Days like this are what Lance Armstrong calls the ''obligation of the cured.''
They involve very little riding and too much talking, and his schedule is already overcooked. But this debt is personal. Almost eight years after his own bout with cancer, Armstrong remains convinced he survived to accomplish something besides stringing six straight Tour de France titles together.
''You used to have a sort of a bike show here in town a long time ago,'' he begins, telling a story from the stage set up in a downtown plaza. ''Just after I was diagnosed, I came to the bike show and decided I was going to go out for a bike ride one day.''
Armstrong's tale meanders through a nearby park, which he planned to cut through on his way to the lakefront. Instead, he reached the other side and was stopped by a sign that read, ''The Cancer Survivors Garden.''
''It was such an emotional time for me,'' he recalled. ''I sat in that garden a long, long time.''
Late-afternoon shadows divide the crowd almost neatly in half, but all of them know where the story proceeds from there. What no one knows -- including, perhaps, even Armstrong himself -- is where it veers next.
The only thing that seems clear at the moment, barely two months after he zoomed down the wide boulevard of the Champs-Elysees and onto the pages of cycling history, is that the man doesn't want to be rushed.
Armstrong says he'll ride in at least one more Tour de France, but he still won't say whether it's next year or 2006. His heart tells him to race in the Grand Tours of Italy and Spain and some of the one-day classic spring races, to display the versatility that was the hallmark of his mentor, Belgian racing great Eddy Merckx. His head tells him that winning all of them in a single season might be impossible, even for him.
Yet Armstrong still seems too competitive to sit still for long and too devoted to advocating on behalf of fellow cancer survivors to give up the platform. On the other hand, he conceded his conditioning was ''pretty much at rock bottom.'' And on days when he speaks to crowds, instead of the dozens of miles his maniacal training regimen was composed of, his rides typically total a few hundred yards to a stage. And so Armstrong is biding his time.
These days, that means threading himself in and out of a 3,500-mile, eight-day relay race across America by 20 cyclists dubbed the ''Tour of Hope'' and sponsored by Bristol-Myers Squibb. Each rider's life, like Armstrong's, has been touched by cancer. The ride began at midnight in Los Angeles on Sept. 30 with a few hundred people lining the street in darkness. It will end in Saturday in Washington, D.C.
The message he delivered in Chicago and other places in between is a simple one. Right now, only about 5 percent of adult cancer patients take part in the clinical trials that test the efficacy of drugs being developed to combat the disease.
''If you compare it to childhood cancers, where 60 percent of childhood cancer patients go in a clinical trial and almost all of them are cured, I think that puts things into perspective. And that,'' Armstrong added, ''is what has to change in this country.''
Ranking his favorite moment along the way so far was easy. It was when Las Vegas officials closed off The Strip to make way for him and the pack of ''Tour of Hope'' cyclists.
''I've ridden down streets all over the world and they close down the streets and there's a lot of people there cheering,'' he said. ''But these people would never have that opportunity. So, to see their faces, to turn around and look at them as they realize, 'Oh my God, this is happening to me,' is really powerful.''
''If I was training for the Tour, I couldn't do this,'' he continued. ''I'd be based in Europe, I'd be training full-time, and really there's no other activity outside of training, eating and sleeping. It's a pretty boring life. But that's the way it has to be.''
Either way, it's a decision Armstrong will have to make in a hurry. The closest thing he gave to a hint came as Armstrong stood on the stage Wednesday and one of the other ''Tour of Hope'' participants asked what he thinks about to cope with the mental fatigue that sets in on a long ride.
Someone in the crowd yelled out ''Sheryl Crow,'' and Armstrong blushed at the memory. Friends have described him as happier than he's been in years, now that a much-publicized divorce is behind him and his even-more public relationship with the rock star is blossoming.
But a moment later, Armstrong considered the question and replied, ''Planning.''
''I'm always planning,'' he added.
Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke@ap.org
