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No one quite understood that except for Kiri. She kept her composure when she had every right to be
distraught and furious with me for pulling the rug out from under her. While I was out playing golf every
day, she was homeless, dogless, and jobless, reading the classifieds and wondering how we were going to
support ourselves. My mother sympathized with what she was going through. She would call us, ask to
speak with Kiri, and say, "How are you doing?"
But after several weeks of the golf, the drinking, the Mexican food, Kiri decided it was enough somebody
had to try to get through to me. One morning we were sitting outside on the patio having coffee. I put down
my cup and said, "Well, okay, I'll see you later. It's my tee time."
"Lance," Kiri said, "what am I doing today?"
"What do you mean?"
"You didn't ask me what I was going to do today. You didn't ask me what I wanted to do, or if I minded if
you played golf. You just told me what you were going to do. Do you care what I'm doing?"
"Oh, sorry," I said.
"What am I doing today?" she said. "What am I doing? Tell me that."
I was silent. I didn't know what to say.
"You need to decide something," she told me. "You need to decide if you are going to retire for real, and be
a golf-playing, beer-drinking, Mexican-food-eating slob. If you are, that's fine. I love you, and I'll marry
you anyway. But I just need to know, so I can get myself together and go back on the street, and get a job to
support your golfing. Just tell me. But if you're not going to retire, then you need to stop eating and
drinking like this and being a bum, and you need to figure it out, because you are deciding by not deciding,
and that is so un-Lance. It is just not you. And I'm not quite sure who you are right now. I love you
anyway, but you need to figure something out."
She wasn't angry as she said it. She was just right: I didn't really know what I was trying to accomplish, and
I was just being a bum. All of a sudden I saw a reflection of myself as a retiree in her eyes, and I didn't like
it. She wasn't going to live an idle life, and I didn't blame her.
Quietly, she said, "So tell me if we're going to stay in Austin. If so, I'm going to get a job, because I'm not
going to sit at home while you play golf. I'm so bored."
Normally, nobody could talk to me like that. But she said it almost sweetly, without fighting. Kiri knew
how stubborn I could be when someone tried to butt heads with me; it was my old reflex against control
and authority. I don't like to be cornered, and when I am, I will fight my way out, whether physically or
logically or emotionally. But as she spoke to me I didn't feel attacked or defensive, or hurt, or picked on, I
just knew the honest truth when I heard it. It was, in a quietly sarcastic way, a very profound conversation.
I stood up from the table.
"Okay," I said. "Let me think about it."
I went to play golf anyway, because I knew Kiri didn't mind that. Golf wasn't the issue. The issue was
finding myself again.
KIK AND STAPLETON AND CARMICHAEL AND OCH conspired against me, talking constantly
behind my back about how to get me back on the bike. I continued to say that I was retiring, but as the days
wore on, I began to waver. Bill persuaded me to commit to one last race, the U.S. Pro Championships,
which would be held in Philadelphia in May.
Chris Carmichael flew to Austin. He took one look in my garage, at the bike still in its carrying bag, and
shook his head. Chris felt like Kiri did, that I needed to make a conscious decision about whether I
belonged back on the bike. "You're alive again, and now you need to get back to living," he repeated. But
he knew I wasn't ready to commit to another full-scale comeback yet, so the surface excuse he gave for
coming to Austin was simply to put together a training plan for the U.S. Championships. Also, the second
Ride for the Roses was coming up, and the race would be a criterium around downtown Austin requiring
that I be at least minimally fit. "You can't go out like this," Chris said, gesturing at my body. "You don't
want to embarrass your foundation."
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. "Let's get out of
town," he said. "You can't focus here, there's too much golf, too many distractions."
We tried to think of a place to go. Arizona? Too hot. Colorado? Too high altitude. Then I said, "Remember
Boone? That little hippie town in North Carolina?"
Boone was high in the Appalachians on the route of the old Tour Du Pont, and I had fond memories of it. I
had won the Tour Du Pont twice there, and I had spent many afternoons cycling and suffering on its biggest
peak, Beech Mountain, which was the crucial climbing stage of the race. It was arduous but beautiful
country, and Boone itself was a college town full of students and professors from nearby Appalachian State
University. Conveniently, it had a training facility at the university, and plenty of cabins for rent in the
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