Katherine Kim Bradtke mentioned you (Tim Norris) in a comment from Facebook.
Katherine wrote: "I enjoyed reading this! I feel the same way you do about Lance Armstrong! Here is something I submitted to TIME years ago but it was not published. I tried to post on the blog but couldn't, so will post it here. And Tim Norris, to you I say, I hope you dig deep, and pull out a winning performance! Dig Deep Lance
I have never been a hardcore cycling devotee but over the years have caught wind of some of the sporting highlights. I remember, for instance, the time that Greg Lemond won the Tour de France in 1986. This was a very big deal for the sport of American cycling since he was the first-ever American to win. AND you would have had to have been a media recluse to have never heard of Lance Armstrong, who made a huge media splash in 1999 when he first won the Tour – probably not so much because he was the second American to do so but that he done so after coming back from metastatic testicular cancer. A very big deal indeed.
Lance has inspired a greater interest in cycling for me – as he hopefully has the rest of the American population. Last summer, I found myself watching the OLN coverage of the Tour de France on television nightly. The OLN commentators liked to use the expression ‘digging deep’ a lot. In fact, I heard it many times during their coverage of Stage 15 in the Pyrenees. Phil Liggett or Paul Sherwen would say things like, “There’s Ullrich, looking in agony. He’s really having to dig deep now.” Or “Vinokourov has got to dig deep if he wants to catch them.”
What exactly is ‘digging deep’? It seems to be a popular expression used in many sporting contexts. I have heard it used on television, in gym classes, by coaches and teachers. I looked up the expression in five different idiom dictionaries, but could not find it - probably because it is too new an expression to have made it into one. I did actually find the expression in print, not surprisingly in the “Tour De France – The Illustrated History,” by Marguerite Lazell. A photo caption on page 146 reads, “Egged on by the crowd, Pantani digs deep as he fights his way to the finish line on Alpe d’Huez, 1997.”
Digging deep. I assume it means to go inside oneself, and to give the best personal performance you can give in spite of whatever pain you are suffering. It requires meditation-like determination. Call it what you want - mind over matter, spirit over body, ethereal over physical – but it demands that you let go of what is on the outside and focus on the inside.
I have often thought that elite athletes had much in common with chronically ill people, particularly those with physical handicaps. It might not seem immediately obvious how one set of the population with superior physical skills might be very much like another set with serious physical handicaps. How could one begin to compare a person with a spinal cord injury to a competitive cyclist climbing hard and fast in the Pyrenees? How could there possibly be any similarity between the MS patient who cannot even execute his/her own personal hygiene to the world-class climber who summits K2 or Nanga Parbat? Well, I for one see it as ‘digging deep.’ Physical illness or handicaps demand that you let go of your external shell and develop an interior purpose, a purpose that emphasizes spirit over body.
In “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag wrote: “ Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
The lucky ones barely visit the kingdom of the sick. Unlucky ones have permanent residence there. How well one is able to deal with this new country of citizenship will depend on how well that person can ‘dig deep’.
Cycling enthusiasts may think that Belgian-born Eddy Merckx, aka the Cannibal, is the greatest cyclist in Tour history. But I see it from a different perspective. Yes, Merckx may have had the raw, inherent talent for the sport. But Lance Armstrong in my mind has done what no other professional cyclist has. First, he has raised the sport of cycling in the American consciousness in a way that no other cyclist before him has. But, more importantly, he has given hope to those who have spent time in the kingdom of the sick, especially to those who have suffered from cancer.
In her same book, Sontag also scribed: “Cancer is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease.” But Lance Armstrong has done exactly that. And that is possibly an achievement that no other cyclist will ever (or want to) attain.
The media expounds on the external aspects of competitive and/or risk-taking sports. They more often talk about the physical – conditioning, endurance, strength. But let us not forget the interior determination that it takes, in whatever endeavor or journey (be it choice or fate) that one takes. And to Lance, I say: Dig deep. And whether you bag your sixth Tour or not, you are already a winner – a hugely talented and enormously lucky winner.
Katherine Bradtke
Mother
Cycling enthusiast
Breast cancer survivor"
Katherine wrote: "I enjoyed reading this! I feel the same way you do about Lance Armstrong! Here is something I submitted to TIME years ago but it was not published. I tried to post on the blog but couldn't, so will post it here. And Tim Norris, to you I say, I hope you dig deep, and pull out a winning performance! Dig Deep Lance
I have never been a hardcore cycling devotee but over the years have caught wind of some of the sporting highlights. I remember, for instance, the time that Greg Lemond won the Tour de France in 1986. This was a very big deal for the sport of American cycling since he was the first-ever American to win. AND you would have had to have been a media recluse to have never heard of Lance Armstrong, who made a huge media splash in 1999 when he first won the Tour – probably not so much because he was the second American to do so but that he done so after coming back from metastatic testicular cancer. A very big deal indeed.
Lance has inspired a greater interest in cycling for me – as he hopefully has the rest of the American population. Last summer, I found myself watching the OLN coverage of the Tour de France on television nightly. The OLN commentators liked to use the expression ‘digging deep’ a lot. In fact, I heard it many times during their coverage of Stage 15 in the Pyrenees. Phil Liggett or Paul Sherwen would say things like, “There’s Ullrich, looking in agony. He’s really having to dig deep now.” Or “Vinokourov has got to dig deep if he wants to catch them.”
What exactly is ‘digging deep’? It seems to be a popular expression used in many sporting contexts. I have heard it used on television, in gym classes, by coaches and teachers. I looked up the expression in five different idiom dictionaries, but could not find it - probably because it is too new an expression to have made it into one. I did actually find the expression in print, not surprisingly in the “Tour De France – The Illustrated History,” by Marguerite Lazell. A photo caption on page 146 reads, “Egged on by the crowd, Pantani digs deep as he fights his way to the finish line on Alpe d’Huez, 1997.”
Digging deep. I assume it means to go inside oneself, and to give the best personal performance you can give in spite of whatever pain you are suffering. It requires meditation-like determination. Call it what you want - mind over matter, spirit over body, ethereal over physical – but it demands that you let go of what is on the outside and focus on the inside.
I have often thought that elite athletes had much in common with chronically ill people, particularly those with physical handicaps. It might not seem immediately obvious how one set of the population with superior physical skills might be very much like another set with serious physical handicaps. How could one begin to compare a person with a spinal cord injury to a competitive cyclist climbing hard and fast in the Pyrenees? How could there possibly be any similarity between the MS patient who cannot even execute his/her own personal hygiene to the world-class climber who summits K2 or Nanga Parbat? Well, I for one see it as ‘digging deep.’ Physical illness or handicaps demand that you let go of your external shell and develop an interior purpose, a purpose that emphasizes spirit over body.
In “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag wrote: “ Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
The lucky ones barely visit the kingdom of the sick. Unlucky ones have permanent residence there. How well one is able to deal with this new country of citizenship will depend on how well that person can ‘dig deep’.
Cycling enthusiasts may think that Belgian-born Eddy Merckx, aka the Cannibal, is the greatest cyclist in Tour history. But I see it from a different perspective. Yes, Merckx may have had the raw, inherent talent for the sport. But Lance Armstrong in my mind has done what no other professional cyclist has. First, he has raised the sport of cycling in the American consciousness in a way that no other cyclist before him has. But, more importantly, he has given hope to those who have spent time in the kingdom of the sick, especially to those who have suffered from cancer.
In her same book, Sontag also scribed: “Cancer is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease.” But Lance Armstrong has done exactly that. And that is possibly an achievement that no other cyclist will ever (or want to) attain.
The media expounds on the external aspects of competitive and/or risk-taking sports. They more often talk about the physical – conditioning, endurance, strength. But let us not forget the interior determination that it takes, in whatever endeavor or journey (be it choice or fate) that one takes. And to Lance, I say: Dig deep. And whether you bag your sixth Tour or not, you are already a winner – a hugely talented and enormously lucky winner.
Katherine Bradtke
Mother
Cycling enthusiast
Breast cancer survivor"
No comments:
Post a Comment