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Introduction
I didn’t know where the kid was going. I just knew it wasgoing to be interesting. I was standing next to my twenty-yearoldson Taylor on the dais at an awards banquet in Davis, California.I’d just introduced him to a crowd of three hundred or sopeople 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 LadyGaga tune, inspiring T to shake his booty in the direction of thecrowd, which roared with laughter. The prospect of giving an acceptancespeech didn’t exactly rattle him.
Taylor could have talked about any number of victories: in the fiveyears 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 hestruggled through a tough French race called the Tour de l’Avenir.After winning the prologue — a short, solo effort against theclock — he’d crashed heavily on a rain-slicked descent toward theend 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, allof them Tour de France veterans. They urged him to abandon therace, to board the waiting ambulance. Shaking them off, T climbedback on his bike. He went from the yellow jersey to the lanternerouge that day — from first to last. After returning from the hospitalwith a half mile of bandages on his left side, he took the startthe 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 racingseemed to be wavering. “If they go crazy on those climbs tomrwand I get dropped . . . not sure if I’ll finish.” “So I send that to my dad,” Taylor told his audience, “and Iget back a text about this long.” He held his thumb and forefingerabout five inches apart. While laughing along with the crowd, I also reflected on howmuch time it had taken me to peck out a five-inch text message.Since my diagnosis with young-onset Parkinson’s disease aboutten 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, andhe wanted my blessing. Which was not forthcoming. “Hmmm. OK. See how it goes,” is how I began my reply. “Startwith the mindframe that you’re gonna finish the stage, tho, otherwiseyou’re done for sure.” And I proceeded to lay it on thick. If hewas capable of competing, he needed to honor his commitment tohis team, to show his true character, to remember what his motherand I had instilled in him from the beginning, the lesson my ownfather had drilled into me: Phinneys don’t quit.
Before beginning this memoir, I held in my head a CliffsNotes versionof my father as a kind of cold, close-minded scientist who impededmy success as much as he enabled it. The exercise of writingthis book made me realize, fairly quickly, that while it mademy journey seem slightly more heroic — Look at everything I’ve hadto overcome! — the CliffsNotes version was incomplete, and unfair. Damon Dodge Phinney had more depth and generosity than Ilong gave him credit for. His love was often disguised, but alwayspresent. Even as he disagreed with what he viewed as my risky,wrong-headed career choice, he supported me. In his way. He tooktime off from his job to drive me to races from Kentucky to Canadato California. His fervent wish that I wasn’t racing didn’t stophim from peppering me with advice on how to race better. One ortwo days after my competitions, he would slide unsolicited, single-spaced typed letters under my apartment door. Disapprovingof my line of work (he would have much preferred to see mehead off to college) didn’t preclude him from holding — and sharing— strong opinions on how I went about my job. After givingthem a brisk once-over, I usually tossed them, believing I knewbetter. As I grew older and recalled his advice, I was struck by howspot-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 deathsentence, he heard a gong that jarred him out of his lifelong stoicism.It was in the final fourteen years of his life that my fathertruly learned to reach out to people, to show the world his innerlight, even as he fought his cancer like a Spartan at Thermopylae.In so doing, he set an example of grace and courage that turnedout to be his greatest gift to me, as I cope with my own chronicdisease.
“Phinneys don’t quit,” declared Taylor, explaining to the audiencewhy he gutted it out in Stage 5 at the Tour de l’Avenir. Becausehe made that decision, because he pushed through the pain, becausehe endured, he learned something vital. T stayed the course,worked hard for his team, and, following that ebb, he began toflow. He felt stronger at the end of that eight-day race than he hadin the beginning. And the form he found in the final stages ofL’Avenir helped him ten days later in Greenville, South Carolina.There, he won his first professional national road title, eking out a0.14-second victory over Levi Leipheimer in the USPRO time trialchampionships — a stunning outcome. Levi is one of the best in theworld in that discipline. A fortnight after Greenville, Taylor wonthe 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 aFrench word for a promising young rider. Translated literally, itmeans “hope.”) T was primed for his next quantum leap — thistime to the top of the pro ranks. He’d recently signed a multimillion-dollar deal with the BMC professional racing team. Fundedby Swiss businessman Andy Rihs, BMC is directed by my old boss,Jim Ochowicz. It was Och (rhymes with “coach”) who created the 7-Eleventeam I rode with for nine years, from its early-’80s success in thiscountry through its pioneering days as the first North Americanteam to contest the Tour de France. Twenty years after my last racein the red, white, and green tricot of Team Slurpee, as we wereknown, we entrusted Taylor to Jim’s care.
To follow Taylor’s races in Melbourne, I found myself devouringTwitter updates at 3 a.m. in a Glasgow hotel. While he was in Australiafor Worlds, I was in Scotland for the World Parkinson’s Congress.In addition to serving as a featured speaker at three of thesessions, I represented the foundation that bears my name. Meetingwith leaders in the PD community, I engaged in our ongoingconversation on how to live better with this disease. Sixteen years after I stopped riding a bike for a living, I’m stillin 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 intoevery corner and recess of my life, slowing me in all ways. The diseasehas forced me to see the world differently — to recognize andseize the small moments, the hidden grace notes available to us every day. That explains the tag line, or motto, of the Davis PhinneyFoundation: Every Victory Counts.
Three of Taylor’s world titles, incidentally, have come in the individualpursuit, an event contested by riders who start on oppositesides of a banked oval track. The Happiness of Pursuit is more thanjust a pun on my son’s track specialty. On a deeper level, “pursuit”denotes action. It is the opposite of the inertia and resignationthat have settled on too many members of my tribe, as I referto my tremulous collective. “Pursuit” in this context means takingresponsibility for your own happiness. It is the pro-active seekingout of what I have come to call “curative moments.” Living the last two decades with PD, I’ve learned to savor andmagnify these moments. I appreciate that I have more control overthe course of the disease than I once thought, and that these lessertriumphs 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, asin 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 chargedinstances, those gratifying moments of victory, those few secondsthat sustain us. Those stories, and the lessons therein, make up thehappiness of pursuit.