SALT LAKE CITY — If you looked at just the start of her life, it would be pretty easy to predict failure for Linda Armstrong Kelly.
Raised in poverty. Pregnant at 17. No high school diploma. No job skills.
And then stuck on her own with a 10-pound baby boy to raise.
What followed were many dead-end jobs and macaroni and cheese dinners. But what many people underestimated was the unshakable determination that the young woman brought to her dreams, goals and plans, not only for herself but her son, as well.
Armstrong Kelly brought a wildly cheering audience to its feet at the annual conference of Salt Lake-based USANA Health Sciences on Thursday as she recounted how she and her son essentially grew up together and created better lives for themselves through hard work, motivation and risk-taking.
Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France seven times, became a best-selling author and overcame stage four cancer. His mother earned her GED, went after promotions and better jobs and wrote her own best-selling book, "No Mountain High Enough: Raising Lance, Raising Me."
Throughout it all, the two have never lost the strong bond between them.
She said the key to success is to set goals, make plans to achieve them and then put every effort into reaching those goals.
Her young son loved to race bikes, so despite their desperately tight budget, she encouraged him to "follow his heart" and offered her full support, financially and emotionally.
Armstrong Kelly said co-workers told her she was crazy when she skipped paying the rent one month to buy a $400 BMX bike for Lance when he was very young. ("I made it up the next months," she quickly added.)
Recently, she ran into one of those co-workers, who told her, "I take it all back!" she confided, smiling widely as the crowd roared its approval for the tiny Texas dynamo in an orange dress and pearls.
"Don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't do it," she said. "Dream big."
She was always on her son's side, whether it was going into an unconventional sport in Dallas or getting second and third opinions about his cancer treatments that ultimately saved his life after his 1996 diagnosis.
"When he was 15, I got him his own business cards," Armstrong Kelly said. "He said, 'What do I need with business cards?' I told him, 'When you give a card, you get a card.' "
By the time Lance Armstrong wanted to seriously compete as a racer and needed sponsors, he had a full Rolodex of adults he had met at sporting events when he was younger. "I did not make those phone calls for him — he did," his mother said.
However, she did her part, too.
During her lunch hours at her various jobs, she would comb the phone book's Yellow Pages for any business connected with sports and make cold calls to get sponsors, offering to sew a company's logo onto her son's jersey so people could see it when he crossed the finish line.
Armstrong Kelly also emphasized the importance of "giving back" to others and concluded by telling the USANA attendees they can achieve anything in life.
"Optimistic people figure out solutions," she said, "and with a positive attitude, you can begin that journey."
e-mail: lindat@desnews.com