It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life by Lance Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page A

of the day, she’d found a private academy, Bending Oaks, that was willing to accept me if I took a couple of make-up courses. We transferred all of my credits from Piano East, and I
    got my degree on time. At the graduation ceremony, all of my classmates had maroon tassels on their caps, while mine was Piano East gold, but I wasn’t a bit embarrassed.
    I decided to go to my senior prom at Piano East anyway. We’d already paid for it, so I wasn’t about to miss it. I bought a corsage for my date, rented a tuxedo, and booked a limousine. That
    night, as I was getting dressed in my tux and bow tie, I had an idea. My mother had never been in a limo.
    I wanted her to experience that ride. How do you articulate all that you feel for and owe to a parent? My mother had given me more than any teacher or father figure ever had, and she had
    done it over some long hard years, years that must have looked as empty to her at times as those brown Texas fields. When it came to never quitting, to not caring how it looked, to gritting your
    teeth and pushing to the finish, I could only hope to have the stamina and fortitude of my mother, a single woman with a young son and a small salary–and there was no reward for her at
    the end of the day, either, no trophy or first-place check. For her, there was just the knowledge
    that honest effort was a transforming experience, and that her love was redemptive. Every time she said, “Make an obstacle an opportunity, make a negative a positive,” she was talking about
    me, I realized; about her decision to have me and the way she had raised me.
    “Get your prom dress on,” I told her.
    She owned a beautiful sundress that she liked to call her “prom dress,” so she put it on and got in the car with my date and me, and together we rode around town for more than an hour,
    laughing and toasting my graduation, until it was time to drop us off at the dance.
    My mother was happy again, and settling into a new relationship. When I was 17, she met a man named John Walling, a good guy who she eventually married. I liked him, and we became
    friends, and I would be sorry when they split up in 1998.
    It’s funny. People are always saying to me, “Hey, I ran into your father.” I have to stop and think, Exactly who do they mean? It could be any of three people, and frankly, my birth father I don’t
    know from a bank teller, and I have nothing to say to Terry. Occasionally, some of the Armstrongs try to get in touch with me, as if we’re family. But we aren’t related, and I wish they
    would respect my feelings on the subject. My family are the Mooneyhams. As for Armstrong, it’s as if I made up my name, that’s how I feel about it.
    I’m sure the Armstrongs would give you 50,000 different reasons why I needed a father, and what great jobs they did. But I disagree. My mother gave me everything. All I felt for them was
    a kind of coldness, and a lack of trust.
    FOR A FEW MONTHS AFTER GRADUATION, I HUNG
    around Piano. Most of my Piano East classmates went on to the state-university system; my buddy Steve, for instance, got his degree from North Texas State in 1993. (Not long ago, Piano
    East held its 10th reunion. I wasn’t invited.)
    I was getting tired of living in Piano. I was competing in bike races all over the country for a domestic trade team sponsored by Su-baru-Montgomery, but I knew the real racing scene was in
    Europe, and I felt I should be there. Also, I had too much resentment for the place after what had happened before my graduation.
    I was in limbo. By now I was regularly beating the adult men I competed against, whether in a triathlon, or a 10K run, or a Tuesday-night crit at the Piano loop. To pass the time, I still hung
    around the Richardson Bike Mart, owned by Jim Hoyt.
    Jim had been an avid rider as a young man, but then he got shipped off to Vietnam when he was 19, and served two years in the infantry, the toughest kind of duty. When he came home, all he
    wanted to do was