It’s Not About the Bike. My Journey Back to Life.

(This article was originally published

in my sports page column Self-Propelled in the October 9-15, 2011 issue

of the Baguio Chronicle --- a weekly newspaper based in Baguio City, Philippines.)

I WAS too young to remember. All that remain are fragments of vague memories that I sometimes exhume from the deepest recesses of my mind in my times of solitude and in my longings of the years gone by. Memories of my mom and me taking the commuter bus from Kamuning in Quezon City, braving the flooded España Avenue following a thunderstorm shortly before dawn, to the Philippine General Hospital along Taft Avenue which was also as flooded, for my periodic checkup. Congenital cataract.

My family has a history of visual degeneration. My maternal grandmother, though she lived a relatively long life, spent the last years of her life in total darkness, totally blind. My mom suffered diminished eyesight during the last three decades of her life.

Despite the stigma, ironic as it may, I ended up as a photographer, both by passion and occupation --- something that requires strict visual capability and judgment. And I owe it all to my mom who simply refused to give up on her menopause baby to the ancient curse of cataract. By the time I entered Grade 1, I have was declared by my doctors as already cataract-free.

And while I have been wearing prescription eyeglasses for more than 10 years now (which I wear all through my waking hours), it has not diminished my passion for printed words. Books.

About a month ago, I accidentally wandered into a second-hand books store and one particular book that instantly caught my attention was Lance Armstrong’s My Journey Back To Life (It’s Not About The Bike).

I instinctively took the book maybe because I share the same passion with the man --- biking. But as the pages turn past my eyes, I discovered a few similarities, if not commonalities, with Lance Armstrong. True to the book’s title, it was not about the bike. It was, indeed, Lance Armstrong’s journey back to life. How he fought and successfully won over cancer and how his mother refused to give up his only son to the ancient curse of cancer.

“Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. I do not know why I got the illness, but it did wonders for me, and I wouldn’t want to walk away from it,” Armstrong testified. “When I was sick, I saw more beauty and triumph and truth in a single day than I ever did in a bike race; they were human moments, not miraculous ones.”

According to him, “athletes, especially cyclists, are in the business of denial. You deny all the aches and pains because you have to in order to finish the race. It’s a sport of self abuse. What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potential embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint.”

On the day he was told about it, Armstrong wrote: “I thought I knew what fear was, until I heard the words: You have a cancer.”

My previous fears, fear of not being liked, fear of being laughed at, fear of losing my money, suddenly seemed like small cowardices. Everything now stacked up differently: the anxieties of life were reprioritized into need versus want, real problem as opposed to minor scare. A bumpy plane ride was just a bumpy plane ride. It wasn’t cancer.

Armstrong defined HUMAN as the “characteristic of people as opposed to God or animals or machines, especially susceptible to weakness, and therefore showing the qualities of man. Athletes don’t tend to think of themselves in these terms. They’re too busy cultivating the aura of invincibility to admit to being fearful, weak, defenseless, vulnerable, or fallible, and for that reasons neither are they especially kind, considerate, merciful, benign, or forgiving, to themselves or anyone around them.”

“(But) as I sat in my house alone that first night, it was humbling to be so scared; more than that, it was humanizing. One thing you realize when you’re sick is that you aren’t the only person who needs support --- sometimes you have to be the one who supports others.”

To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing. Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you.

Dispiritedness and disappointments, these were the real perils of lie, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit.

And while Armstrong admitted that “chemo was lonely”, he said he discovered “a new sense of purpose” which “had nothing to do with my recognition and exploits on a bike; I no longer felt that it was my role in life to be a cyclist; my role was to be cancer survivor. My strongest connections and feelings were with people who were fighting cancer and asking the same question I was: am I going to die?”

We each cope differently with the specter if deaths. Some people deny it. Some pray. Some numb themselves with tequila; we are supposed to face it straightforwardly, armed with nothing but courage --- the quality of spirit that enables one to encounter danger with firmness and without fear. We have unrealized capacities that sometimes only emerge in crisis; if there is a purpose to the suffering that is cancer, I think it must be this: it’s meant to improve us; cancer is not a form of death; I choose to redefine it: it is a part of life.

In less than two years after he was pronounced as cancer-free, Lance Armstrong won his first of seven consecutive Tour de France titles --- a feat no man ever did before. A record.

Until then and have a safe ride all the time and don’t forget to wear that cycling helmet each time. Remember: YOU CAN BEAT THE EGG WITHOUT BREAKING THE SHELL.* (SP20)