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

but
    she had been through that before. She was single for the next five years.
    I tried to be dependable. I’d climb on our roof to put up the Christmas lights for her–and if I mooned the cars on the avenue, well, that was a small, victimless crime. When she got home
    from work, we would sit down to dinner together, and turn off the TV, and we’d talk. She taught me to eat by candlelight, and insisted on decent manners. She would fix a taco salad or a
    bowl of Hamburger Helper, light the candles, and tell me about her day. Sometimes she would talk about how frustrated she was at work, where she felt she was underestimated because she
    was a secretary.
    “Why don’t you quit?” I asked.
    “Son, you never quit,” she said. “I’ll get through it.”
    Sometimes she would come home and I could see she’d had a really bad day. I’d be playing something loud on the stereo, like Guns ‘N Roses, but I’d take one look at her and turn the
    heavy stuff off, and put something else on. “Mom, this is for you,” I’d say. And I’d play Kenny G for her–which believe me was a sacrifice.
    I tried to give her emotional support, because she did so many small things for me. Little things. Every Saturday, she would wash and iron five shirts, so that I had a freshly pressed shirt for each
    school day of the week. She knew how hard I trained and how hungry I got in the afternoons, so she would leave a pot of homemade spaghetti sauce in the refrigerator, for a snack. She taught
    me to boil my own pasta and how to throw a strand against the wall to make sure it was done.
    I was beginning to earn my own money. When I was 15,1 entered the 1987 President’s Triathlon in Lake Lavon, against a field of experienced older athletes. I finished 32nd, shocking the other
    competitors and spectators, who couldn’t believe a 15-year-old had held up over the course. I got some press coverage for that race, and I told a reporter, “I think in a few years I’ll be right
    near the top, and within ten years I’ll be the best.” My friends, guys like Steve Lewis, thought I was hilariously cocky. (The next year, I finished fifth.)
    Triathlons paid good money. All of a sudden I had a wallet full of first-place checks, and I started entering triathlons wherever I could find them. Most of the senior ones had age
    restrictions–you had to be 16 or older to enter–so I would doctor my birth date on the entry form to meet the requirements. I didn’t win in the pros, but I would place in the top five. The other
    competitors started calling me “Junior.”
    But if it sounds like it came easy, it didn’t. In one of the first pro triathlons I entered, I made the mistake of eating badly beforehand– I downed a couple of cinnamon rolls and two Cokes–and I
    paid for it by bonking, meaning I ran completely out of energy. I had an empty tank. I was first out of the water, and first off the bike. But in the middle of the run, I nearly collapsed. My
    mother was waiting at the finish, accustomed to seeing me come in among the leaders, and she couldn’t understand what was taking me so long. Finally, she walked out on the course and
    found me, struggling along.
    “Come on, son, you can do it,” she said.
    “I’m totally gone,” I said. “I bonked.”
    “All right,” she said. “But you can’t quit, either. Even if you have to walk to the finish line.”
    I walked to the finish line.
    I began to make a name in local bike races, too. On Tuesday nights there was a series of criteriums–multi-lap road races–held on an old loop around those empty Richardson fields. The
    Tuesday-night “crits” were hotly contested among serious local club riders, and they drew a large crowd. I rode for Hoyt, who sponsored a club team out of the Richardson Bike Mart, and
    my mother got me a toolbox to hold all of my bike stuff. She says she can still remember me pedaling around the loop, powering past other kids, lapping the field. She couldn’t believe