The Armstrong Lie

I began cycling in 1990, a year after I moved to Laramie, Wyoming. The bike became my most frequent companion (other than my wife, Karen), riding the ranch roads and smaller state roads around Laramie, as well as a variety or roads around Wyoming on my annual visits to newspapers. I took it with me during a week in Bozeman, Montana, when I conducted a communications audit at Montana State University, riding up Bridger Bowl. Two years,  I went to the Carpenter-Phinney cycling camp in Frisco, Colorado, riding Vail, Aspen and Loveland passes. I was hooked

Late in 2003, I started suffering from a continual ache in the lower right quadrant of my back. I tried heat, ice, chiropractic. Karen bought me a massage pad for my office chair. Nothing worked. Finally, my GP ordered an ultrasound. I asked the technician if she saw anything where I felt the pain. "Not there, but there's a mass on your left side." One evening, soon thereafter, my doctor called and asked Karen and me to meet him that night at his office. Clearly, it wasn't good. We ate dinner at the nearby Wendy's, discussing the best- and worst-case scenarios. My doctor came right to the point. You have a tumor in your left kidney. It's probably cancerous.

We set up surgery for early January 2004. The surgeon conducted a total nephrectomy through a double incision still visible today. I was in the hospital for three painful weeks. Four weeks after my discharge, I went back to work, wearing a sweatsuit, the only clothes I could wear comfortably. It was quite a while longer before I could get back on the bike. I can't remember my first ride, but I remember ordering my yellow, rubber Livestrong band. I admired Lance Armstrong and his return to high-level professional cycling after cancer surgery. I vowed to myself that I'd get back to my previous level of fitness, and after five years as a cancer survivor I'd remove the band. Before I left Laramie, I got myself back up to 55-mile rides to the end of Herrick Lane, but I never did get out again to Woods Landing for the 60-mile rides I did in the late 90s in preparation for bike camp.

One day, a couple of years after my surgery, I received a morning call from my good friend, Charles Pelkey, inviting me over to his house for brunch. There was, he said, someone he wanted me to meet. When I got there, Charles, who by then was writing authoritatively about doping-in-cycling issues for VeloNews, introduced me to Greg LeMond. Over bagels and salmon, we talked about cycling, doping, and, inevitably to Lance Armstrong. I didn't get all of the technical data points, though I'd been reading Charles' articles for several years. It was clear that Charles and LeMond believed Armstrong had doped during his Tour de France wins. LeMond asked me why I was wearing a Livestrong band, and I responded that I was a recent cancer survivor. He wished me well, but suggested there were better cancer-fighting organizations to which I could give my money, referring to Livestrong as Armstrong's retirement fund.

I didn't want to believe Armstrong was a doper. I bought his argument that it would be unthinkable for a cancer survivor to take doping products into an already battered body. But, I thought over LeMond's reasoned arguments. I thought over Charles' writings. And I remember how, at Carpenter-Phinney one year, a camper, a licensed pharmacist, asked the late cycling fitness expert Ed Burke what performance enhancers she could take and not get caught at doping control. This from an amateur cyclist; a pharmacist.

I began to believe that Armstrong was a doper, a bully, a liar, and a cheat. I stopped watching professional cycling for a few years and cancelled my subscriptions to magazines that covered professional cycling. I rode for fitness; I rode for fun. In 2009, five years after my cancer surgery, I removed my Livestrong band.

All of this came back today while watching Alex Gibney's documentary, "The Armstrong Lie." Gibney, a serious and prolific documentarian whose work includes "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," began work on the documentary as a confirmation of Armstrong's greatness as he attempted to win the 2009 Tour de France, four years after his seventh consecutive win. As Armstrong fell further and further behind eventual winner Alberto Contador, it became clear that the documentary would not have a happy ending. Gibney, at the time, did not know how unhappy the ending would be. Floyd Landis' 2010 doping confession and accusations against Armstrong; Tyler Hamilton's "60 Minutes" accusation; USADA in 2012 stripping Armstrong of all wins since 1998 and banning him from cycling for life; Armstrong's 2013 confession to Oprah Winfrey. Gibney lays it all out with interviews of Armstrong's former teammates, Irish journalist Dave Walsh, Betsy Andreau (his former teammate Frankie's wife), and more. And, in his own interview with Armstrong, Gibney presses for reasons - why did you cheat, why did you lie, why did you trash all your accusers. The answers are revealing of Armstrong's character, or lack thereof, essentially: "To win," "Because I cheated (though everyone else did too)," "And because I've always been a fighter."

As Gibney notes in the documentary, the use of performance enhancers has always been a part of cycling. Alcohol, cocaine, strychnine, caffeine used as early as 1886. Amphetamines were used by the likes of Italian champion Fausto Coppi; French champion Jacques Anquetil; British cyclist Tom Simpson, who died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in 1968; and the greatest rider in history, Belgian Eddy Merckx. Cortisone, hormones, steroids, blood doping, EPO, human growth hormone. On and on, scandal after scandal, illness and death.

I'd like to think that professional cycling is cleaner now. I'd like to, but I can't. Enhanced performance is intoxicating. When I moved from Laramie (7,200-foot-altitude) to northern Idaho (2,250-foot-altitude), I had an immediate two-week boost in fitness from having trained many years at altitude. When I developed kidney disease in my right kidney after losing the left one to cancer, my nephrologist proscribed a short-course of EPO to help build red blood cells. That was nice. And when I had a blood transfusion in the early days of my disintegrating pancreas to remedy blackouts from anemia (internal bleeding), I felt like Superman for a week or two.

But it's all illusion. You are what you are, you ride as you ride. I'll never be a strong rider, because that's my physiology. I'll always climb like a cat without claws. So what. As Armstrong wrote (with Sally Jenkins), "It's Not About the Bike." Maybe that's the truest thing Armstrong ever said. It's also not about winning at any cost. It's not even about winning.

For me, it's always been about enjoyment, and in more recent years it's been about staying healthy enough to live through another surgery if it becomes necessary. It's why I suffer nearly every day during winter with my bike locked onto a trainer, building endurance and strength, so that when spring comes I can take my bike back on the roads and trails around Northern Idaho and Spokane, and ride the Tour de Cure, an event that, as a Type 1 diabetic for the past four-and-a-half years means a great deal to me.

My performance enhancers: Gatorade and homemade energy bars that prevent my blood sugar from dropping and causing crashes, both metaphoric and literal. It's not about the bike. It's all about going out for a ride, having fun, and coming home in one piece.

Winter Training

Cold. Snowpack on the roads. Ice on my driveway. On the trainer in the garage. Cold. Training for the 2013 Tour de Cure for diabetes research.

Damn you Andy Hampsten.

We All Scream for Ice Cream

A couple of days ago, a Facebook friend, a fellow cyclist, wrote that she'd just finished 340 in a few days and would be spending the next 7 eating as much ice cream as she wanted. It got me to thinking about ice cream past, present, and future.


When I was a kid in Trenton, New Jersey, on hot summer nights, the whole family would walk up Greenwood Ave. past the Carvel soft-serve up toward the small ice cream parlor near the Greenwood Theater. My grandparents, parents, sister, and me. I'd usually go for a vanilla sundae with wet walnuts and hot fudge, all presented in a tall, fluted glass, with a flopped-over lip. Afterward, we'd walk home past the smells of honeysuckle and mulberry and flashes of lightning bugs toward the corner on which we lived, flanked on three sides by gas stations.


I didn't eat much ice cream as a singleton, but I married a woman with a taste for butter pecan, and so we indulged in that for a while, occasionally hitting Baskin-Robbins for a few of their 31 flavors when we lived in Laramie.


Stephen Colbert made his big announcement shortly after we moved to Idaho: Ben & Jerry had just created "Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream," vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and a caramel swirl. De-lish. We also discovered Blue Bunny's "Bunny Tracks." Use your imagination.


Then, a bit more than two years ago, a highly skilled surgeon sliced out my pancreas, and I became an instant Type 1 diabetic. Goodbye sugar; farewell Ben & Jerry; hop away Blue Bunny. Fortunately, Dreyer's makes several varieties of no-sugar-added, including French vanilla, butter pecan, and fudge swirl. Pretty good, but not Americone Dream. So Ben - and you too Jerry - open up a big bag of Splenda and get creative. Name something after Charles Barkeley or Dan Marion, and use weight loss for a symbolic sugar-free ice cream. Or, maybe, Jay Cutler (Go Bears) for our diabetic crowd.


Get with it, Pepperidge Farm. Oreo puts out a pretty good sugar-free cookie, but who wouldn't want a sugar-free Chesapeake or Nantucket. Just sayin'. 

Tour de Cure

This has been a tough winter for cycling. Rain, snow, slush, and yesterday more snow. That's the way it's been here in northern Idaho the past couple of winters. Just a day on the bike now and then - with enough layers and winter gear to still feel my fingers and toes by the end of the ride. My motivation is, to put it mildly, low.

But a couple of weeks ago, while visiting my diabetes counselor, I saw a poster for the Tour de Cure, scheduled for May 20. According to the American Diabetes Association, more than 50,000 riders will be on their bikes to raise money and awareness for research toward a cure for diabetes. Now I had my motivation.

I became a Type 1 diabetic in summer 2010 after two years of trying to figure out what was going wrong with my pancreas. A pancreatic pseudocyst in 2008 that burst while being drained (followed by sepsis); a diagnosis of organized pancreatic necrosis from Virginia Mason Clinic in Seattle, accompanied by three drains and stents; and finally a full Whipple procedure in July 2010 after a series of blackouts from severe anemia and blood loss. Every now and then I run into someone who knows what a Whipple is, and congratulates me on being alive. During 8 hours on the operating table, my surgeon, Ed Detar, removed my spleen, pancreas and 2/3 of my stomach, and rerouted various vital organs. Instant diabetic. Fortunately, my years of cycling had given my heart and lungs the strength to survive the surgery, though Dr. Detar said he nearly lost me four times during the procedure.

I got back to cycling as soon as I could, riding the Centennial Trail east to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and west toward Spokane, Washington, and hitting the winding, undulating back roads behind Liberty Lake, Washington. Though with a break to have a couple of bile duct stents removed to treat jaundice and early sepsis from bacterial backup into my blood system.

So, I now have a goal - the Tour de Cure. Part of the deal is helping to raise funds in support of the ADA. I've never liked asking people for money, but now I'm invested in diabetes. I posted information about the TdC on my Facebook page and e-mailed some folk in my contact list. To my surprise and delight, more than $850 has been contributed by my friends from New Jersey, Wyoming, Idaho, and Washington. Thanks, guys. As soon as this current snowfall clears, I'll be on the road training for the 2012 Spokane Tour de Cure.