Seven

Lance Armstrong wins his 7^th Tour, what an incredible achievement. I’ve enjoyed watching him the past few years on OLN, and I really enjoyed reading his books … “It’s Not About the Bike” is a great one. There are so many moments in that book that make a chill run up the spine.

 My favorite is after he has recovered, done a decent job at a comeback placing 14^th in a big race in Spain, given up cycling and hung around Austin playing golf, eating at Chuy’s and drinking Shiner Bock (BTW, having traveled to Austin a good deal on business, I can say his taste is pretty good on the Chuy’s and Shiner ;-) )

He has decided that biking is just too tough, and he wants to “enjoy life”. At one point, he makes the statement “… the old saying, that you should treat each day as if it might be your last, was no help at all. The truth is, it’s a nice sentiment, but in practice it doesn’t work. If I lived only for the moment, I’d be a very amiable no-account with a perpetual thre-day growth on my chin. Trust me, I tried it.” He was locked in the “what do I want to be when I grow up” black hole and going nowhere.

His wife, manager, and friends convinced him that he needed to race in a local Austin race called “Ride for the Roses” that he had set up for Cancer survivors, and if he didn’t train “a little”, he would embarrass himself. Chris Carmichael talked him into going to Boone North Carolina where he had won a couple of races and train. There is a peak there called Beech Mountain, and on the last day of the training he would climb that with Bob Roll, his training partner for that trip. For those of you who watch OLN during the Tour, Bob Roll is one of the commentators.

He buried Bob early on the ascent, and he started to get better and faster as he went up. “That ascent triggered something in me. As I rode upward, I reflected on my life, back to all points, my childhood, my early races, my illness, and how it changed me. Maybe it was the primitive act of climbing that made me confront the issues I’d been evading for weeks. It was time to quit stalling, I realized. Move, I told myself, if you can still move, you aren’t sick!

… As I continued upward, I saw my life as a whole, I saw the pattern and the privilege of it, and the purpose of it too. It was simply this: I was meant for the long hard climb.”

He certainly was, and he has certainly accomplished it. “The privilege of it”. There is something in that line that separates the real “winners” in their hearts from the “losers” of this world. If you are reading this, you are drawing breath, so the privilege is yours. You are one of the privileged. 

One of the top surgeons from Mayo ran a stop sign on a country road that I know pretty well Friday AM and his privilege came to an end. A friend that used to live a across the street from my Grandmother was hit head-on by a drunk driver at 24, and her privilege came to an end.

There will be a ton of people, causes and even political parties that will try to tell you that you don’t have a chance in life and that the deck is all stacked against you. They may be your parents, they may be your “friends”, they may be the group you have always associated with and believe that there is no way you can ever think any differently. They will tell you that some other group will prevent you, that you don’t have “enough” … intelligence, connections, emotional stability, family background, money, etc. 

They will give you the message that you are “lacking”. The reasons they present it to you may vary a lot. They may just believe it, and misery does love company. They may feel that they would be invalidated by your success … that if you had success it would somehow mean that the powerlessness they peddle was somehow more of their own doing than that of some “other”. They may want to convince you to “join their cause”, because adding you to their roster will somehow improve the power of the powerlessness lobby.

Don’t buy it. 

Lance Armstrong was in the bottom 3% of the cancer patients that a noted oncologist had ever treated for SURVIVAL … not for winning the Tour de France 7 times, but for continuing to draw breath. As he says, “success” isn’t about winning the Tour 7 times. That was part of what it was about for HIM, but there are all sorts of success that are possible as long as you realize that as long as you have that privilege of drawing breath.

Thanks Lance, it has been a privilege.