon—but that didn’t prevent him from mistreating my mother or beating me with a paddle. So I saw religion as something to distrust, that could be used as an instrument of fear as well as good, and just because people went to church every Sunday didn’t mean they weren’t corrupt.

My children are being reared as Catholics, and their mother is a practicing Catholic. My own house is open on the subject. I never argued with Kik about what the kids should be taught, or how they should be raised; as far as I was concerned they should go to church with their mother. I think that by and by, the kids will be smart enough, and, I hope, independent enough, to make their own decisions, and if they are believers, all the better.

Kik is increasingly passionate about her faith, while I’ve remained a skeptic. We were married in a Catholic church, but over the years it became an issue of divergence. My doubt could occasionally upset her. Sometimes a stranger would stop us, and say to me, “Why don’t you pray?” Kik would say, “If it makes you feel any better, I pray for him.”

Also, I had a tendency to be a smart-aleck that didn’t sit well with her.

When she’d go to mass, I’d make a comment.

“What are you doing that for?”

“I like going to mass.”

“But it’s Saturday. Let’s go to dinner instead.”

“I like Saturday mass.”

I’d think about that for a second.

“Can’t you change it?” I’d crack.

But one day she cured me, convinced me it wasn’t worth making any more cracks. “Wherever my strength comes from, you should be happy for it,” she said. “Because you rely on me a lot, so you rely on that strength.” She had a point; if faith affected her life, then by extension if affected mine. When I raced, Kik would find a church and light candles for me, and I appreciated it. During the Tour I’d ask her, “Did you light a candle for me today?” But nobody in the family ever said, “You want to go to church with us?” They knew better.

Kik started talking to Luke early on about Jesus Christ, but Christmas wasn’t especially meaningful to me, except as it related to my children. On the morning of Luke’s second Christmas, I was beside myself with excitement, and I was the first to wake up. We’d gotten him a little battery-operated jeep, and I couldn’t wait to see his face when he opened the box. But on that morning, of all mornings, he decided to sleep in. I paced the kitchen impatiently. Kik and her parents, Dave and Ethel Richard, got up, and we all sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the paper. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Let’s just go get him up,” I said.

I got out of my chair and grabbed a Christmas stocking with bells on it, and I went upstairs, and I stood outside Luke’s room and I shook it, hard.
Nothing.
So I shook it again, and again, impatiently. Downstairs Kik collapsed in giggles because she could hear the Christmas bells, and me shouting, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” Finally, my son poked his head out of bed.

Kik thought my skepticism was based on childhood resentment and that eventually I might be persuadable on the subject, might some day “credit the source” of my survival. I disagreed, and still do. But it doesn’t prevent me from being respectful of and even intrigued by some aspects of faith, particularly by the ceremony and imagery of it.

It’s why I wear the cross on my chest—it’s an expression of kinship with those who’ve suffered. While I was still in remission, my friend Stacy Pounds, who worked for Bill Stapleton as an assistant for many years, was diagnosed with lung cancer. My mother bought a pair of silver crucifixes, and Stacy wore one, and I wore the other. I still wear it.

In the winter and spring of 2001, in the midst of preparing for another Tour de France, I became absorbed in restoring the old family chapel in our new home in Girona. I’d bought the first floor of what had once been a small palace on one of the most historic streets in the old city, in part because I was stunned by the wrecked beauty of it, and also because I knew how it would please Kik. The apartment was dank and crumbling, would have to be completely redesigned and restored, but you couldn’t help but feel remnants in the air of all that had happened there, the fervency in the flaked and fading walls, the aged dank gray stone, the arched gothic ceilings, and the colored glass.

Girona is a living archaeological dig, with the ruins from different ages, elements of Roman, Moorish, Jewish, Muslim, and medieval history, still visible. The gothic cathedral is one of the largest in
Europe
, and it’s just up a winding, narrow cobbled street, lined with small bookshops, cafés, and other businesses. According to the history books, during some of the bloodier periods in the city’s intensely religious history, rivulets of blood literally ran down the street to the bottom of the hill.

The apartment has tall windows with a wrought-iron terrace, and I can step outside and look down on my favorite sidewalk café directly across the street, where there are deep wicker chairs in which you can settle and drink coffee. The apartment itself has the old gothic arches and cornices, and two small gardens, with stone fountains gurgling. But the centerpiece is the small family chapel, with deep blue walls and gilt stars and a small wooden altar.

I hired craftswomen from
Barcelona
to repair the frescoed walls, matching the midnight-blue and magenta walls with textured gilt details, and when it was done, I bought a painting for it, an exquisite piece of 15th-century religious art, to be the centerpiece over the altar.

To me, that chapel isn’t just about worship, but about history, about age, about the hundreds of years that have seeped into the arched ceilings, the gold paint, and the original stained glass. It’s stunning. I appreciate that chapel as a balance to logic; some things can be measured, and other things can’t.

My survival is an immeasurable thing, too. How much of it was due to science, how much to belief, how much to self-will? I don’t know the answer, and I resist the simple, comfortable explanations, because frankly, pure luck had a good deal to do with it, too. Sometimes
I don’t know
is the best and most honest answer you can give.

In 2001, as I approached the five-year cancer anniversary and the prospect that I’d be declared officially cured, I had reason to consider all of these issues again. I also had yet another reason to try to win the Tour again. The race was always a reconfirmation, another act of continued existence. It seemed only right to exhaust the possibility in the body I’d been given back. Regardless of what you attributed my ongoing presence to, it seemed to me that I was obliged to
do
something with it.