Cancer taught me a plan for more purposeful living, and that in turn taught me how to train and to win more purposefully. It taught me that pain has a reason, and that sometimes the experience of losing things-whether health or a car or an old sense of self-has its own value in the scheme of life. Pain and loss are great enhancers.

There's no rule, no law, no regulation that says you can't come back. So I have every right to come back.

Motivation can't take you very far if you don't have the legs.

If you worried about falling off the bike, you'd never get on.

What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potenial embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint. I was discovering that if it was a matter of gritting my teeth, not caring how it looked, and outlasting everybody else, I won. It didn't seem to matter what sport it was-in a straight-ahead, long-distant race, I could beat anybody. If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it.

I take nothing for granted. I now have only good days, or great days.

We have unrealized capacities that sometimes only emerge in crisis.