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    strong I was. I didn’t care if it was just a $100 cash prize, I would tear the legs off the other riders to get at it.
    There are degrees of competitive cycling, and they are rated by category, with Category 1 being the highest level, Category 4 the lowest. I started out in the “Cat 4″ races at the Tuesday-night
    crits, but I was anxious to move up. In order to do so you had to have results, win a certain number of races. But I was too impatient for that, so I convinced the organizers to let me ride in
    the Cat 3 race with the older and more experienced group. The organizers told me, “Okay, but whatever you do, don’t win.” If I drew too much attention to myself, there might be a big stink
    about how they had let me skip the requirements.
    I won. I couldn’t help it. I dusted the other riders. Afterward there was some discussion about what to do with me, and one option was suspending me. Instead, they upgraded me. There were
    three or four men around there who were Cat 1 riders, local heroes, and they all rode for the Richardson Bike Mart, so I began training with them, a 16-year-old riding with guys
    in their late 20s.
    By now I was the national rookie of the year in sprint triathlons, and my mother and I realized that I had a future as an athlete. I was making about $20,000 a year, and I began keeping a
    Rolodex full of business contacts. I needed sponsors and supporters who were willing to front my airfare and my expenses to various races. My mother told me, “Look, Lance, if you’re going
    to get anywhere, you’re going to have to do it yourself, because no one is going to do it for you.”
    My mother had become my best friend and most loyal ally She was my organizer and my motivator, a dynamo. “If you can’t give 110 percent, you won’t make it,” she would tell me.
    She brought an organizational flair to my training. “Look, I don’t know what you need,” she’d say. “But I recommend that you sit down and do a mental check of everything, because you
    don’t want to get there and not have it.” I was proud of her, and we were very much alike; we understood each other perfectly, and when we were together we didn’t have to say much. We
    just knew. She always found a way to get me the latest bike I wanted, or the accessories that went with it. In fact, she still has all of my discarded gears and pedals, because they were so
    expensive she couldn’t bear to get rid of them.
    We traveled all over together, entering me in 10K runs and triathlons. We even began to think that I could be an Olympian. I still carried the silver-dollar good-luck piece, and now she gave
    me a key chain that said “1988″ on it–the year of the next summer Olympics.
    Every day after school I’d run six miles, and then get on my bike and ride into the evening. I learned to love Texas on those rides. The countryside was beautiful, in a desolate kind of way.
    You could ride out on the back roads through vast ranchland and cotton fields with nothing in the distance but water towers, grain elevators, and dilapidated sheds. The grass was chewed to
    nubs by livestock and the dirt looked like what’s left in the bottom of an old cup of coffee. Sometimes I’d find rolling fields of wildflowers, and solitary mesquite trees blown into strange
    shapes. But other times the countryside was just flat yellowish-brown prairie, with the
    occasional gas station, everything fields, fields of brown grass, fields of cotton, just flat and awful, and windy. Dallas is the third-windiest city in the country. But it was good for me.
    Resistance.
    One afternoon I got run off the road by a truck. By then, I had discovered my middle finger, and I flashed it at the driver. He pulled over, and threw a gas can at me, and came after me. I ran,
    leaving my beautiful Mercier bike by the side of the road. The guy stomped on it, damaging it.
    Before he drove off I got his license number, and my mom took the guy to court, and won. In the meantime,