Free Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong

anywhere from 30 to 40 times a year, both in and out of competition, and I welcome it, because frankly, it’s the only proof I have of my innocence.
    How do you prove a negative? All I can do is to submit to the endless needles and cups, no matter what the time of day or how disrupting to my private life. Innocence is something I’ve had to declare and demonstrate on an almost daily basis, and not always successfully, either. “Doper,” the French scream at me. That’s okay. I have an easy heart.
    I’ve never once failed a test. Not one. Nor do I intend to, ever. You know why? Because the only thing you’ll find evidence of is hard work, and there’s no test for that.
    But no matter how many tests I took, there were still those who considered me guilty, a doper-mastermind who outwitted scientific communities across the globe, and the suspicion reached a height in 2000–2001.
    For a while some people even believed I was given a miracle drug during chemo. Reporters used to call my oncologist, Dr. Craig Nichols, and grill him about what he had done to me: exactly what medications had I taken, and what were their effects?
    Finally, one day, while yet another reporter was interrogating him as to how he had Frankensteined me, Dr. Nichols wearied of all the questions.
    “I put in a third lung during surgery,” he said.
    He waited for laughter. But there was none.
    Dr. Nichols decided that much of the skepticism was based on disbelief that someone could not just survive cancer, but prosper . Most people thought if you had it, you were going to die, and even if you survived the treatment, it was inconceivable that you didn’t come out a cripple. But I challenged that assumption by returning to a full, productive life. I had behaved, Nichols said, “as if death was an option.”
    “The treatment is very rigorous,” Dr. Nichols said. “There are some risks.”
    “Such as?”
    “Well, something as simple as an infection could become life-threatening.”
    “You can’t kill me,” I said.
    “I assure you I can.”
    In some ways, fighting cancer and winning bike races were much simpler, more direct confrontations than the ones ahead in the coming months. How do you fight an invisible opponent like suspicion? You can’t; but that sort of acceptance doesn’t come easily to any of us, and sometimes the hardest thing in the world to do is . . . nothing.
    How do you learn to cope with doubt, and, more important, self-doubt? And how do you learn how to lose?
    Trouble is , you’re going to lose more than you’re going to win, no matter who you are. Most of us overreact when we lose, and over-celebrate when we win, and I’m no exception. I have a love-hate relationship with losing: it makes me brooding and quarrelsome. But the fact is, a loss is its own inevitable lesson, and it can be just as valuable as a victory in the range of experiences, if you’ll examine it.
    When you ride a bike for a living, you see a lot of stuff, and after a while you understand that the races aren’t really races but expressions of human behavior; and that behavior can be brave, fraudulent, funny, seeking, uplifting, and downright parasitical. Some of what you see you like, and some of it you don’t like very much, and it’s all very interesting, and telling, but it ain’t war and it ain’t death and it ain’t childbirth, either, and what losing does is, it restores the perspective.
    In August of 2000, I had yet another crackup on my bike. In Italy they say a cat has 12 or 13 lives, instead of nine. I must be an Italian cat, because it was my second life-threatening crash in a year.
    I was out on a training ride in the hills above Nice with my Postal teammates Frankie Andreu and Tyler Hamilton, just a cruise to get our legs back after the Tour and begin preparing for the Olympics in Sydney , Australia .
    A single lane ribboned up into the mountains above the city, and we followed it until it grew so narrow it didn’t have a center line.