Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong Page A

on our radios, discussing strategy. How much should we let Pantani get away? I badly wanted to beat him to the finish this time. The action was intense, and my resentment was very high. For 50 miles Pantani stayed ahead, with me chasing.
    But we were riding strong, and I felt good on the bike. So good that I passed my last chance to eat, and spun through a feed zone without a second thought. It was a feeble mistake, an unthinkable one for a professional, but I made it. We were so focused on tactics and on Pantani that I forgot to do the simplest thing. It never occurred to me what the consequences of not eating could be.
    Finally, I caught him on the approach to Joux-Plane. There, he began to fall back with stomach pains, and eventually lost 13 minutes. But he had done what he had set out to do: ruin my day.
    We hit the foot of Joux-Plane, and I went up hard, drafting behind Kevin Livingston as we climbed. Other riders dropped off, unable to match our pace. It was just us. Then Kevin, worn out, fell back too.
    All of a sudden I was alone. And all of a sudden I didn’t feel very good. It started with a telltale tiredness in my legs, and then a hollowness in my stomach. I had no water, no food, no protein bars, nothing—and no way to get anything, either.
    I could feel the power draining from my body.
    Virenque and Ullrich caught up to me . . . and then simply passed me.
    At first I tried to stay with them, and push through the pain, but my speed slowed, and then slowed some more.
    Soon, it was as if I was sliding backwards down the hill.
    Ullrich and Virenque turned around, surprised. I could tell they were thinking, What’s
he doing? Is he faking?
Initially, I’d ridden away so easily from them, but now I was in trouble and it was written all over my face.
    There were ten kilometers to go, six miles. But it felt like sixty. Johan came on the radio—he could tell exactly what was happening from my slow pace. Johan, as a former cyclist, knew what could happen if a rider broke. His worst fear wasn’t that I would lose the lead. It was that I might collapse, or quit altogether, lose the entire race right then and there.
    Johan kept his voice casual on the radio, even though he must have felt the pressure. Not only was I bonking, but riding in the car with him as a VIP guest was the prime minister of Belgium . “Don’t worry, you have a big lead,” he said mildly. “You can afford to give some of it back.”
    The smart play, Johan advised, was to back down my pace and allow myself to work slowly up the hill, limiting the loss. The worst thing I could do was push harder, because that could mean going to zero, totally empty. And that was when people failed physically and fell over sideways.
    Every revolution of the pedals sapped me more, and put my body at a greater deficit. It was a question of fuel, of calories or the lack thereof.
    That kind of depletion could make strange things happen. As the body broke down, so did the mind.
    You went cross-eyed, or the snow turned black. You hallucinated. You tried to talk through your ears. Or you got off your bike. You coasted to the side of the road and stopped, because you simply could not pedal.
    If you got off the bike, you were done, out of the race. And I was not that far from completely stopping.
    I’d seen riders lose as much as ten or even 15 minutes in that situation, with a long, hard climb ahead and nothing left. I’d seen them drool. I’d seen them disintegrate, and never be quite the same riders again. Now it was happening to me. Steadily, I deteriorated. It was my darkest day in a race.
    I began to lose any sense of where I was, or what I was doing. One of my few rational thoughts was, A
lead of seven and a half minutes is a long time; don’t lose all of it
.
    Johan kept talking steadily into my ear, saying the same thing. “Just relax, ride your pace, don’t push it. You can lose a minute, two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, and you are okay.
Just