CYCLING. CANCER. LIFE.
Readers, you got to buy, beg, borrow or steal Lance Armstrong's autobiography - It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life co-authored by Sally Jenkins, a Sports journalist! In more ways than one, my best investment for a long time (I also bought myself PuLa's Purvaranga and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, along with it. Click here for my book review of The Kite Runner)
It was just a few minutes back that I finished reading the above said autobiography. For the uninitiated, Lance Armstrong is a cyclist who was diagnosed with stage 3 Testicular Cancer. He battled the deadly disease to come back and win the Tour de France: undoubtedly the most physically enduring race in competitive cycling.
The book provides a look into the trials (the time-trials including) and tribulations that embrace the mind of a cancer patient. Lance is a young, ambitious sportsman with a free spirit and cancer attempts to crush it. Lance fights, battles and breathes to the point of abusing "those damned cells", quite literally until he gets rid of them completely. This is one man's story of battling the negativity and staying on top when life takes one to the lowest. He is given a 50% chance of survival (or was it lower than that), has to undergo neuro-surgery and is asked to "store" his sperm in a sperm bank because he might not be able to produce it again!
As much as it is about battling cancer, the narration is interspersed with little snippets about the people he meets while battling the ordeal. The most profound, according to me, is the nurse who takes care of Lance while he undergoes "chemo" (LaTrice, whom he calls the real-life Angel). The book shows that the people who stick by you through your worst are the ones you can call your own. Lance has a great set of friends and a mother with a heart of Gold!
I would whole-heartedly recommend this book to everyone reading this review- irrespective of whether you know a cancer patient/survivor or not. There are things, instances and situations that you can relate to and this book can inspire, really! Without taking anything away from the book, I must say that the book is written with style and in a way that makes the taste linger days after you've finished reading it; especially some conversations Lance had during the "chemo" and post-Cancer. Quite like the feeling I had after I read Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom!
I'd immense respect for this man, solely for winning the Tour de France several times...now have an added reason for that. Attaboy Lance!
PS: In one-odd instances I was quite almost reliving the climax from the Aamir Khan starrer Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, when Lance was describing the tantalisingly close finishes in the Tour-stages!
