It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

good at swimming.
    But I tried. If I had to swim with the little kids to learn technique, then that’s what I was willing to do. My mother gets emotional to this day when she remembers how I leaped headfirst into
    the water and flailed up and down the length of the pool, as if I was trying to splash all the water out of it. “You tried so hard,” she says. I didn’t swim in the worst group for long.
    Swimming is a demanding sport for a 12-year-old, and the City of Piano Swim Club was particularly intense. I swam for a man named Chris MacCurdy, who remains one of the best
    coaches I ever worked with. Within a year, Chris transformed me; I was fourth in the state in the 1,500-meter freestyle. He trained our team seriously: we had workouts every morning from 5:30
    to 7. Once I got a little older I began to ride my bike to practice, ten miles through the semi-dark early-morning streets. I would swim 4,000 meters of laps before school and go back for another
    two-hour workout in the afternoon–another 6,000 meters. That was six miles a day in the water, plus a 20-mile bike ride. My mother let me do it for two reasons: she didn’t have the option of
    driving me herself because she worked, and she knew that I needed to channel my temperament.
    One afternoon when I was about 13 and hanging around the Richardson Bike Mart, I saw a flyer for a competition called IronKids.
    It was a junior triathlon, an event that combined biking, swimming, and running. I had never heard of a triathlon before–but it was all of the things I was good at, so I signed up. My mother
    took me to a shop and bought me a triathlon outfit, which basically consisted of cross-training shorts and a shirt made out of a hybrid fast-drying material, so I could wear it through each
    phase of the event, without changing. We got my first racing bike then, too. It was a Mercier, a slim, elegant road bike.
    I won, and I won by a lot, without even training for it. Not long afterward, there was another triathlon, in Houston. I won that, too. When I came back from Houston, I was full of
    self-confidence. I was a top junior at swimming, but I had never been the absolute best at it. I was better at triathlons than any kid in Piano, and any kid in the whole state, for that matter. I
    liked the feeling.
    What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potential embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint. I was discovering that if it was a matter of gritting my teeth, not
    caring how it looked, and outlasting everybody else, I won. It didn’t seem to matter what the sport was–in a straight-ahead, long-distance race, I could beat anybody.
    If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it.
    I COULD HAVE DEALT WITH TERRY ARMSTRONG’S PADdle. But there was something else I couldn’t deal with.
    When I was 14, my mother went into the hospital to have a hysterectomy. It’s a very tough operation for any woman, physically and emotionally, and my mother was still very young when
    it happened. I was entered in a swim meet in San Antonio, so I had to leave while she was still recuperating, and Terry decided to chaperone me. I didn’t
    want him there; I didn’t like it when he tried to play Little League Dad, and I thought he should be at the hospital. But he insisted.
    As we sat in the airport waiting for our flight, I gazed at Terry and thought, Why are you here? As I watched him, he began to write notes on a pad. He would write, then ball up the paper and
    throw it into the garbage can and start again. I thought it was peculiar. After a while Terry got up to go to the bathroom. I went over to the garbage can, retrieved the wadded papers, and
    stuffed them into my bag.
    Later, when I was alone, I took them out and unfolded them. They were to another woman. I
    read them, one by one. He was writing to another woman while my mother was in the hospital having a hysterectomy.
    I flew back to Dallas with the crumpled pages in the bottom of my bag. When I got home, I went