Free Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong Page A

It was remote, which was why we chose it: you could ride it for hours and not see a single car. It was purely a chance deal that one ran straight into me.
    We whirled around a blind left-hand curve, me in the lead. Meantime, a French couple in their car sped into the curve from the opposite direction—and halfway around the turn, we piled into each other head-on. Behind me, Tyler swerved into a ditch. Frankie managed to steer clear.
    There was a metallic clap, and my bike disintegrated. I sailed into the air over the hood of the car.
    Frankie watched the wreckage of my bike as it clattered along the asphalt, a heap of broken and twisted metal tubes, a couple of them with Trek stickers.
    I lay on the ground, dazed. Slowly, I sat up. I stared at the pieces of my bike. The frame itself was in three pieces, the fork was in two pieces, and the wheels were everywhere. The rear part of the bike had been torn from the chain, which was snapped in two.
    I wondered if my arms and legs were in similar condition, and began a mental checklist of my body parts. My shoulder and neck hurt, bad. I glanced down and saw my helmet lying next to me. It was cracked in half like a walnut.
    I moved a little, and felt an incredible stabbing pain in my back. It was as if a bone was trying to poke through my skin.
    “Frankie, look at my back,” I said. “Is anything sticking out?”
    “No, there’s nothing sticking out.”
    “It’s got to be sticking out. I can feel it.”
    Suddenly, I felt like lying down again. “Unnhhhhh,” I said, and fell back on the tarmac.
    A Frenchman had gotten out of the car, and now he started yelling at us. Frankie and Tyler asked him for help, but it quickly became clear he wasn’t going to do anything but yell. Frankie and Tyler tried their cell phones, but the reception was lousy in the mountains and they couldn’t get through. They eyed the Frenchman. He wasn’t going to let us use his cell phone to call somebody, either.
    Frankie and Tyler squatted in the dirt next to me, and the three of us conferred. We decided Tyler should ride down the mountain, until he either found help or until his cell phone worked and he could call Kik to come get us.
    Tyler rode off, and as I lay back down in the road, something occurred to me.
    “Frankie,” I said, “ slide me out of this road, so I don’t get run over.”
    Frankie and I just sat there. To tell you how remote the road was, we didn’t see another car for the next two hours—and then it was Kik’s. That’s how desolate the road was, and how unlucky we were.
    Meanwhile, Kik was experiencing her own drama. Tyler finally got through to her and explained what had happened, but she couldn’t hear well enough to make out the name of the village closest to us. The phone connection started breaking up. Kik heard, “We’re in (crackling noise), a place called (crackling noise).” Then the phone went dead.
    Kik opened a map and stared at the tiny printed names of villages, trying to find one that sounded sort of like what she had heard. Finally, she saw it, and jabbed a pen at it.
    She grabbed her keys and raced to a taxi stand, and found a driver we’d gotten to know, and asked if he would show her the way. He jumped in his car, and they took off, winding through the mountains. Finally, after about an hour and a half, they found us.
    We were still sitting by the side of the road when Kik pulled up. She did a good job of seeming calm as she surveyed the wreckage, and loaded me and the remnants of my bike into the car.
    As we drove down the mountain she asked, “Where does it hurt?” I said, “Right where my back meets my neck.”
    Kik drove me straight to a local hospital for an X ray—but it didn’t show anything. “It’s just strained,” the doctor told me. I said to Kik, “That can’t be right,” but I went home and took some aspirin and waited for the pain to go away. Instead it got worse.
    I went to a chiropractor, thinking maybe my back was out