When you know your not going to die, you have to ask yourself... What's the highest and best use for myself.

I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles.

No one automatically gives you respect just because you show up. You have to earn it

I have never doped … I have competed as an endurance athlete for 25 years with no spike in performance, passed more than 500 drug tests and never failed one.

Nineteen hundred meters up there is completely different from1,900 any place else. There's no air, there's no oxygen. There's no vegetation, there's no life. There's no life. Rocks. Any other climb there's vegetation, grass and trees. Not there on the Ventoux. It's more like the moon than a mountain.

Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a life as bliss. It’s a great enhancer. It might last a minute, but eventually it subsides, and when it does, something else takes its place, and maybe that thing is a great space. For happiness. Each time I encountered suffering, I believed that I grew, and further defined my capacities – not just my physical ones, but my interior ones as well, for contentment, friendship, or any other human experience.

I will spend the rest of my life trying to earn back trust and apologize to people.