As the days passed, after Joe and his wife had gone back home, I asked myself, “what happened to me?”

I’d been on my bike for that race, going back-and-forth across the course, first on the flats, then on some hills. It had felt good. (Image from a great organization, Yellowbikes.org.)

So I started riding again.

I found my legs again. There was a group that left a nearby bar each Thursday, and went for 15 miles through the streets of the city, ending at the same bar for beer and iced tea. I found myself riding to the start of the ride, riding it with them, sharing a beer afterward, then riding home.

A few years later, I felt good enough to ride on my own, to pick my way through the city, to find new routes on a Sunday morning, before the muggers woke up, or to head into the Sun, toward Stone Mountain, to ride around it (cars must pay but bikes ride free), and to return in triumph, to a shower, to a beer, and to sleep the sleep of the righteous.

Was it Lance who had saved me, or Joe, or this yellow bike, now riddled with rust where paint had flaked off? I didn’t care. I was long past 40 but I felt young, younger than I’d even felt in Texas, strong, proud, fast, freewheeling down the hills of the city, even passing cars sometimes, my fellow riders admiring me for my sleek antique machine, the cars giving me a thumbs-up when they saw my whitening beard.

What happened to Lance, as the world knows now, was cancer. (Image of a cancer cell from DPCWeb.)

Even while riding that Olympic race in Atlanta he was full of it. It had started in his testicles and, by the time he felt weak enough to get checked-out, it was everywhere. Now it was lymphoma. The prognosis was fatal. “You have a 30 percent chance,” the doctors told him, although they didn’t believe it themselves. But they had to give him something.

Give me everything you got, he said.

So they did. The idea of chemotherapy is that, because cancer cells grow like crazy, out of control, that their frenzy leaves them weaker then other cells. (Learn all about it here.)

So kill the patient, the doctors say. Fill him or her with deadly deadly chemicals and, maybe, if we’re lucky, the cancer cells will die first. Maybe, if we’re real lucky, all of them will die, so we keep killing the patient even when the cancer seems gone, because if one cell survives, just one, it will multiply, and the cancer will come back. Before we knew what cancer was victims called the diease “consumption,” because the body would consume itself, feeding the rogue cells, growing weaker in the frenzy, exhausting itself to death.

I knew all this. I knew it too well. Back in Houston, back when I was Lance’s age, when I first started riding with Joe, a close friend got a similar cancer. She had the funny idea that, if she went to Hermann Hospital for treatment that was good, for it was the “House of Life,” while if she were sent to M.D. Anderson it was to die, for that was “the House of Death.” Her first bout was at Hermann, but then came Anderson. Debbie Wyatt was 23 when she passed away.

Call it courage, a miracle, or dumb luck, but somehow Lance Armstrong saw 24.

He even saw 25, and he started riding again. But he was getting no results, he was far behind the field, and he thought about quitting. A coach named Craig Carmichael and a rider from that old 7-11 team, Bob Roll, reportedly convinced him to keep trying.

Don't ride for the win, they said, or the glory or the fame. Ride for yourself. Just ride.