The way you live your life, the perspective you select, is a choice you make every single day when you wake up. It's yours to decide.

The day it all changed. The day I stated never to take anything for granted. The day I learned to take charge of my life. It was the day I was diagnosed with cancer.

Everything in my life is in perspective. OK, perspective ebbs and flows. I've had bad days, but they weren't in the last years. A bad day is 2 October 1996: 'We've got bad news for you, you've got advanced testicular cancer and you've got a coin's toss chance of survival.' That's a bad day.

The unwillingness to accept anything short of victory, that underlying fury, is the fundamental building block of my bottomless motivation to succeed. It is my credo in all that I do in life from battling cancer to bicycle racing.

My actions and reactions, and the way I treated certain scenarios, were way out of line, so I deserved some punishment.

Hard work, sacrifice and focus will never show up in tests.

There were something like 50 good, arduous climbs around Nice, solid inclines of ten miles or more. The trick was not to climb every once in awhile, but to climb repeatedly. I would do three different climbs in one day, over the course of a six- or seven-hour ride. A 12 mile climb took about an hour, so that tells you what my days were like.