It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life by Lance Armstrong Page A

turns hard and tight, and at the bottom, I glanced over my shoulder to see who was still with me.
    No one.
    I panicked. You made the same old mistake, I thought, desperately, you went too early. I must
    have forgotten what lap it was. Surely there was still a lap to go, because a lead like this was too good to be true.
    I glanced down and checked my computer. It was the last lap.
    I was going to win.
    Over the last 700 meters, I started celebrating. I pumped my fists and my arms in the air, I blew kisses, and I bowed to the crowd. As I crossed the finish line, I practically high-kicked like a
    Rockette. Finally, I braked and dismounted, and in the crowds of people, the first thing I did was look for my mother. I found her, and we stood there in the rain, hugging. I said, “We did it!
    We did it.” We both began to cry.
    At some point in all of the post-race confusion and celebration and ceremony, a royal escort arrived to inform me that King Harald of Norway wanted to greet me. I nodded and said, “Come
    on, Mom. Let’s go meet the king.”
    She said, “Well, okay.”
    We began to move through the security checkpoints. Finally, we approached a door, behind which the king was waiting to give me a private audience. A security guard stopped us. “She’ll
    have to stop here,” the royal escort told us. “The king will greet you alone.”
    “I don’t check my mother at the door,” I said.
    I grabbed her arm and turned around to leave. “Come on, let’s go,” I said. I had no intention of going anywhere without her.
    The escort relented. “All right. Please, come with me.” And we met the king, who was a very nice man. Our audience was very short, and polite, and then we went back to celebrating.
    It seemed like the end of something for my mother and me, a finish line. The tough part of the fight was over; there would be no more naysayers telling us we wouldn’t amount to anything, no
    more concerns about bills or scrabbling for equipment and plane tickets. Maybe it was the end of the long, hard climb of childhood.
    ALTHOUGH I WAS A WORLD CHAMPION, I STILL HAD plenty of learning to do, and the next three years were a process of testing and refinement. I had other successes, but life from
    now on would be a matter of incremental improvements, of seeking the tiniest margin that might separate me from the other elite riders.
    There was a science to winning. The spectator rarely sees the technical side of cycling, but behind the gorgeous rainbow blur of the peloton is the more boring reality that road racing is a
    carefully calibrated thing, and often a race is won by a mere fraction of acceleration that was
    generated in a performance lab or a wind tunnel or a velodrome long before the race ever started. Cyclists are computer slaves; we hover over precise calculations of cadence, efficiency,
    force, and wattage. I was constantly sitting on a stationary bike with electrodes all over my body, looking for different positions on the bike that might gain mere seconds, or a piece of
    equipment that might be a little bit more aerodynamic.
    Just a few weeks after winning the Worlds, I went into a performance lab at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs with Chris Carmichael. Despite my big year I still had
    some critical weaknesses, and I spent several days in the lab, plastered with electrodes while doctors jabbed me with pins for blood tests. The idea was to determine my various thresholds
    and breaking points, and thus to figure out how I could increase my efficiency on the bike. They looked at my heart rate, my VO
    2 max, and in one day alone, they pricked my thumb 15 times to check my blood.
    We wanted to determine what my maximum effort was, and how long I could sustain it. We set out to learn my optimum cadence: what was my most efficient pedal speed, and where were the
    weaknesses in my pedaling technique, the dead spots where I was wasting energy? My stroke was a symmetrical sledgehammer, straight up and