A summary of what we found of great value in his book:
- Lance Armstrong, It’s not about the bike, My journey back to life -
Do career builders and entrepreneurs require nurturing, support, close mentors, coaches, in short, a team? Lance Armstrong won six Tour de France’s with his team.
We found one of the messages Lance communicates in his book particularly powerful; the people that share his journey. He shares abundantly about these people that nurtured him when times were tough; acknowledging the amazing strength these individuals brought him. Lance Armstrong would have found it much harder to become a multiple Tour de France winner if it were not for the people supporting him through his fight against cancer and after that getting ready for his first Tour de France win.
They were there when he began practicing after winning cancer. They were there when he wanted to give up. At a certain stage Lance did almost give up, he had a life insurance fund paying out every month and said he was retired. His coach, Chris Carmichael, set him up with the rest of the people around him. Lance’s foundation against cancer was organizing a competition and the people close to him told him he would have to get back in shape for this ride. Quoting from the book:
P199, Chris insisted that regardless of what I decided about retirement, I needed an eight- to ten-day intensive training camp to get back to form-and I needed to do it somewhere other than Austin (Lances home town). “Let’s get out of town,” he said. “You can’t focus here, there’s too much golf, too many distractions.”
They went to a small town called Boone, a little hippie town in North Carolina; Lance, Chris and Bob Roll, an old road racer buddy. Those few days changed Lance Armstrong back into the man he used to be. At the end of the training camp they decided to top Beech Mountain.
P201, Toward the end of the camp, we decided to ride Beech Mountain. Chris knew exactly what he was doing when he suggested it, because there was a time when I owned that mountain. It was a strenuous 5,000-foot climb with a snowcapped summit, and it had been the crucial stage in my two Tour Du Pont victories. I remembered laboring on up the mountainside with crowds lined along the route, and how they had painted my name across the road: “Go Armstrong.”
P202, My body reacted instinctively to the climb. Mindlessly, I rose out of my seat and picked up the pace. Suddenly, Chris pulled up behind me in the follow car, rolled down his window, and began driving me on. “Go, go, go, go!” he yelled. I glanced back at him. “Allez Lance, allez, allez!” he yelled. I mashed down on the pedals, heard my breath grow shorter, and I accelerated.
As he pumped his pedals up the mountain, his name passed under him. Go Armstrong was still visible on the tarmac in faded paint. The ride up that mountain changed everything and at the end of the ten days he made a suggestion to coach Chris:
P203, That night at dinner, I said to Chris causally, “I wonder if I could get into that race in Atlanta.”
“Let’s do it,” Chris said.
That evening, we started figuring out my comeback. Chris placed a bunch of calls, trying to find me some new racing wheels. Then called Bill Stapleton, and said, “Get ready. He’s coming back a different guy. The guy we used to know.”
The message we took out of the book as entrepreneurs and career builders:
Drop the “I’m going to do it on my own” attitude. Lance succeeded because he allowed the people in his life to be there for him, to nurture him and lift him up when necessary. He is now a multiple Tour de France winner because of these people. Every person needs to be nurtured, be it in building ones career or business.
“All of us sometimes need someone riding next to us and shouting Go, go, go, go!”
