Table of Contents
Introduction ix
1. Good News 1
2. Diagnosis 10
3. The Road 22
4. The Amateur 44
5. Ahab 55
6. The Big C 66
7. “We’re Just the Americans, Man!” 78
8. I Can’t Believe It. I Won? 92
9. You’re Not Supposed to See This 104
10. If God Were a Cyclist… 112
11. For a Little While, I Was Cured 121
12. Desperation 131
13. Dad, I Gotta Do This 138
14. The Trenches 146
15. Rocket Launch 154
16. The Gavia 172
17. The Light in Your Face Just Came On Again 182
18. Beyond Beijing 186
19. As Good As It Gets 202
Epilogue 210
Acknowledgments 213
Notes 218
Introduction
I didn’t know where the kid was going. I just knew it was going to be interesting. I was standing next to my twenty-yearold son Taylor on the dais at an awards banquet in Davis, California. I’d just introduced him to a crowd of three hundred or so people at a ceremony hosted by the US Bicycling Hall of Fame. USA Cycling had named Taylor its 2010 Male Athlete of the Year. As he made his way to the lectern, someone fired up a Lady Gaga tune, inspiring T to shake his booty in the direction of the crowd, which roared with laughter. The prospect of giving an acceptance speech didn’t exactly rattle him. Taylor could have talked about any number of victories: in the five years he’s been racing a bike, he’s won five world championships. Instead, he told the story of “the Text,” a message I’d sent him as he struggled through a tough French race called the Tour de l’Avenir. After winning the prologue – a short, solo effort against the clock – he’d crashed heavily on a rain-slicked descent toward the end of the second stage. As he lay dazed and bleeding on the road, his shorts and jersey shredded, he was ringed by anxious onlookers: his team director, Patrick Jonker, and several paramedics, all of them Tour de France veterans. They urged him to abandon the race, to board the waiting ambulance. Shaking them off, T climbed back on his bike. He went from the yellow jersey to the lanterne rouge that day – from first to last. After returning from the hospital with a half mile of bandages on his left side, he took the start the next morning.
He raced in pain that day and the next. On the eve of Stage 5, the most mountainous and difficult of the race, he sent me a text, describing his condition as “pretty f-ed.” His will to keep racing seemed to be wavering. “If they go crazy on those climbs tomrw and I get dropped… not sure if I’ll finish.”
“So I send that to my dad,” Taylor told his audience, “and I get back a text about this long.” He held his thumb and forefinger about five inches apart. While laughing along with the crowd, I also reflected on how much time it had taken me to peck out a five-inch text message. Since my diagnosis with young-onset Parkinson’s disease about ten years ago, my hands don’t work as well as they used to.
Taylor wanted to bail on the race, is what it boiled down to, and he wanted my blessing. Which was not forthcoming.
“Hmmm. OK. See how it goes,” is how I began my reply. “Start with the mindframe that you’re gonna finish the stage, tho, otherwise you’re done for sure.” And I proceeded to lay it on thick. If he was capable of competing, he needed to honor his commitment to his team, to show his true character, to remember what his mother and I had instilled in him from the beginning, the lesson my own father had drilled into me: Phinneys don’t quit.
Before beginning this memoir, I held in my head a CliffsNotes version of my father as a kind of cold, close-minded scientist who impeded my success as much as he enabled it. The exercise of writing this book made me realize, fairly quickly, that while it made my journey seem slightly more heroic – Look at everything I’ve had to overcome! – the CliffsNotes version was incomplete, and unfair.
Damon Dodge Phinney had more depth and generosity than I long gave him credit for. His love was often disguised, but always present. Even as he disagreed with what he viewed as my risky, wrong-headed career choice, he supported me. In his way. He took time off from his job to drive me to races from Kentucky to Canada to California. His fervent wish that I wasn’t racing didn’t stop him from peppering me with advice on how to race better. One or two days after my competitions, he would slide unsolicited, single-spaced typed letters under my apartment door. Disapproving of my line of work (he would have much preferred to see me head off to college) didn’t preclude him from holding – and sharing – strong opinions on how I went about my job. After giving them a brisk once-over, I usually tossed them, believing I knew better. As I grew older and recalled his advice, I was struck by how spot-on and incisive it often was.
Damon was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in 1987. It was grim news, and, in its way, a blessing. Rather than a death sentence, he heard a gong that jarred him out of his lifelong stoicism. It was in the final fourteen years of his life that my father truly learned to reach out to people, to show the world his inner light, even as he fought his cancer like a Spartan at Thermopylae. In so doing, he set an example of grace and courage that turned out to be his greatest gift to me, as I cope with my own chronic disease.
“Phinneys don’t quit,” declared Taylor, explaining to the audience why he gutted it out in Stage 5 at the Tour de l’Avenir. Because he made that decision, because he pushed through the pain, because he endured, he learned something vital. T stayed the course, worked hard for his team, and, following that ebb, he began to flow. He felt stronger at the end of that eight-day race than he had in the beginning. And the form he found in the final stages of L’Avenir helped him ten days later in Greenville, South Carolina. There, he won his first professional national road title, eking out a 0.14-second victory over Levi Leipheimer in the USPRO time trial championships – a stunning outcome. Levi is one of the best in the world in that discipline. A fortnight after Greenville, Taylor won the U23 (under twenty-three) world title in the same event in Melbourne, Australia.
Those races down under were his last as an espoir. (That’s a French word for a promising young rider. Translated literally, it means “hope.”) T was primed for his next quantum leap – this time to the top of the pro ranks. He’d recently signed a multimillion-dollar deal with the BMC professional racing team. Funded by Swiss businessman Andy Rihs, BMC is directed by my old boss, Jim Ochowicz. It was Och (rhymes with “coach”) who created the 7-Eleven team I rode with for nine years, from its early-’80s success in this country through its pioneering days as the first North American team to contest the Tour de France. Twenty years after my last race in the red, white, and green tricot of Team Slurpee, as we were known, we entrusted Taylor to Jim’s care.
To follow Taylor’s races in Melbourne, I found myself devouring Twitter updates at 3 a.m. in a Glasgow hotel. While he was in Australia for Worlds, I was in Scotland for the World Parkinson’s Congress. In addition to serving as a featured speaker at three of the sessions, I represented the foundation that bears my name. Meeting with leaders in the PD community, I engaged in our ongoing conversation on how to live better with this disease.
Sixteen years after I stopped riding a bike for a living, I’m still in a race. But this is a race I can’t quit, or even take a break from. Like an insidious vine, Parkinson’s has crept and coiled its way into every corner and recess of my life, slowing me in all ways. The disease has forced me to see the world differently – to recognize and seize the small moments, the hidden grace notes available to us every day. That explains the tag line, or motto, of the Davis Phinney Foundation: Every Victory Counts.
Three of Taylor’s world titles, incidentally, have come in the individual pursuit, an event contested by riders who start on opposite sides of a banked oval track. The Happiness of Pursuit is more than just a pun on my son’s track specialty. On a deeper level, “pursuit” denotes action. It is the opposite of the inertia and resignation that have settled on too many members of my tribe, as I refer to my tremulous collective. “Pursuit” in this context means taking responsibility for your own happiness. It is the pro-active seeking out of what I have come to call “curative moments.” Living the last two decades with PD, I’ve learned to savor and magnify these moments. I appreciate that I have more control over the course of the disease than I once thought, and that these lesser triumphs provide their own source of cure. And that is the heart, the crux, the essence of my message to the tribe. With a chronic illness, it can be all too easy to live in the shadows, to become absorbed in the down times, but in bike racing, as in life, it’s imperative never to renoncer a l’espoir – to give up hope. To concede, to abandon the race, is to miss out on those charged instances, those gratifying moments of victory, those few seconds that sustain us. Those stories, and the lessons therein, make up the happiness of pursuit.
