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.