Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong Page B

don’t stop
.”
    Up at the finish line, Bill Stapleton and a group of friends who’d come over to see me race sat in a VIP luxury trailer. They sipped wine and snacked while they followed the action on TV. At first no one noticed that I seemed to be slowing. But then I fell off the front and began to fade. Ullrich and the others began to put real time on me. Suddenly the noise in the trailer went from happy chatter to confusion. Somebody said, “Oh my God, what’s going on?” And then there was silence, just absolute silence.
    On the bike, I couldn’t think straight anymore. I was so dehydrated that my body temperature went funny. I got the chills. My limbs felt hollow, empty. Empty, empty, empty. A Sunday cyclist on a casual ride could have passed me.
    Standing in the crowd on the mountainside watching me labor upward was Bart Knaggs. By this time, there wasn’t much that Bart and I hadn’t been through together, along with our other great friend, College. As I say, you define yourself partly in relation to other people, and Bart and College had been there for some of my defining moments. They’d sat with me when a doctor gave me a probable death sentence and informed me that even if I lived, I’d crawl out of the hospital. They’d been at my bedside again after brain surgery. Bart and his wife, Barbara, who had twin baby daughters, had been close confidants when Kik and I went through the in-vitro fertilization that made Luke.
    Bart, College, and I had ridden together across miles and miles of
Texas
hill country, laughing and trash-talking, or just talking. I liked to taunt them on the bike, ride even with them for a while, and then light them up. But when we weren’t horsing around, we helped each other, too. One day we took an exceptionally long ride to Wimberly and back, over miles of rolling highway. Finally, Bart had enough and pulled off, and took a shortcut home, but College tried to stay with me. He did okay until we got to Dripping Springs, when he hit the wall. His body started salting up, and he got weak. I gave him a Coke, which revived him a little, but that didn’t last, so I started screaming at him to get on my wheel, and pulled him for a while. But when we were only about five miles from home, he could barely pedal anymore. He screamed back, “I can’t do it,” and I screamed, “Yes, you can.” Then I started laughing, and I said, “Oh, if you could see yourself now.” He was pale, white, and slumped over his handlebars. As we hit the last big hills coming into Austin , I put my hand on his back, and pushed him up the slope toward home.
    Not long after that, I got the cancer. I kept trying to ride, though, and Bart and College would go with me. Now they were the ones who could leave me in the dust, because I was so weak. One afternoon, when I was bald and thin and yellow from my third chemo cycle, I wanted to ride. I should have been in bed, resting, but I insisted, so Bart and College went with me. We only went three or four miles when we came to a hill. I started failing. “I can’t go on,” I said. “I gotta go back.”
    College reached out and put a hand on my back and pushed me up that hill. I almost cried with the humiliation of it, but I was glad for the help. Those were the things we did for each other. What goes around comes around: we all need a push sometimes. If you’re the one pushing others up the hill, there may come a day when you need a push, too. Maybe when you help someone, you’re that much closer to the top yourself.
    Now here was another defining moment. On Joux-Plane, Bart, who knew me better than anyone, stared at my ashen face and my eyes, which now were red-rimmed and badly bloodshot. He saw how the bike swung unsteadily underneath me, and he knew exactly what had happened.
    He couldn’t push me up the hill. So he did the next best thing.
    He started to run alongside me, screaming encouragement. “Go, go, go, go, go !” he screamed. “You can do this!