Ride with Lance Armstrong

Thursday night I was getting ready to go to bed and thinking about where I would ride on Friday morning. I decided to log on to my twitter account, which I rarely do, to see what all the cycling stars were up to. I saw a post by Lance Armstrong that said. "He Austin, let's go ride. 8:15 am MelllowJohnny's. " Uh, okay. I'm there.

Friday I got up and put on my Texas kit and headed to Mellow Johnny's bike shop. I brought along some flyers for the Sweatin' Burnt Orange bike tour that UT is putting on to hand out to other people that showed up to ride with Lance. There were about 200 people standing around. Most were in riding gear. Some were in street clothes, just there to take pictures. I handed out all of my flyers and got some people that seemed interested in the ride. You can get a lot of riders that want to sign up when you say "3 kegs of RealAle beer at the end of the ride" as your hook line.

About 8:30 am, there he was. Lance Armstrong. In the flesh. It was a little surreal for me, considering that he is the main reason why I was standing there with shaved legs and in a Lycra cycling kit. He stood there for a minute or two as some big-whig supporters of Livestrong took some pictures with him, and then we started to ride. So many people! Because I had been handing out flyers, I was in the back, so I slowly started to move up. I knew that I would soon get dropped because of street lights. It was such a big group that we were having to run a lot of lights and people in their cars looked quite confused.

Once we got out of downtown, it was smoother sailing. I got up to the front and all of a sudden, I was riding next to Lance! He looked over at me, took a look at my Texas kit, and said "Howdy." Then he put his horns up. I smiled and gave him the horns as well. It is probably a little embarrassing how excited this made me. I fell back into the pack, and was smiling the whole time.

It's funny how small Lance is. He is actually only 5'9". When you see pro football players in real life, you are always amazed at how much bigger they look in real life instead of on TV. But cyclists seem bigger on TV, smaller in real life. That coupled with the fact that the greatest cyclist maybe ever is willing to ride with normal people, that's pretty cool. It made him seem like a person instead of a demigod.

At one point, I was up near the front, and we got on to a really nice stretch of road. A pro guy from Team Six was riding next to me and said, " What an awesome road. I'm gone." And just like that, he attacked out of the pack. He got a gap, and then Lance decided we should reel him back in. Lance took a monster pull and then some other people took pulls at the front, trying to catch. We slowly rotated through until it was my time to pull. I took a short pull and then Lance came around me to bridge the last 20 ft or so. Pretty cool experience.

We slowed down a bit to finish off the ride. Then Lance said he had to go to the airport and turned right to go toward the airport. His car followed him, and left us to ride home together. Altogether, a successful ride. I got to get some training in, and got to talk to the biggest American name in cycling. Cool.