Read Online Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong - Free Book Online

Don’t you stop! ”
    I didn’t acknowledge him. I just stared straight ahead. Bart kept running, uphill, and screaming, “Come on, just get to the top!” Finally, the pitch of the mountainside got the best of him, and he couldn’t keep up.
    I never really knew he was there. I don’t remember even seeing him. All I remember, vaguely, is the sound of his voice. It seemed as if it was lost in static, but it was there. I thought it was coming through my radio.
    Now Johan’s voice crackled in my ear. Apparently I had gone long minutes without responding to him. I don’t know if my radio reception had failed in the mountains, or if I had simply been unconscious on the bike.
    “Lance, talk to me,” Johan said, crackling through the radio. “Where are you? Why aren’t you responding?”
    “It’s okay,” I said.
    “You have to talk to me,” Johan said.
    “ It’s okay, it’s okay,” I babbled. “I talked to Bart.”
    “What?”
    “I talked to Bart,” I said, woozily.
    I was delirious.
    I don’t know exactly what kept me on the bike, riding, in that state. What makes a guy ride until he’s out of his head? I guess because he can. On some level, the cancer still played a part: the illness nearly killed me, and when I returned to cycling, I knew what I’d been through was more difficult than any race. I could always draw from that knowledge, and it felt like power. I was never
really
empty. I had gone through all that, just to quit? No. Uh-uh.
    But Bart kept me there, too. If there was any question in my mind of stopping, Bart’s voice interfered. I could not have finished the stage alone—and didn’t.
    Whatever I was as a cyclist was the result of a million partnerships, and entanglements, and any cyclist who genuinely believed he had done it all by himself was destined to be a lonely and losing one. The fact is , life has enough lonely times in store for all of us.
    If I had any doubts on that score, they were settled by what happened next. About halfway up Joux-Plane, I got some added, unexpected assistance from two riders who came up behind me, Roberto Conti and Guido Trentin. They were good, strong, respected riders who I was fairly friendly with. They saw immediately what state I was in. What happened next was a classic case of cycling sportsmanship, and one I will never forget: they stayed with me, and helped me to the top. Without being asked, they moved in front, shielding me from the wind, allowing me to draft on them, and sparing me untold amounts of work. It was a gesture typical in the Tour; we were competitors, but we shared a mutual compassion for extreme physical suffering. Without Conti and Trentin, who knows how much time I’d have lost before I got to the top?
    Fortunately, the last few miles of the stage were all downhill. Once Bart and my other friends had pulled me to the top of Joux-Plane, I sagged over the handlebars and coasted to the bottom. In the end I lost only 90 seconds off my lead. But I might easily have lost everything, and I knew it.
    “I could have lost the entire Tour today,” I told the press frankly afterward.
    When I saw my friend Jeff Garvey from Austin , I said, “So how’d you like amateur hour at the Tour de France?”
    I have very little recollection of anything else I said or did between the time when I first began to suffer, and when I finally crossed the finish line. For instance, Chris Carmichael came over to the hotel and met me in my room.
    I said, “Where the hell have you been?”
    “What do you mean?” he said. “I was there, right there when you crossed the line.”
    “You were?”
    That night at dinner, I apologized to the entire Postal team. I had nearly wasted the efforts of everyone involved. “I will never, ever do that again,” I promised. In retrospect it was a great lesson: the mountains were so unforgiving that in one bad hour, or one bad minute, you could lose it.
    The next question was , would I be able to recover? How much had it