Every Second Counts (20 page)

But in retrospect, perhaps we should have. For the first few years together, it was an adventure for both of us to live the life of a European cyclist. But over time, it became less of an adventure, and now with three children it began to mean spending stretches of time apart. It was just too hard to move three children around, and we weren’t willing to leave them with a nanny.

We no longer went places together the way we once had. In March, I left for a one-day race, Milan–San Remo, an event she’d always come to in the past. But this time she stayed home in Girona. I flew to
Milan
alone, and raced 300 kilometers, and afterward I threw on dry clothes, sped to the airport and flew home. I made it back in time for dinner. I was aching with fatigue, but I was home.

I
t was the
rain that made Floyd Landis drink 13 cappuccinos.

It wasn’t because he thought it was a good idea.

Floyd and another young member of the U.S. Postal team, Dave Zabriskie, were sharing an apartment in Girona in the spring of 2002, and it had rained for weeks on end. There wasn’t a lot to do except ride their bikes, and it had strained their abilities to entertain themselves. When they woke up to gray skies and wet streets for yet another day, Floyd said to Dave, “Screw it, let’s not ride today. Let’s hang out at the café.”

They wandered down to the town square and took a table in a sidewalk café. They watched people go by, and Floyd ordered a cappuccino. It arrived, frothing and aromatic. After a while, he ordered another, and then another. “How many of those are you going to drink?” Zabriskie said. Floyd shrugged. So Zabriskie joined him, and ordered another. And it went on like that for three hours, Floyd and Dave lounging and drinking coffee, after coffee, after coffee, with mounting hilarity. When the check came, Floyd found he’d had 13 cappuccinos.

The next day the story got back to me. I’d been watching Floyd carefully. He was an interesting new kid on the team, made up of equal parts mischief and talent. He was a 26-year-old from a Mennonite family in
Lancaster
,
Pennsylvania
, who’d run off to become a mountain biker and had then switched over to road racing. He showed promise, but he’d had some hard luck, and he obviously hadn’t yet learned how to be a professional, either. He was loud and smart-alecky and he liked to blast ZZ Top, which in combination with his iffy training habits made him seem like a slacker to the veteran cyclists on our team, who were all serious in their work habits. If he didn’t know better than to blow off training and try to give himself caffeine poisoning, he needed to learn. Mainly he was young.

I called him up. “Floyd, what are you doing tomorrow?”

He said, “Oh, I’m going to do a two-hour ride with the guys.”

I said, “No, you’re not. You’re going to do five hours with me and we’re going to have a little talk.”

He met me the next morning, and we rode into the hills above Girona, and I told him I’d heard what he had done.

“Man, you
cannot
act that way,” I said. “You can’t treat your body that way, you can’t train that way, and you can’t treat your teammates that way.”

Floyd was very open, and apologetic. He said, “I know, I know.”

“Look man, you gotta get it together,” I said. “You’ve got to have a little balance. You aren’t born a professional. You have to turn yourself into one. You have to do the right things. You have to eat right. You have to sleep right.”

I knew that Floyd was in the midst of a hard year. His previous cycling team, Mercury, had gone bankrupt when a sponsor pulled out, and Floyd only got paid half of what he was owed, and he was out of racing for eight months. Eventually, he got up the nerve to contact Postal and ask if he was wanted, and we said sure. Now he was one of 20 riders on the Postal roster, and he had a chance to be one of the nine riders selected by Johan to ride in the Tour—if he worked hard.

But Floyd was distracted. He was loaded down with debt, because he’d maxed out his credit cards when his team folded. He had medical and dental bills, and was struggling to support his family, his wife, Amber, and his six-year-old daughter, Ryan. He didn’t know what to expect from his new team, or what was expected from him in return, or even whether he had a future as a rider.

“Look, pal,” I said, “you’ve got to get this right. Listen to me, and do what I tell you.”

I explained the math: Floyd was making a salary of $60,000, but if he bore down and made the nine-man squad that raced in the Tour, and we won, he would get about $50,000 more in prize money. “And then I’m going to throw a Lance-bonus on top of it,” I said. “But to do it, you’ve got to focus, and quit worrying about anything else. Your family, debt, money, stress, you have to forget all of it. You’ve got to focus on this one thing.”

Floyd said that was easier said than done.

“Forget it,” I repeated. “You just fucking ride your bike.”

But the very advice I was giving Floyd—to focus on cycling to the exclusion of all else—was the subject about which I struggled most. I constantly considered the cost of a career as demanding as cycling, versus the demands of a young family. How to balance the two? One of the ways in which I was determined to be a good father was to make the best living I could for them, make the most out of this brief opportunity I had as a world-champion athlete. But professional success could become a personal failure, if cycling came at the expense of our family.

In Floyd’s case at the time, it was the right choice, and the only one. There aren’t many clearly marked, signpost moments in your life, but occasionally they come along, and you have a choice. You can either do something the same old way, or you can make a better decision. You have to be able to recognize the moment, and to act on it, at risk of saying later, “That’s when it all could have been different.” If you’re willing to make a harder choice, you can redesign your life. This was Floyd’s moment, when he could change everything for himself, and I wanted him to know it.

Floyd agreed, and for the next several weeks, we trained together. He went with me to
St. Moritz
for altitude training. We went on reconnaissance rides for the Tour stages. We rode together for hours on end, and he learned, on a day-to-day basis, what I meant by professionalism. He learned focus, the ability to ignore large distractions, and to concentrate on the process. He learned resolve.

Sometimes others see more ability in you than you see in yourself. As a young rider, I’d been something like Floyd, a talented thrasher who didn’t know how good he could be. What was true in his case had once been true in mine: I’d been ambitious but directionless, and a little bit of a loudmouth American, until older riders taught me better.

I’d never conceived of the Tour de France as a race I was capable of winning before Johan Bruyneel told me I could. I remember the moment when he said it to me, back in 1998. Johan was the newly named director of the Postal team, and I was the newly named team leader, and while I’d begun to work my way back from illness, I was still a tentative rider. I’d recently placed fourth in the Tour of Spain, a three-week road race, and Johan had watched me closely.

I was about to ride in the World Championships in
Holland
when Johan came to see me in my hotel room. He immediately started to talk about his ambitions for me and the Postal team. “Okay,” he said, “you just took fourth in
Spain
, without any special preparation, without having trained for it. You just showed up, you didn’t even have the ambition to be in the top five, and you ended up fourth. So I think next year we have to work toward the Tour de France.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I can win some stages.”

“No, no, to win the whole thing,” he said.

I stared at him, doubtfully. I was just glad to be there, to have a bike and a job again. I said, “Well, yeah, right. Look, I’m thinking about the World Championships now. We’ll talk about this later.”

Johan let the topic go for the moment, but he came back to it a couple of days later. Traditionally, the winner of the World Championships wears a rainbow-colored jersey for the entire year, signifying that he is the title-holder. Just before I raced, Johan wrote me an e-mail. “Good luck,” he said. “I think you will look great on the podium of the Tour de France in the rainbow jersey.”

I didn’t win the Worlds—I was fifth. But the idea of winning the Tour began to grow in me.

Johan knew me more by reputation than anything else: a huge talent who didn’t get everything out of himself. Every once in a while, I’d deliver a big ride: when I was 21, I had come out of nowhere to win the Worlds, and then a stage of the Tour de France. But mostly I cruised for months at a time, performing decently but not exceptionally, just barely meeting the definition of “professional.”

Back then, I thought I was doing all that I could do. After the cancer, I realized I’d been operating at about half of my abilities. The truth was that I’d never trained as hard as I could, never focused as much as I could.

For one thing, I carried around 15 to 20 pounds more weight than I should have, some of it in puppy fat and some of it in margaritas and tortilla chips. After cancer, I was 20 pounds lighter.

Under Jonah, I began training seriously, and kept the weight off, and discovered what a huge difference it made in the mountains, where your own body was your biggest adversary. The lost weight, I discovered, made me 10 to 12 minutes faster over a mountain stage; I figured it saved me about three minutes on every mountain pass I rode.

Also, I began to work on becoming an efficient rider. As a young rider, I would start off at the gun, and just go. I didn’t really know how to race—I mashed big gears and thrashed around on the bike, my position all wrong. Now, with Johan and Chris Carmichael, I studied proper aerodynamic positioning and effective cadence. Instead of cranking a big gear without much technique, I used a smaller gear and quicker pedal strokes as I moved uphill. I became an extremely good technical rider—the athlete turned into a trained and practiced cyclist.

There was no mystery and no miracle drug that helped me win that Tour de France in 1999, I explained to Floyd. It was a matter of recognizing the moment. It was a matter of better training and technique, and my experience with cancer and subsequent willingness to make the sacrifices. These were the explanations. If you want to do something great, you need a strong will and attention to detail. If you surveyed all the greatly successful people in this world, some would be charismatic, some would be not so; some would be tall, some would be short; some would be fat, some would be thin. But the common denominator is that they’re all capable of sustained, focused attention.

Since then, I’d become ever more fixated on the Tour de France, both as a personal challenge and an objective one. The race became not so much about beating others, but about turning the competition against
myself
. I was obsessed with doing it a little better than I had before, a little bit better than last year, or last month, or even yesterday.

The Tour is essentially a math problem, a 2,000-mile race over three weeks that’s sometimes won by a margin of a minute or less. How do you propel yourself through space on a bicycle, sometimes steeply uphill, at a speed sustainable for three weeks? Every second counts.

You had to be willing to examine any small part of your body or the bike to find extra time, I told Floyd; to look for fractions of seconds in something as small as the sleeves of your jersey. “Once you reach a certain level, everyone is good, and everyone trains hard,” I said. The difference is who is more meticulous, willing to find the smallest increments of time, and as you get older and more experienced, the percentage gains grow smaller and smaller.

You had to become a slave to data, to performance indicators like pedal cadence, and power output measured in watts. You had to measure literally every heartbeat, and every morsel you ate, down to each spoonful of cereal. You had to be willing to look like a vampire, your body-fat hovering around three or four percent, if it made you faster. If you weighed too little, you wouldn’t have the physical resources to generate enough speed. If you weighed too much, your body was a burden. It was a matter of power to weight.

Who knew when you might find a winning margin in a wind tunnel in December, during equipment testing? You might find another fraction of time in your position on the bike, or in a helmet, or in the composition of a wheel. Aerodynamics are different for every type of road, and for mild pitches, steep climbs, and long grades, so I worked on strengthening my hip flexors and my lower back, until I could hold certain positions—because the smallest thing, like moving your hands on the handlebars, could make you three seconds slower over 25 miles. I practiced changes in rhythm, accelerations.

I drove Trek’s advanced-concept group crazy with testing new equipment, always looking for fractions of seconds. I wanted the bike lighter, I wanted it more aerodynamic,
I
wanted better wheels. I could lift a carbon-fiber frame with one finger, but I asked, “Can’t you make it even lighter?” A tiny change in the weight or construction of the bike could save 10 to 15 seconds over the course of a 24-mile time trial. We played with computer-assisted design, aerospace materials. A hydration system was installed, so I could sip fluids without having to shift on the bike from the ideal aerodynamic position—it might save me another 10 seconds.