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Back in the Saddle
Lance Armstrong, Forbes
ASAP, 12.03.01
For The World's Best Cyclist, Pleasure Comes From Pain
I become a happier man each time I suffer.
Suffering is as essential to a good life, and as
inextricable, as bliss. The old saying that you should live each day as if
it's your last is a nice sentiment, but it doesn't work. Take it from me.
I tried it once, and here's what I learned: If I pursued only happiness,
and lived just for the moment, I'd be a no-account with a perpetual
three-day growth on my chin. Cancer taught me that.
Before cancer, whatever I imagined happiness to
be, pretty soon I wore it out, took it for granted, or threw it away. A
portfolio, a Porsche, a coffee machine--these things were important to me.
So was my hair. Then I lost them, including the hair. When I was 25, I was
diagnosed with advanced testicular cancer, which had metastasized into my
lungs and brain. I sold the car, gave up my career as a world-class
cyclist, lost a good deal of money, and barely hung on to my life.
When I went into remission, I thought happiness
would mean being self-indulgent. Not knowing how much time I had left, I
did not intend to ever suffer again. I had suffered months of fear,
chemotherapy so strong it left burn marks under my skin, and surgery to
remove two tumors. Happiness to me then was waking up.
I ate Mexican food, played golf, and lay on the
couch. The pursuit of happiness meant going to my favorite restaurant and
pursuing a plate of enchiladas with tomatillo sauce.
But one day my wife, Kristin, put down her fork
and said, "You need to decide something: Are you going to be a
golf-playing, beer-drinking, Mexican-food-eating slob for the rest of your
life? If you are, I'll still love you. But I need to know, because if so,
I'll go get a job. I'm not going to sit at home while you play golf."
I stared at her.
"I'm so bored," she said.
Suddenly, I understood that I was bored, too. The
idleness was forced; I was purposeless, with nothing to pursue. That
conversation changed everything. I realized that responsibility, the
routines and habits of shaving in the morning with a purpose, a job to do,
a wife to love, and a child to raise--these were the things that tied my
days together and gave them a pattern deserving of the term living.
Within days I was back on my bicycle. For the
first time in my life, I rode with real strength and stamina and purpose.
Without cancer, I never would have won a single Tour de France. Cancer
taught me a plan for more purposeful living, and that in turn taught me
how to train and to win more purposefully. It taught me that pain has a
reason, and that sometimes the experience of losing things--whether health
or a car or an old sense of self--has its own value in the scheme of life.
Pain and loss are great enhancers.
People ask me why I ride my bike for six hours
a day; what is the pleasure? The answer is that I don't do it for the
pleasure. I do it for the pain. In my most painful moments on the bike, I
am at my most self-aware and self-defining. There is a point in every race
when a rider encounters the real opponent and realizes that
it's...himself. You might say pain is my chosen way of exploring the human
heart.
That pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or
an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it subsides. And when it
does, something else takes its place, and that thing might be called a
greater space for happiness. We have unrealized capacities that only
emerge in crisis--capacities for enduring, for living, for hoping, for
caring, for enjoying. Each time we overcome pain, I believe that we grow.
Cancer was the making of me: Through it I became
a more compassionate, complete, and intelligent man, and therefore a more
alive one. So that's why I ride, and why I ride hard. Because it makes me
hurt, and so it makes me happy.
In July, Lance Armstrong won bicycling's Tour
de France for the third year in a row, despite having an advanced stage of
testicular cancer five years earlier. He created the Lance Armstrong
Foundation, which helps people manage and survive cancer.
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