Here is Lance Armstrong's opinion on cancer. Lance just this year won his 6th Tour de France. This is unheard of, no one has been able to do that. It is the most grueling bicycle race, or sports race that exists. Yet, Lance Armstrong has the courage and determination to win for the 6th consecutive time. You probably know that Lance is the survivor of a particularly virulent form of cancer. The interesting thing, which is hardly ever mentioned is this: before the cancer, Lance Armstrong had been training with Eddie Mercx, a prior winner of 3 Tours de France. Eddie knew a lot about cycling and about what it took to become a champion.
And one look at Lance Armstrong told him that Lance could never win the Tour de France. That was before the cancer, remember. The problem, as he explained it to Lance, is that he was too solid, too heavy. He needed to be lean and have long muscles to win, to endure the race and what it demanded of the body. Now, during and after his fight with cancer, Lance lost a lot of weight, body mass. The chemotherapy basically changed his entire build.
To what result? Yes, you guessed it. His body was now the right shape to fit the profile of the winner. And his personality no doubt was altered too during the fight, and his determination to fight the disease is the same that it takes to win that race. In 1996, young cycling phenomenon Armstrong discovered he had testicular cancer. In 1999, he won the Tour de France. Now he's a grateful husband, a father of two, and a memoirist: with pluck, humility and verve, his book covers his early life, his rise through the endurance sport world and his medical difficulties. Cancer "was like being run off the road by a truck, and I've got the scars to prove it," Armstrong declares.
Earlier scars, he explains, came from a stepfather he casts as unworthy; early rewards, from his hardworking mother and from the triathlons and national bike races Armstrong won as a Texas teen. "The real racing action was over in Europe": after covering that, Armstrong and Jenkins (Men Will Be Boys, with Pat Summit, etc.) ascend to the scarier challenges of diagnoses and surgeries. As he gets worse, then better, Armstrong describes the affections of his racing friends and of the professionals who cared for him. Armstrong is honest and delightful on his relationship to wife Kristin (Kik), and goes into surprising detail about the technology that let them have a child. The memoir concludes with Armstrong's French victory and the birth of their son. "When I was sick I saw more beauty and triumph and truth in a single day than I ever did in a bike race."
Read below Lance's own comments, as quoted from his book: "It's not about the bike", copyright 2000
Good, strong people get cancer, and they do all the right things to beat it, and they still die. That is the essential truth that you learn. And after you learn it, all other matters are irrelevant. They just seem small. P3
Cancer would change everything for me. It wouldn't just derail my career. It would deprive me of my entire definition of who I was. Who would I be if I could no longer be myself, the person I used to know? A sick person.
Your past forms you, whether you like it or not. Each encounter and experience has its own effect, and you're shaped.
Why did I ride when I had cancer? Cycling is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it's absolutely cleansing. You can go out there with the weight of the world on yoru shoulders, and after a 6 hour ride at a high pain threshold, you feel at peace. The pain is so deep and strong that a curtain descends over your brain. At least for a while, you have a kind of hall pass, and don't have to brood on your problems; you can shut everything else out, because the effort and subsequent fatigue are absolute.
I became a student of cancer. Understand the enemy Do some research. Knowledge is more reassuring than ignorance. At least, you 'll know what you're dealing with. Explore all the various treatment options. Share the responsibility with your doctors.
"What are my chances?" He never gave up the thought that he had chances. It didn't matter, because the medical odds didn't take into account the unfathomable. There is no proper way to estimate somebody's chances. It deprives people of hope. Hope that is the only antidote to fear.
"Why me? Why anybody?" It was not a question of worthiness.
To be afraid is a priceless education. Once you have been that scared, you know more about your frailty than most people, and I think that changes a man.
- Never give up!
- Never give up!
- Never give up!
There was a disquieting intimacy to the idea that something uninvited was living in my head. When something climbs straight into your mind, that's way personal. I decided to get personal right back, and I began talking to it, engaging in an inner conversation with cancer. Remember, don't hide it to yourself. I tried to be firm in my discussions: 'You picked the wrong guy. When you looked around for a body to try to live in, you made a big mistake when you chose mine.'
I was determined to stay involved in my health, in the decision-making. P112
How do you confront your own death? Maybe there is a protective mechanism that prevents us from accepting our mortality unless we absolutely have to. I asked myself what I believed? I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe - what other choice was there? We do it everyday, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing. Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every sigle day. And it will beat you, I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight everyday against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle everyday against the slow slapping of cynicism, dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness. I knew now what people fear cancer: it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit.
"I've seen wonderful, positive people not make it in the end,"... Dr Einhorn said. .."And some of the most miserable, ornery people survive to resume their ornery lives." p130
To cope with chemo, I imagined I was coughing out the burned up tumors. I envisioned the chemo working on them, singeing them and expelling them from my system. When I went to the bathroom, I endured the acid sting in my groin by telling myself I was peeing out dead cancer cells. I suppose that's how you do it. They've got to go somewhere don't they? I was coughing up cancer, pissing it out, getting rid of it every way I knew how.
I personalized the disease. The bastard, I called it. I made it my enemy, my challenge. I insisted on behaving as if I was a full participant in the cure. P137
What I needed to tell myself was that I was a rider, not a cancer patient, no matter weak I had become. P149
The survivors redefine what's humanly possible, we cause people to reconsider their limits, to see that what looks like a wall may really just be an obstacle in the mind. Illness was not unlike athletic performance: there is so much we don't know about our human capacity, and I felt it was important to spread the message.
If you ever get a second chance in life for something, you have got to go all the way. P262
Things take place, there is a confluence of events and circumstances, and we can't always know their purpose, or even if there is one. But we can take responsibility for ourselves and be brave. We each cope differently with the scepter of our death. Some people deny it. Some pray. Some numb themselves with tequila. I was tempted to do a little of each of those things. But I think we are supposed to try to face it straightforwardly, armed with nothing but courage. The definition of courage is: the quality of spirit that enables one to encounter danger with firmness and without fear. P272
Arm yourself with all the available information, get second opinions, third opinions, and fourth opinions. Understand what has invaded your body, and what the possible cures are. We have unrealized potential that sometimes only emerges in crisis. There is a purpose to suffering. It is supposed to improve us. P273
I made an acronym out of the word: Courage, Attitude, Never give up, Curability, Enlightenment and Remembrance of my fellow patients.
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