PUBLISHED 01/11/2007
Lance went straight into a press conference, and afterward was certain he would not be able to stand up from the table. I peppered him with text messages to get into an ice bath, ASAP. He tried, but "Goldilocks, it was tooo cold." Instead, he took a hot shower, hopped an immediate flight to Scottsdale, Arizona, for a speaking engagement, and had wine on the plane. Hot shower? Airplane travel? Wine? A postrace recipe for disaster if I ever heard one. And so it was. The next morning he got up and struggled to walk down the hall to give a speech at his hotel. Afterward he told Mark Higgins, his go-to guy, to get him a baggage cart and push him back to his room. He wasn't kidding, and Higgs obliged. The next day Lance almost got an MRI because he thought he had a stress fracture in his back. This turned out to be a dislocated rib that had to be cracked back into place by a chiropractor. This finally brought him to tears.
Back in my kitchen, with a few moments before our girls went to preschool and Lance headed to the airport for a flight to the Bahamas, I thanked him for his time, trying my best to be professional in pajamas. From one runner to another, I congratulated him. "On what?" he asked. "On finishing," I replied, and asked if he had any future marathon plans.
Yes: the 2007 New York City Marathon. This time with a dose of humility and respect for the distance, he'll train properly, weigh in under 180 pounds, and go for sub-2:45.
It's so incredible to think of how few people can ever ride in the Tour de France. You have to be a professional, selected by a sponsored team, part of an elite group of men. In comparison, a marathon is open season--young, old, men, women, gifted, and not-so-much-so. It's a huge accomplishment that stellar athletes, like him, and regular peeps, like us, can share. And so before he left, I asked Lance what he had to say to all the runners out there who saw that he suffered, too, and he ran a time that mere mortals can achieve. "They should feel validated," he said. And then he hobbled sideways back to his car.
