Moths Have Eaten an Infamous Armstrong Poster

The basement in my home is a dungeon. Construction workers poured the concrete walls over a hundred years ago, and when it rains, the walls leak like an old pirate ship. I store my road bike in the basement, a corner of the dungeon tucked inside a small alcove. During the winter or when it’s really raining, I come inside the leaky dungeon, put my bike on a trainer, and ride for an hour while I stare at the posters on the walls.

I collected most of the posters in college, and one poster catches my attention each time I ride, especially times like right now, for the three weeks in July when a hundred professional riders compete in the two-thousand-mile race called the Tour de France.

The poster is of Lance Armstrong, his famous “What Am I On?” poster. A blurred Armstrong rides along a country road in his iconic Postal uniform on his Trek bicycle frame. The red, white, and blue colors evoke the best of American, even Texan, pride, the ideas that happiness can be pursued and success is democratized to everyone willing to work hard. In the background behind Lance is a white building resembling a country church. Perhaps the church signifies devotion and zeal, even worship. In the upper right-hand corner the poster reads:

This is my body and I can do whatever I want to it, I can push it, study it, tweak it, listen to it. Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?

The poster was actually part of a broader marketing campaign by Nike. A television commercial employed the same brash and polemical wording on the poster to rebuke the early rumors of Lance’s steroid use and blood doping.

As I said, I’ve had this poster since college, and many times as a college athlete, I would look up and think, If I work hard, if I do the work with excellence and effort, passion and devotion, if I put in the six-hour days and I’m smart about it, then I will get ahead. It. Will. Happen.

I did this because, more than just celebrating Armstrong’s work ethic, the poster promised—indeed the “Legend of Lance” promised—similar results to all who had ears to hear. The way the poster shows Lance riding slightly uphill underscores this promise. His skills and determination shined brightest on French mountains, so the climbing posture fits. But the posture also extends the promise of progress to any devoted viewer, any true believer in hard work. You can do this too, it whispers. Armstrong climbed back from cancer by riding his bike uphill six hours a day. What are you on?

Needless to say, that poster looks different to me today than it did in college.

Not only was Lance Armstrong stripped of all seven of the titles he won in the Tour de France, but during that era the governing body of the race has chosen not to award other winners because of such pervasive use of performance-enhancing drugs. Most top riders have confessed to cheating or been credibly accused.

I ponder these realities and see the potential to make what some call a “Jesus juke,” that is, to quickly move from one story—whether a sad or sappy story—to a fairly obvious connection to Jesus, often some sentimental truth. But in all seriousness, the story of Lance and this particular “What Am I On?” poster has often led me to reflect upon Jesus’s words about treasure. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,” Jesus said. “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matt. 6:19–20).

The promise, however, offers more than we likely realize at first. God offers forgiveness for cheaters. Instead of standing trial for our failings, God offers to let the death of Christ stand as the public reckoning for wrongs. And here is the real treasure, forgiveness from God and friendship with him that never fades.

I know he’s controversial, but I like Armstrong—not only back in the day when he raced but now. I appreciated the early autobiography It’s Not About the Bike written with Sally Jenkins, and I appreciate now his predictably arrogant hot takes on his podcast The Move. And I can appreciate his recent attempts to engage the conversation of transgenderism in sports, chiefly biological men playing against biological women.

Yet of course I understand the polarization, like on Twitter for instance. The comments under his posts fall almost exclusively in the categories of either “I love you, Lance” or “I hate you.” This is because he’s also hurt people, not only back in the day when he squashed his accusers, but the way his hot takes still cut down others. For all the other falsehoods about Armstrong’s integrity in his that early autobiography, it really was true that it’s not about the bike. Lance is about Lance, then and now.

And I feel this same temptation tug at me, even as I preach and lead a church and love my wife and kids and point others to Jesus. Too often it’s about Benjamin.

So I guess I long for Armstrong to know—as I long for myself and others to know—the treasure of God’s forgiveness and what it means to be caught up in something bigger, indeed Somone bigger, than myself. Because while the promise of the poster has rusted, the promise from Jesus has not and will not.

Roadie Rage

A few years ago I submitted an article to a local periodical called the Tucson Pedaler. (Aside, I used to live in Tucson.) I’m not sure they are still publishing, but in the summer of 2011, they ran a short story about a cyclist who had an altercation with a car driver and they asked readers to send in their reflections about the story. So I did. I called it “Roadie Rage,” and they published it in the August/September 2011 Issue. For this week’s post, I have included it below. By way of background, a “roadie” is a cyclist that rides (primarily) on the road; for those that know nothing about cycling, think Lance Armstrong type bikes.

Because I ride my bike a few times a week, often near traffic, I am frequently reminded of my words in this article. In fact this morning, in snowy weather, let’s just say it is a remote possibility that I raised my voice to one particular car driver – a driver who was quickly too far away to hear what I said and who, naturally on a very cold day, had the car windows rolled up and would not have heard what I said anyway. And maybe that was for the best. Regardless, this morning I was reminded that I am a man still in need of God’s grace and that I long for the maturity of character to respond rightly to my own reactions.

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Roadie Rage: Natural, but Wrong Nonetheless

I have a three-year-old son who loves to wrestle his dad. However, the other day when we were wrestling, he kicked me in the crotch.

I think it was an accident, but I yelled anyway. I reacted. Protective instincts took over. I pushed him away. There was a twinge of rage in my heart.

It all happened very quickly, but in a moment, I was reminded that I am fragile. I am vulnerable. I can be hurt. So I lashed out.  But it was only natural, right?

Last week I read a police report about a cyclist who reacted; a cyclist who lashed out. Apparently the cyclist was cut-off by an absentminded motorist. At a stop-light, he caught up to the car and pounded on the passenger side door with enough force to leave dents. He broke the side mirror and promised in colorful words to do the same to the woman driver. “I will run you off the road and you will know how it feels,” he roared. From her cell, the women called 911, but before the police arrived, the perpetrator pedaled away.

What is uncommon about this event is not the close call between motorist and cyclist. Anyone who has ever spent time as a road cyclist knows such an experience – a car runs a red light; a large pickup truck brushes you back; a city bus zips by only to slam on its breaks while 30 tons jerk over into the bike lane to make a pickup.

Instantly, your blood boils.  You see red.  Obscenities spring forth as from a geyser.  “Don’t you know that is how people get killed!”

Yes, we cyclists can ‘bob and weave’ in traffic with nimbleness, and can cover great distances at great speeds, but we often forget that we are wearing spandex and sitting on a piece of machinery weighing twenty pounds with only a helmet for protection. We are vulnerable.  We can be hurt.  So we lash out. It is only natural, right?

I suspect that most who read this harrowing account of the assaulted motorist, feel a measure of compassion for her, culpable though she is. Yet, I suspect a few, but still too many, read of the cyclist’s actions with vicarious pride. “Finally, someone stood up for us. Somebody did what I have never had the chance or courage to do myself,” they think.

As the cyclist put away his bike that day, safe at home, I wonder if he felt ashamed of his actions, as I did after I pushed my son away when he accidentally kicked me. Or perhaps, on the other hand, as he recounted the ordeal to his buddies, a grand satisfaction welled up regarding how ‘he showed her’. It is impossible to know.

In the end, while the cyclist’s actions (and ours) may be in many respects “natural” reactions – just as when a doctor taps you on the knee with a rubber, triangle hammer to check your reflexes, and you kick – we must conclude that what comes natural is not always right. Maturity and character are not always best assessed by what comes natural, but in how we react to our own reactions.

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[Image from a picture I took on Thanksgiving Day 2014 riding Peter's Mountain in Harrisburg, PA]

Uh oh! Michael R. just stole your KOM!

That’s the subject line of an email I got just over two months ago. You can see a picture of the email above.

It still makes me mad. I didn’t lose my KOM, someone stole it. Someone named Michael. A plague on his house, I say.

Lost My KOM

But before you call the police, you should know that while KOMs are valuable to me, they are actually meant to be stolen; before Michael stole it from me, I stole it from a guy named Brian.

At this point, I know most of my readers are lost, so let me help: KOM stands for “King of (the) Mountain.” It’s a cycling term – sometimes a formal designation in professional cycling, and sometimes an informal one.

I didn’t earn my KOM in professional cycling of course, but while using the app called Strava (www.strava.com).

Strava is a combo of Facebook and a personal fitness tracker, but with the ability to compete on designated “segments.” There are thousands of “segments” across the world. And when you ride through one with a GPS, you get timed, and then your time is ranked against all of the other riders that have ridden that segment.

You can see in the email that my KOM was on the “Overton Climb”— stress on the word “was”; Michael beat my time by 8 seconds.

As mad as I was at whoever this Michael guy is, I was thankful for the reminder that treasures on earth do not last. Here on earth, people can steal them. But I am also thankful for the reminder that  Jesus gives: there is a place to keep treasures that is more secure than Fort Knox.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19-21, ESV)

Where is your treasure – on earth or in Heaven?

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