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9780385508711: Every Second Counts
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The champion cyclist and author of It's Not About the Bike continues the inspirational story of his life and accomplishments in the wake of his recovery from testicular cancer and describes what fuels his pursuit of personal and professional success, his Tour de France victories, his restoration of a Spanish chapel, and more. 500,000 first printing.

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Champion cyclist Lance Armstrong continues to make winning the Tour de France his annual cycling goal. He also oversees the Lance Armstrong Foundation, a nonprofit organization that assists cancer patients around the world with managing and surviving the disease. He lives in Austin, Texas. Sally Jenkins is a columnist for the Washington Post. In 2002 she won the Associated Press’s Columnist of the Year Award. She has co-written many bestselling sports books, including It’s Not About the Bike and Reach For the Summit with Pat Summitt (Broadway Books).

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:
Chapter 1
Pitched Back
So, it looks as though I'm going to live--at least for another 50 years or more. But whenever I need to reassure myself of this, as I sometimes do, I go out to a place called Dead Man's Hole, and I stare down into it, and then, with firm intent, I strip off my shirt and I leap straight out into what you might call the great sublime.

Let's say it's my own personal way of checking for vital signs. Dead Man's Hole is a large green mineral pool gouged out of a circular limestone cliff, so deep into the hill country of Texas that it's hardly got an address. According to conflicting legends, it's either where Confederates tossed Union sympathizers to drown, or where Apaches lured unsuspecting cowboys who didn't see the fall coming. In any event, I'm drawn to it, so much so that I bought 200 acres of brush and pasture surrounding it, and I've worn a road into the dirt by driving out there. It seems only right that a place called Dead Man's Hole should belong to a guy who nearly died--and who, by the way, has no intention of just barely living.

I stand there next to a 45-foot waterfall and examine the drop--and myself, while I'm at it. It's a long drop, so long that it makes the roof of my mouth go dry just looking at it. It's long enough for a guy to actually think on the way down, and to think more than one thought, too. Long enough to think first one thing, A little fear is good for you, and then another, It's good for you if you can swim, and then one more thing as I hit the water: Oh fuck, it's cold. As I jump, there are certain unmistakable signs that I'm alive: the press of my pulse, the insistent sound of my own breathing, and the whanging in my chest that's my heart, which by then sounds like an insubordinate prisoner beating on the bars of my ribcage.

I come up whooping through the foam and swim for the rocks. Then I climb back up and towel off, and I drive home to my three kids. I burst through the door, and I shout at my son, Luke, and my twin daughters, Grace and Isabelle, and I kiss them on the necks, and I grab a Shiner Bock beer with one hand and an armful of babies with the other.

The first time I ever did it, my wife, Kik, just looked at me and rolled her eyes. She knew where I'd been.

"Was that clarifying for you?" she said.
At what point do you let go of not dying? Maybe I haven't entirely and maybe I don't want to.

I know they're out there, lying in their hospital beds, with those damn drip poles, watching the damn chemo slide into their veins, and thinking, This guy had the same thing I do. If he can do it, I can, too. I think of them all the time.

My friend Lee Walker says I got "pitched back." What he means is, I almost died, and possibly even did die a little, but then I got pitched back into the world of the living. It's as good a description as any of what happened. I was 25 when cancer nearly killed me: advanced choriocarcinoma spread to my abdomen, lungs, and brain and required two surgeries and four cycles of chemotherapy to get rid of. I wrote an entire book about death, called It's Not About the Bike, about confronting the possibility of it, and narrowly escaping it.

"Are you sure?" I asked the doctor.

"I'm sure."

"How sure?"

"I'm very sure."

"How can you be so sure?"

"I'm so sure that I've scheduled you for surgery at 7 a.m. tomorrow."

Mounted on a light table, the X-ray showed my chest. Black meant clear; white meant cancer. My chest looked like a snowstorm.

What I didn't and couldn't address at the time was the prospect of life. Once you figure out you're going to live, you have to decide how to, and that's not an uncomplicated matter. You ask yourself: now that I know I'm not going to die, what will I do? What's the highest and best use of my self? These things aren't linear, they're a mysterious calculus. For me, the best use of myself has been to race in the Tour de France, the most grueling sporting event in the world.

Every time I win another Tour, I prove that I'm alive--and therefore that others can survive, too. I've survived cancer again, and again, and again, and again. I've won four Tour titles, and I wouldn't mind a record-tying five. That would be some good living.

But the fact is that I wouldn't have won even a single Tour de France without the lesson of illness. What it teaches is this: pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.

To me, just finishing the Tour de France is a demonstration of survival. The arduousness of the race, the sheer unreasonableness of the job, the circumnavigation of an entire country on a bicycle, village to village, along its shores, across its bridges, up and over the mountain peaks they call cols, requires a matchless stamina. The Tour is so taxing that Dutch rider Hennie Kuiper once said, after a long climb up an alp, "The snow had turned black in my eyes." It's not unlike the stamina of people who are ill every day. The Tour is a daily festival of human suffering, of minor tragedies and comedies, all conducted in the elements, sometimes terrible weather and sometimes fine, over flats, and into headwinds, with plenty of crashes. And it's three weeks long. Think about what you were doing three weeks ago. It feels like last year.

The race is very much like living--except that its consequences are less dire and there's a prize at the end. Life is not so neat.

There was no pat storybook ending for me. I survived cancer and made a successful comeback as a cyclist by winning the 1999 Tour, but that was more of a beginning than an end. Life actually went on, sometimes in the most messy, inconvenient, and un-triumphant ways. In the next five years I'd have three children, take hundreds of drug tests (literally), break my neck (literally), win some more races, lose some, too, and experience a breakdown in my marriage. Among other adventures.

When you walk into the Armstrong household, what you see is infants crawling everywhere. Luke was born in the fall of 1999 to Kristin (Kik) Armstrong and me shortly after that first Tour, and the twins came in the fall of 2001. Grace and Isabelle have blue saucer eyes, and they toddle across the floor at scarcely believable speeds. They like to pull themselves upright on the available furniture and stand there, wobbling, while they plan how to make trouble. One of Isabelle's amusements is to stand up on the water dispenser and press the tap until the kitchen floods, while she laughs hysterically. I tell her, "No, no, no," and she just shakes her head back and forth and keeps laughing, while the water runs all over the floor. I can't wait for their teen years.

Luke adds to the bedlam by riding his bike in the living room, or doing laps in a plastic car, or tugging the girls around in separate red wagons. He is sturdy and hardheaded. He wears his bike helmet inside the house and refuses to take it off, even when we go out to dinner. We get some interesting stares--but anything is better than the fight that ensues if you try to remove the helmet. He insists on wearing it just in case he might get to go cycling with me. To him, a road is what his father does for a living. I'm on the road so much that when the phone rings, he says, "Daddy."

One afternoon I went to pick my family up at an airport. Luke gave me a long stare and said, "Daddy, you look like me."

"Uh, I look like you?" I said.

"Yeah."

"Are you sure it's not the other way around?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. It's definitely you that looks like me."

Also milling around our house are a cat named Chemo and a small white dog named Boone. I trip around all of them, watching my feet, careful not to step on a critter or a kid. It's been a chaotic few years, and not without its casualties. There have been so many children and adults and animals to feed that sometimes things get confused and the dog winds up with the baby food. One day Kik handed me what was supposed to be a glass of water.

"This tastes like Sprite," I said.

"Just drink it," she said.

I could never seem to find the right keys to anything. One time I pulled the ring of keys from my pocket and stared at them in their seeming hundreds, and said to Kik, wonderingly, "I have the keys to the whole world." She just said, "Perfect."

The reason I have so many keys is because I need so many homes and vehicles, in various countries and counties. I spend most of the spring and summer in my European home in Girona, Spain, while I prepare for the Tour. When the racing season is over, I come back to Austin. Our family lives in a house in central Austin, and we also have the ranch in the hill country. But my favorite home is a small hideaway, a one-room cabin just outside Austin, in the hills overlooking the Colorado River. Across the river there's a rope swing dangling from an old bent oak, and on hot days I like to swing on the rope and hurl myself into the current.

I love the tumult of my large family, and I've even been accused of fostering a certain amount of commotion, because I have no tolerance for peace and quiet. I'm congenitally unable to sit still; I crave action, and if I can't find any, I invent it.

My friends call me Mellow Johnny. It's a play on the French term for the leader of the Tour de France, who wears a yellow jersey: the maillot jaune. We like to joke that Mellow Johnny is the Texan pronunciation. The name is also a play on my not-so-mellow personality. I'm Mellow Johnny, or Johnny Mellow, or, if you're feeling formal, Jonathan Mellow.

Sometimes I'm just Bike Boy. I ride my bike almost every day, even in the off-season, no matter the weather. It could be hailing, and my friends and riding partners dread the call that they know is going to come: they pick up the phone, and they hear Bike Boy on the other end, demanding, "You ri...

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  • EditoreBroadway Books
  • Data di pubblicazione2003
  • ISBN 10 0385508719
  • ISBN 13 9780385508711
  • RilegaturaCopertina rigida
  • Numero di pagine246
  • Valutazione libreria

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Descrizione libro Hardcover. Condizione: New. The four-time Tour de France winner and number 1 New York Times bestselling author returns with an inspirational account of his recent personal and professional victories-and some failures-and an intimate glimpse into how almost dying taught him to really live.Since the release of his megabestseller, Its Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong has enjoyed a new series of thrilling rides, from the birth of his twin daughters, to an astounding succession of Tour de France triumphs, to being chosen as Sportsman of the Year by Sports Illustrated in 2002. Continuing the inspiring story begun in his first book, Every Second Counts captures the mind-set of a man who has beaten incredible odds and considers each day an opportunity for excellence.Armstrongs previous book recounted his journey from a grim diagnosis of testicular cancer, which had spread to his lungs and brain, to a stunning recovery that culminated in his winning the 1999 Tour de France-the ultimate evidence that he had also won a daunting battle with death.His new book addresses the equally daunting challenge of living in the aftermath of this experience and making the most of every breath of life. Armstrong candidly discusses his prickly relationship with the French and the ultimately disproved accusations of doping within his Tour de France team, and he writes about his recent achievements, including celebrating five years of cancer survival and how he restored a magnificent chapel in his beloved Spain.A fresh perspective on the spirit of survivors everywhere, Every Second Counts will invigorate and enthrall Armstrongs millions of admirers. Codice articolo DADAX0385508719

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Armstrong, Lance; Jenkins, Sally
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Descrizione libro Hardcover. Condizione: New. Condizione sovraccoperta: New. 1st Edition. " The four-time Tour de France winner and number 1 New York Times bestselling author returns with an inspirational account of his recent personal and professional victoriesand some failuresand an intimate glimpse into how almost dying taught him to really live. Since the release of his megabestseller, Its Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong has enjoyed a new series of thrilling rides, from the birth of his twin daughters, to an astounding succession of Tour de France triumphs, to being chosen as Sportsman of the Year by Sports Illustrated in 2002. Continuing the inspiring story begun in his first book, Every Second Counts captures the mind-set of a man who has beaten incredible odds and considers each day an opportunity for excellence. Armstrongs previous book recounted his journey from a grim diagnosis of testicular cancer, which had spread to his lungs and brain, to a stunning recovery that culminated in his winning the 1999 Tour de Francethe ultimate evidence that he had also won a daunting battle with death. His new book addresses the equally daunting challenge of living in the aftermath of this experience and making the most of every breath of life. Armstrong candidly discusses his prickly relationship with the French and the ultimately disproved accusations of doping within his Tour de France team, and he writes about his recent achievements, including celebrating five years of cancer survival and how he restored a magnificent chapel in his beloved Spain. A fresh perspective on the spirit of survivors everywhere, Every Second Counts will invigorate and enthrall Armstrongs millions of admirers. Review: In the opening of Lance Armstrong's memoir, Every Second Counts (co-authored by Sally Jenkins), he reflects: "Generally, one of the hardest things in the world to do is something twice." While he is talking here about his preparation for what would prove to be his second consecutive Tour de France victory in 2000, the sentiment could equally be applied to the book itself. And just as Armstrong managed to repeat his incredible 1999 tour victory, Every Second Counts repeats--and, in some ways exceedsthe success of his bestselling first memoir, It's Not About the Bike. Every Second Counts confronts the challenge of moving beyond his cancer experience, his first Tour victory, and his celebrity status. Few of Armstrong's readers will ever compete in the Tour de France (though cyclists will relish Armstrong's detailed recounting of his 2000-2003 tour victories), but all will relate to his discussions of loss and disappointment in his personal and professional life since 1999. They will relate to his battles with petty bureaucracies, like the French court system during the doping scandal that almost halted his career. And they will especially relate to constant struggles with work/life balance. In the face of September 11--which arrives halfway through the narrative (just before the fifth anniversary of his diagnosis)--Armstrong draws from his experiences to show that suffering, fear, and death are the essential human condition. In so openly using his own life to illustrate how to face this reality, he proves that he truly is a hero--and not just because of the bike. In Every Second Counts he is to be admired as a human being, a man who sees every day as a challenge to live richly and well, no matter what hardships may come." --Patrick O'Kelley. Codice articolo 020413

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Descrizione libro Hardcover. Condizione: Like new. Condizione sovraccoperta: Fine. Signed and NOT inscribed. Signed by Author(s). Codice articolo 000710

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