Tour de’ LanceHave you guys have you read a book called the "Its not about bike", its written by a certain guy called Lance Armstrong...
I wanted to write about this book, because this happens to one of the best books I have ever read in life (just fyi, I read quite a lot, I would have finished about, say 2000 of your Jeffry Archer style knovels- more or less the complete series of authors like Michael Crichton, Jeff Arch, Ayn rand, Paulo Coelho, a whole room full of hardy boys, Archie’s etc).
Ok but this book particularly impressed me, and you know why, because that Armstrong fellow I spoke about no, he just happens to have
- won the tour de France in 1999 - and yeah as you might have been aware he had been sick earlier (a little cancer in his testicles which had to be amputated and had a brain surgery too), and yeah if you know, tour de France isn’t just another race, its THE MOST grueling race in the world, - about 2,290 miles of racing- that’s even far'er than distance been Delhi and Chennai- about 2,200 Km which our fastest train in the country take 2 days to complete. So you can imagine how far it is.
Actually what happens is in that particular race, you got some of the worlds most and best professional cyclists coming in and competing there and guess what- forget winning, half the people don’t even finish the race.
- So book tells about how he not just won "THE RACE" in quotes, caps and bold (which normally itself is pretty tough to finish, imagine winning it after given a 40% chance of survival + having testicle removed + a brain surgery). But also he not just won it once; he just about went on again and won the race for another 6 times- consecutive till about 2005.
There are so many things he says in that book, so many little things, which you want to frame it and keep it right in your room to see every day. Like lemme give u a sampler, this is Para from his book where he says how he got cancer and still had to keep training.
“Some of it is not easy to tell or comfortable to hear. I am not a storybook hero and this is not Disneyland. I'll give an example: I've read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don’t fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else.
Cancer is like that, too. Good strong people get cancer, and they do all the right things to beat it and they still die. I have seen children with no eyelashes or eyebrows, their hair burned away by chemo, but who still fought with the hearts of indurian. (Off quote, do you know who Indurian is, do a google search), I don’t why I am still alive. I can only guess, there are many things I still don’t completely understand, and all I can do is tell you, what happened’. End quote.
Infact it’s so superb that, once you finish, you look very small in front of what he's done. Like we cant we wake up on the alarm in one ring (or at least I cant).. Sic how depressing.
Actually you know what, don’t listen to me, JUST go buy this book, cause if at the end of your life if you have done endured and done atleast one tenth what lance had gone and done, trust me you would already be a great guy.
Sathish
