The truth is, if you asked me to choose between winning the Tour de France and cancer, I would choose cancer. Odd as it sounds, I would rather have the title of cancer survivor than winner of the Tour, because of what it has done for me as a human being, a man, a husband, a son, and a father. - Lance Armstrong
Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever. That surrender, even the smallest act of giving up, stays with me. So when I feel like quitting, I ask myself, which would I rather live with? - Lance Armstrong (It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life)
Without cancer, I never would have won a single Tour de France. Cancer taught me a plan for more purposeful living, and that in turn taught me how to train and to win more purposefully. It taught me that pain has a reason, and that sometimes the experience of losing things — whether health or a car or an old sense of self — has its own value in the scheme of life. Pain and loss are great enhancers.- ibid, As quoted in Forbes Magazine (3 December 2001)
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People around the world have known Lance Armstrong as a a bicycle hero, a winner of Tour de France a record 7 times in his career. They also know him as a controversial character with doping allegations and fights with cancer... This one's not about that.
This 2000 autobiographical book with Sally Jenkins, written shortly after he won the 1999 Tour de France. It is about how a cocky brash kid who drove a red sports car, who struggled through life with parental issues, peer pressures, reached the top, fell into cancer, with hardly 3% chance of survival... in 1996, when he had been diagnosed with testicular cancer, which spread to his lungs, abdomen and brain. This disrupted his career, and the book is about his journey back...
The book covers his story from childhood to the 1999 Tour, and the birth of his first child. A subsequent autobiographical instalment, entitled Every Second Counts and also with Sally Jenkins as co-author, continues the narrative until his 2003 Tour victory.
Read this if you ever feel the need of encouragement - to never quit. Even when you want to. Even when you have to. Even when you need to... you don't quit.. Why? Because you never give up.
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