Its not often someone invites 700 of their best and wildest friends over for a bike ride, much less to their own house for a race on their property.

That’s exactly what Lance Armstrong did this past weekend outside of Dripping Springs, Texas.

Benefiting the Livestrong Foundation, the Mellow Johnny’s crew pulled out all of the stops in putting on a first class event – and the industry matched that support. SRAM brought HB and Dawson along with their full sized rig, Rapha and King were in the house, waffles, burgers, beer, and just about anything else you could hope for were all added to compliment an organizational structure and race course that would make a World Cup blush with envy…and we won’t even mention the crowds and energy.

Word just could not describe it. Then Lance arrived…and things exploded.

And did I mention this is in his front yard?

The ranch (and the Austin area in general) received 4 inches of rain in the 48hrs preceding the event. Typically this would have made for a disaster of mud-fest proportions, but between careful course design by Dave Weins and raw man hours from the Livestrong land crew, by race time things were barely damp, though highly sticky and sometimes slick due to the multiple course crossings.

The Jamis crew was lean in numbers – Rotem and Seamus are deep intheir off seasons, Snyder racing ‘cross back East and Harlan buried in school. It was up to the old man to do his best – and waxed by JHK we all did get.

Racing on what felt like duct tape for 2hrs clearly sorted out the men from the boys and Sager held onto 3rd by the finish, making for a fairly nice weekend in the Hill Country and nice way to close out the season.

Lance threatened to have us back for another one in the Spring…count on us to be back again.