In December, we asked you to send in your best questions for Lance Armstrong. Editor CHRIS KEYES posed a few of our favorites to the seven-time Tour de France champ.
Lance Amrstrong
Lance Armstrong
When you’re absolutely crushed on the bike, what motivates you?
Oof. Very rarely am I crushed or totally empty on the bike. Very rarely. Only a time or two in my career was I completely spent, and that motivation would have been the same as any other motivation. The motivation to win, and most importantly, the motivation not to lose. So that would be playing through my mind, just simply, this fear of failure. I cannot fail. I cannot let this thing fall apart. Just keep it together.A time like that, also I think it’s best not to panic. And just be as conservative as possible. Just relax, don’t do anything stupid. Don’t take risks the downhill. Get some food if you can, just normalize and stabilize the situation.
What do you listen to when you’re training?
I don’t listen to music on the bike. I do in the gym. The best is when you’re warming up. I listen to some hard stuff. Rage Against the Machine, that would be the primo warm up music. Lately I’ve been listening to, just in the house, the new Ryan Adams, the new Kings of Leon, Foo Fighters. Always the Foo Fighters. You could throw on that Zeppelin they did a year ago, that remixed version. That’s great for getting in the gym and hitting it hard.
What’s your favorite thing about being a dad?
Well, being a parent is the most challenging thing you’ll ever do and the biggest responsibility. I try to be friendly with my kids. I’m their father and they’re my kids, but I try to get down to their level quite a bit and be silly and goofy with them and let them view me as a buddy. That’s the way I was with my mother. She was not that far from me in age. It’s fun to see them evolve and grow and it’s interesting too because they split time between me and their mom. So they’ll go back to their mom for four days and come back and they’re doing something completely different. They learned to ride their bikes over here, and they go back to her house and say, Hey, we’re riding bikes. But over there they learn how to tie their shoes and they come back over here and I’ve missed that. That’s pretty cool.
[Our most popular reader question.]
Will you ever do the Ironman? You’ve got a lot of triathlon fans out their desperate for an answer.
Yeah. Whenever I’m done with this [comeback]. I can unequivocally say yes to that. That’s a fact. And I get asked that question every day. I don’t know when it was, less than a year ago, that I got some of these Ironman DVDs. I said, Let’s see what that’s all about. So we’ve been watching them for the past year. I’m definitely motivated to do an Ironman. We’ll go back and I’ll be close to 40, but I’ve swam more in the last three years than before that. And I don’t want to just do an Ironman. I don’t want to approach it like I approached the marathons. I want to do it as fast as I can.