Outside Reading Post A

Vocab

Affinity (5)- a person, thing, or idea, in which a person has a natural liking to

Stagnant (40)- not flowing or moving

Appeals

"Of course I should have known something was wrong with me. [...] You deny all aches and pains because you have to in order to finish the race" (5).The reader now knows that at the time of his cancer, Lance had a high level of mental toughness. I read on, and found out that even professional bicyclist's get sore, and when Lance had pains in his right testicle, and nipples, he just attributed it to the stress he was going through on the bike. Having the guts to just deal with pain is an admirable trait, but is not always the best one to have.

"It looks like testicular cancer with large metastasis to the lungs" (12) Before I read this sentence, I knew for a fact that Lance Armstrong beat testicular cancer. After reading this sentence, I found out that he also survived lung cancer.

"I saw children with no eyelashes or eyebrows, their hair burned away by chemo, who fought with the hearts of Indurains" (5). In this sentence, chemo is the loaded word. I know more then one person who has gone through chemotherapy, lost all their hair, and later lost their life to cancer. I, myself, cannot pretend to know what it feels like to go through chemotherapy, but I can guess that it is a horrible nightmare, based on descriptions.

Quote

"You're gonna win the Tour de France one day," he said (48). Lance's bicycle coach Chris Carmichael tells Lance this after he is the first american to win the Settimana Bergamasca in 1991. The Settimana Bergamasca is a ten-day race that takes place in Italy. He won this race when he was only 20 years old, and had not raced the Tour de France yet. Regarding the Tour de France, though, it looks like Coach Carmichaels words turned out to be the truth.

Theme

A prominent theme in this memoir is, "Take the activities you excel in, and push yourself to be the very best while participating in them." Lance Armstrong did not achieve such an amazing cycling record by going and throwing the shotput everyday. He biked, ran, and swam every day, and boy, did it pay off.

Outside Reading Post B

I chose the memoir It's Not About the Bike, by Lance Armstrong. So far, I am only 32 pages into it, but it seems that Lance has had an amazing childhood. When he was thirteen, he entered and won the IronKids triathlon. When he was twelve, he swam under a coach named Chris MacCurdy's instruction, and by his guidance, became fourth in his state for the 1500-meter freestyle when he was thirteen. In addition to swimming one and a half hours in the morning, he swam two hours after school, as well as biking 10 miles to and from school.
“What makes a good athlete is the ability to absorb potential embarrassment and to suffer without complaint […] 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” (23). I thought about the first sentence of this quote some, and it has a lot of truth in it. In track, for a distance runner, if one wants to win a race, they need to almost be sprinting the whole time. It is true. Half of ones time depends on how in shape one is, and how much endurance one has, however, the other half is just sucking up all fatigue and tiredness one has, and not giving up. No matter how hard someone has ran throughout a race, they can always sprint those last few hundred meters, and shave those extra few seconds off of their time.
Lance Armstrong’s memoir is not just about his athletic success. The first chapter briefly explains how he got testicular cancer when he was 25, and was given a less than 40 percent chance of survival. Being a professional biker, he was taught to ignore pain, and just keep going. He dropped out of one of the Tours de France, just five days before the race started. A few of my friends who have read this book, said that it was horrible, and focused on his cancer too much. It’s Not About the Bike has been a gripping memoir, talking about Lance’s three fathers, semi-rough childhood, and his early athletic successes. Even though I am 32 pages into his book, I can tell that his story will be an inspiring one.

Hi guys. This is my blog.