Breaking Away

Like the time he was about 6 or 7, and he was with his father in the barn behind their house, arguing with him about something he has long since forgotten. But he remembers his father's words.

"He said if I really wanted to do something, I could do it," Landis recalls. "And I said, 'Well, you can't jump over the barn.' And that was the problem between me and my parents the whole time. I was always logical about everything, and that's part of the reason why I didn't stay and just accept things the way they were."

Landis's family was devout -- church was at the center of their lives, and there was no television, or radio other than Christian broadcasts -- but, as many Mennonites do, they made compromises with the outside world. Paul Landis owned a carwash and laundromat. Floyd Landis attended public school, where most of his friends were non-Mennonites.

That's how he got gradual tastes of the world beyond Farmersville -- though at times they were too much to bear. When he was about 8, he spent the night at a friend's house, where he watched "Jaws" on video. It terrified the uncorrupted boy.

"I didn't sleep all night," Landis says. "I just lay there shaking. I was scared . They all just sat there watching it like it was normal. I was thinking, 'What is wrong with these people?' "

The family rode bikes together after church on Sunday afternoons. As a teenager, Landis hopped on his bike to hang out with friends and escape town. "We were just lighting things on fire and throwing rocks," he says, laughing. "That's what you do when you're 15 and you don't have video games. So you have to actually burn things and kill things."

Bike riding was freedom, the most freedom he had ever felt. And, as he found when he was 16 and won the first race he ever entered, he was awfully good at it.

Cycling was also a way to put his growing frustrations with his family's lifestyle behind him.

"The things that I was told didn't make sense to me," he says. Like the notion that competing in bike races was somehow an affront to God -- why would He even care? Landis wondered. While no one ever declared outright that he'd wind up in Hell for racing his bike, the implication was clear, Landis says. His soul was on the line. It didn't help that most of the races he entered were on Sundays.

Then there was the confining pace of life. "When you're young," he recalls, "you don't see how much value it has, that there's security and there are people who care about you and that no matter what happens, you're going to be okay. When you're 16 or 17, you don't see that part. At that point, life is a great adventure."

When he realized he could break out of Lancaster County and live that adventure if he got good enough on the bike, riding became an addiction. He patterned his training regimen after what he read of the pros in cycling magazines. But his day was ultra-scheduled; after school he had a job at a grocery store, and he also repaired washing machines at his dad's shop. Chores kept him busy until long past dark. Only then did he get on the bike, and he'd streak along the deserted country roads until early morning.

Landis rode through the winters wrapped in layers of thermal underwear and plastic bags. Not even snow deterred him. "When the rest of the children were sledding," recalls his mother, "he was riding his bike up the hill."