Every Second Counts (29 page)

In February of 2003, Kik and I agreed to a trial separation, and we entered marriage counseling. I moved into my one-room cabin at Milagro, the small ranch that I had cleared and planted with a soft green lawn. I sat on a rocking chair on the porch and cast around for the specific cause of our marital difficulties, but they were cloudy to me. All I knew was that in trying to do everything, we’d forgotten to do the most important thing. We forgot to be married. It was like being in a current you didn’t know was there. One day we looked up and realized we’d been swept downstream from our landmarks, all the points of reference.

People warn you that marriage is hard work, but you don’t listen. You talk about the pretty bridesmaids’ dresses, but you don’t talk about what happens next; about how difficult it will be to stay, or to rebuild. What nobody tells you is that there will be more than just some hard days. There will be some hard weeks and perhaps even some hard years.

In February I returned to
Europe
for training alone, and Kik stayed behind in
Austin
. But we continued to talk and to work at rebuilding our relationship with a better foundation. In April, Kik came to
Europe
and we went to Nice, where we had lived together before we were married. It was the first time in four years that we had really been alone, without children.

As of this writing, we didn’t know what the future would hold, but we did know this: we intended to bring the same dedication and discipline to counseling that we brought to the rest of our lives. And whatever our personal shortcomings, and no matter the outcome, the marriage is a success: we have three great prizes.

I know this, too: the seize-the-day mentality that I carried with me from the illness doesn’t always serve me well. It’s too tempting, in the throes of it, to quit on any problem that seems hard or inconvenient, to call it a waste of precious time and move on to something more immediate. Some things require patience.

The question of how to live through cancer, for me, has become: how do you live beyond it? Survivorship is not unlike competition; both are emotionally complicated, and neither necessarily delivers pat answers, no matter how nice it is to think so. In both cases, you have to constantly ask yourself what the real lessons are, what’s worth transferring to the rest of your life?

But both cancer and competition have taught me one great, incontrovertible lesson that I think every person can learn from, whether healthy or ill, athlete or layman. The lesson is this: personal comfort is not the only thing worth seeking.

Whether the subject is bike racing, or cancer, or just living, comfort only takes us to a point that’s known. Since when did sheets with the right thread-count, a coffee maker, and an electric toothbrush become the only things worth having or working toward? Too often, comfort gets in the way of inner reckonings.

For instance, there’s no math that can tell you why some people ride in the Tour de France, some never enter the race, and some ride but don’t risk. I’ve known guys who never quite put it all on the line, and you know what? They lost. One minute, after nearly a month of suffering, can decide who wins. Is it worth it? It depends on whether you want to win. I have the will to suffer. I do have that.

There are parts unknown with regard to human performance, and those are the parts when it’s just about pain and forfeit. How do you make yourself do it? You remind yourself that you’re fulfilling your obligation to get the best from yourself, and that all achievement is born out of sacrifice.

The experience of suffering is like the experience of exploring, of finding something unexpected and revelatory. When you find the outermost thresholds of pain, or fear, or uncertainty, what you experience afterward is an expansive feeling, a widening of your capabilities.

Pain is good because it teaches your body and your soul to improve. It’s almost as though your unconscious says, “I’m going to remember this, remember how it hurt, and I’ll increase my capacities so that the next time, it doesn’t hurt as much.” The body literally builds on your experiences, and a physique and temperament that have gone through a Tour de France one year will be better the next year, because it has the memory to build upon. Maybe the same is true of living, too.

If you lead a largely unexamined life, you will eventually hit a wall. Some barriers can be invisible until you smack into them. The key, then, is to investigate the wall inside yourself, so you can go beyond it. The only way to do that is to ask yourself painful questions—just as you try to stretch yourself physically.

So the fact that there are unanswered questions in my life doesn’t bother me. I don’t know what happens next, and I don’t need to know, because I welcome the exploration. There’s no simple and final explanation for me. Can’t be, won’t be. As I watch my children grow, it occurs to me that while the structure of your bones takes shape, other elements leave their tracings on you, too. I can see that in my own scars—there’s no way to move through this life and not be marked by the unexpected.

As we move, we leave trails, intended or not.
Trails of action, trails of sound, trails of colors, trails of light.
Who knows how long they last?

When I climb out of the water at Dead Man’s Hole, I walk over the rocks, and if I turn and look behind me, what I see are my own damp footprints disappearing. They disappear before my eyes. When I look in front of me, what do I see? I see the turning of more of these pages, and in the pages there will be near things, small things, fuck-ups, celebrations, tragedies, broodings, weddings, graduations, accidents, and close calls.

I want to feel this life as it occurs. Not as it
might
have occurred.
Or as it
could
have been, if only.
I want to feel it,
as it is
: naked or clothed; barefoot or wearing shoes; cold, hot, complicated, simple, fearful, happy, discontented, exhilarated, fruitful, selfish, giving, and feeling.

All I know is that I shouldn’t be alive, and yet I feel more alive than just about anyone. Each time I go back to Dead Man’s Hole, I do the jump again. I still believe a little fear is good for you. I believe it so much that after a while, when the jump became routine, I began to study a higher point on the rocks.

This is an outcropping that offers a truly terrifying 50-foot drop to the water. For days I regarded it with my friends, and we made laughing bets about whether any of us would ever have the nerve to do it. Finally, one afternoon, my friend Morris Denton did it. He threw himself off that shelf of rock and arrowed down into the cold green water, and as he came up we all shrieked and applauded. Next,

I crept to the edge, and peered over. As I stood there, I felt the blood rush from my head into my feet, and I got weak. “No way,” I called down, my voice echoing. “I can’t do it.” I stepped carefully back, retreating from the cliff.

Down below, Morris treaded water. “What’s the matter?” he called.

“I can’t do it,” I yelled down.

“You scared, Mellow
Janey
?”

I stopped short. Ryan and Morris’s high-pitched howls of laughter caromed off the stone canyon walls.
“
Mellow Janey!
Mellow Janey!
”

“That’s funny,” I yelled.

I stood there for a moment, laughing with them. And then I turned around . . . and ran straight off the edge of the cliff.

I threw myself into the air. The rock ledge dropped out from under me, and for a fraction of a second I hung in the breeze, my arms pinwheeling and my legs kicking involuntarily, with nothing below but green water. The breath died in my throat. My friends stared upward, open-mouthed and laughing, at a man thrilled to be in midair . . .

. . . Another Ending . . .

You think it’s over, and then it’s not. I thought I was done with this book, which was supposed to be about overcoming odds, not just in one period of your life, but the whole of it. What happened next was, I set out to win a fifth Tour de France, and got knocked on my ass, and was reminded of just how hard it can be to get back up. Which is exactly the point: you don’t just overcome odds once and that’s it. Things keep, you know, happening.

In the 2003 Tour, things kept happening.
Too many things.
There were crashes, heat waves, viruses, broken bikes, such a succession of miseries that the event began to seem jinxed. At one point, I stood on a mountainside in the
Pyrenees
, cut, bruised, and screaming, because I was certain the race was lost. At times the only thing that kept me riding was, as race announcer Phil Liggett described it, “the magnetism of a finish line.”

Is history an actual force? It felt like it. In the 100th anniversary edition of the Tour, it seemed I was riding against some eerie invisible opponent. It was as if the collective spirit and judgment of the past greats got together and decided that this year’s winner had to prove not just his worthiness, but his ability to deal with the absurd and near-unendurable.

I should have known it would be a hard race when, a couple of days before it began, a bird soiled Johan’s shoulder. We were sitting outside the team bus having a meeting when it splattered on his shirt. Was it a bad omen? In some countries it’s considered a good one. Later, there would be a lot of discussion about good luck, and bad. But to me, that’s excuse-making. The fact is, in the previous four years I’d won the race without having to overcome any real misfortunes: no crashes, no flats, no problems. Now things went wrong all at once—or maybe they just evened out.

It started in the winter, when Kik and I separated. Anyone who has been through something similar understands how catastrophic it is emotionally, and how it overwhelms any other concern. I tried to tell myself that I was managing the situation and that my personal trials had nothing to do with the bike, but it worked on me. I never cracked physically, had a day where I couldn’t get out of bed or get on the bike. But it was a disruption, and I don’t mean a disruption in training. It was a disruption in my head and my heart.

As the Tour approached, there were other, smaller problems. I crashed in an important tune-up race for the Tour, called the Dauphiné Libéré, on Friday the 13th ironically, and was slow to recover. I came down with tendinitis in my hip. I caught a stomach bug from my kids the week I was supposed to leave for
Paris
and barely made the trip. I was still doubled over the day before the race began.

As I prepared for the Prologue, I told myself maybe I could still find my form on the road once the race began. But everyone expected another big, dominating victory from me, more than they had in any other year. When you hear that all the time, it gets to you, and you begin to feel that there isn’t much to race for. You can only lose.

I promptly lost. I finished seventh in the Prologue, and started the Tour in a full-blown crisis. Now everybody knew what I’d hoped to hide: word immediately swept through the peloton that I wasn’t the rider I’d been in the past. My performance bolstered the hopes of every rider that night, including those of Jan Ullrich, who showed up in
Paris
looking as lean and fit as he ever had, and riding for a new team, Bianchi.

From there, things just got worse. The very first stage, to Meaux, was marked by an epic crash. The peloton was jumpy and tightly packed as we raced for the finish, and one small event caused a huge chain reaction. A guy came out of his pedal. That’s all. Within seconds, 176 riders piled into each other, total carnage. The worst casualty of the day was my friend and neighbor Tyler Hamilton, who broke his right collarbone but somehow got up and kept riding. I was luckier; I had some bruises and road rash. But the crash signaled what kind of race it would be.

So did the heat. It was hot all across
France
, very hot, and it made the race hard for everybody. In the early sprinting stages, the heat rose to 100 degrees and beat down on our heads and shoulders. It was like being leaned on by something heavy and it steadily sapped me. Instead of feeling better as the days went on, if anything, I felt weaker.

But my teammates carried me through the first week. Postal won a wonderful collective stage victory, a team time trial from Joinville to St. Dizier of 42.9 miles. It was a highly technical stage that required all nine riders to go flat-out, together, against the clock. We yearned to show that Postal had become the best team in a European-dominated sport, and we rode perfectly, a flying blue wedge of speed.

We won the stage in 1 hour, 18 minutes, and 27 seconds, half a minute faster than our closest competitors, and that vaulted me from 12th place into second. Just as satisfying was the fact that Postal riders occupied the top eight places in the overall standings, and I actually trailed my own teammate, Victor Hugo Peña, who claimed the yellow jersey. As we’d neared the finish line, we were all tired, but I urged Victor on, saying, “What color do you want to wear tonight? What color?”