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

ride a bike again. He started out as a distributor for Schwinn, and then he opened his own store with his wife, RJionda. For years Jim and Rhonda have cultivated young
    riders in the Dallas area by fronting them bikes and equipment, and by paying them stipends. Jim believed in performance incentives. We would compete for cash and free stuff he’d put up, and
    we raced that much harder because of it. All through my senior year in high school, I earned $500 a month riding for Jim Hoyt.
    Jim had a small office in the back of his store where we’d sit around and talk. I didn’t pay much attention to school principals, or stepfathers, but sometimes I liked to talk to him. “I work my
    butt off, but I love who I am,” he’d say. “If you judge everybody by money, you got a lot to learn as you move through this life, ’cause I got some friends who own their own companies, and I
    got some friends who mow yards.” But Jim was tough too, and you didn’t fool with him. I had a healthy respect for his temper.
    One night at the Tuesday crits, I got into a sprint duel with another rider, an older man I wasn’t real fond of. As we came down the final stretch, our bikes made contact. We crossed the finish
    line shoving each other, and we were throwing punches before our bikes came to a stop. Then we were on each other, in the dirt. Jim and some others finally pried us apart, and everybody
    laughed at me because I wanted to keep duking it out. But Jim got mad at me, and wasn’t going to allow that kind of thing. He walked over and picked up my bike, and wheeled it away. I was
    sorry to see it go.
    It was a Schwinn Paramount, a great bike that I had ridden in Moscow at the World Championships, and I wanted to use it again in a stage race the following week. A little later, I
    went over to Jim’s house. He came out into the front yard.
    “Can I have my bike back?” I said.
    “Nope,” he said. “You want to talk to me, you come to my office tomorrow.”
    I backed away from him. He was irate, to the point that I was afraid he might take a swing at me. And there was something else he wasn’t too happy about: he knew I had a habit of speeding
    in the Camaro.
    A few days later, he took the car back, too. I was beside myself. I had made all the payments on that car, about $5,000 worth. On the other hand, some of that money had come from the stipend
    he paid me to ride for his team. But I wasn’t thinking clearly, I was too mad. When you’re 17 and a man takes a Camaro IROC Z away from you, he’s on your hit list. So I never did go see
    Jim. I was too angry, and too afraid of him.
    It was years before we spoke again.
    Instead, I split town. After my visit to Colorado Springs and Moscow, I was named to the U.S. national cycling team, and I got a call from Chris Carmichael, the team’s newly named director.
    Chris had heard about my reputation; I was super strong, but I didn’t understand a lot about the tactics of racing. Chris told me he wanted to develop a whole new group of young American
    cyclists; the sport was stagnant in the U.S. and he was seeking fresh kids to rejuvenate it. He named some other young cyclists who showed potential, guys like Bobby Julich and George
    Hincapie, and said he wanted me to be one of them. How would I like to go to Europe?
    It was time to get out of the house.

It's Not About The Bike
    three
    I DON’T CHECK MY MOTHER AT THE DOOR
    THE LIFE OF A ROAD CYCLIST MEANS HAVING
    your feet clamped to the bike pedals churning at 20 to 40 miles per hour, for hours and hours and days on end across whole continents. It means gulping water and wolfing candy bars in the
    saddle because you lose 10 to 12 liters of fluid and burn 6,000 calories a day at such a pace, and you don’t stop for anything, not even to piss, or to put on a raincoat. Nothing interrupts the
    high-speed chess match that goes on in the tight pack of cyclists called the peloton as you hiss through the rain and labor up cold mountainsides,