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

down, and I was expending too much work
    without getting enough speed from it. We went into a velodrome to look at my position on the bike and determine where I was losing power. The idea in cycling is to generate the most speed
    with the least amount of work; watts indicate the amount of work you are doing as you pedal. We shifted me lower on the bike, and there was an immediate improvement.
    At about the same time, I met the legendary Belgian rider Eddy Merckx, five-time winner of the Tour de France, and one of the most ferociously attacking riders who’s ever lived. I had heard all
    the stories about Merckx, what a brave, hard-charging rider he was, and I thought that was the kind of rider I wanted to be. I didn’t just want to win, I wanted to win a certain way. We
    became friends. Eddy told me that I could win a Tour de France someday–but that I needed to lose weight. I was built like a linebacker, with a thick neck and slabs of muscle in my chest,
    remnants of my career as a swimmer and triath-lete. Eddy explained that it was hard to haul all of that weight up and down mountains over three weeks. I was still racing partly on raw power;
    to win a Tour de France, I would have to find a way to lose weight without losing strength. So I quit eating pastry, and laid off Tex-Mex, and understood that I would have to find a new kind of
    strength, that inner strength called self-discipline.
    By 1995, I still had not completed an entire Tour de France, only portions. My coaches didn’t think I was ready, and they were right; I had neither the body nor the mental toughness yet to
    endure the hardship. A young rider has to be carefully walked through the process and developed over years until he is ready to finish the race, and finish it healthy. I was steadily
    improving: in ‘94 I was second in Liege-Bastogne-Liege, second in San Sebastian, and second in the Tour Du Pont, and in the first part of ‘95 I won San Sebastian and won the Tour Du Pont.
    But now Och felt I needed to move to another level, I needed to finish the Tour de France, not just start it. It was time for me to learn exactly what it took to win the biggest stage race in the
    world.
    My reputation was as a single-day racer: show me the start line and I would win on adrenaline and anger, chopping off my competitors one by one. I could push myself to a threshold of pain
    no one else was willing to match, and I would bite somebody’s head off to win a race.
    But the Tour was another thing entirely. If you raced that way in the Tour, you would have to drop out after two days. It required a longer view. The Tour was a matter of mustering the right
    resources at the right times, of patiently feeding out your strength at the necessary level, with no wasted motion or energy. It was a matter of continuing to ride and ride, no matter how
    uninspired you felt, when there was no rush of adrenaline left to push you.
    If there is a defining characteristic of a man as opposed to a boy, maybe it’s patience. In 1995,1 finally gained an understanding of the demanding nature of the Tour and all of its extraordinary
    tests and dangers. I finished it, and I finished strong, winning a stage in the closing days. But the knowledge came at too high a price, and I would just as soon not have learned it the way I
    did.
    Late in the race, our Motorola teammate, Fabio Casartelli, the 1992 Olympic champion, was killed on a high-speed descent. On a descent, you ride single file, and if one rider goes down, it
    can cause a terrible chain reaction. Fabio didn’t crash alone; 20 riders went down with him. But he hit a curb with the back of his head and fractured his neck and skull.
    I went by too fast to see much. A lot of riders were down, and everybody was crouched around someone lying on the ground, but you see that sort of thing a lot in the Tour. It was only a while
    later that I learned via the team radio what had happened: Fabio was dead. When they tell you something like that, you