When Jack Mason meandered past Brett Johnson to win the 58-mile road race at the VeloTek Grand Prix Stage Race on Sunday at Perry Lake, it was the biggest victory of his cycling career.

But Mason said the most important race he had won was surviving a disastrous biking accident that nearly ended his life almost two years ago.

“That was the biggest race I’ve ever done in my life — fighting back and being able to race again, because I lost everything,” Mason said.

Mason fell in a race June 1, 2003, at Perry Lake. Coasting down a hill, he clipped another competitor’s tire and crashed. Mason said he probably was going 45 mph at the time. The crash left him with seven skull fractures and a broken collarbone, and the injuries put Mason into a coma.

VeloTek teammate Jim Whittaker was there when it happened.

“I cried that day,” Whittaker said. “It was bad.”

Mason was kept in the intensive-care unit at Kansas University Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan., and it was five days before he knew what had happened.

He was at the hospital for three weeks. In that span, he said he had to learn how to swallow again, how to read and write and even rediscover what a television was.

But amazingly, he was racing nine weeks later, only one week after he got back his driver’s license.

Mason said he never felt a fear of returning to racing.

“No fear whatsoever,” Mason said. “It’s like they say, when you’re a kid, you never forget how to ride a bike. It was something I always loved to do as a child. It’s an awesome experience for me to do it, and that’s all I wanted to do when I came back. I wanted to get my life back again, but I also wanted to get back in racing again.”

Mason raced in supreme fashion Sunday. The men’s category-three race, the event’s highest classification, splintered early into four distinct packs. Several riders wilted under the gusty winds and the strain from two races the day before — the criterium and prologue — at Clinton Lake.

Mason stuck with the lead pack the entire way — a feat he said was surprising after the race’s early stages.

“I told one of my teammates about 10 miles in, I told him I felt like warm butter,” Mason said. “Sometimes when the jump goes, it throws the light switch on. Like when you hear athletes say dig deep, that’s what it was all the way.”

The lead pack of seven riders hung together until the last three miles, when Mason and Johnson took the lead and crossed the Perry Lake dam in tandem.

Mason, whose strength is scaling hills, tucked behind Johnson as they approached the final hill. As they approached the summit — and the finish line — Mason snaked around Johnson and took the electrifying victory.

“All I had to do was mark him and follow him up the hill, and pace myself and take first,” Mason said. “That’s my specialty. I knew that was my plan: to push it hard up the hill and gas everybody. You watch Lance Armstrong on TV enough, you learn the hill climb.”

Whittaker, who organized the race, was at the finish line when his friend crossed it.

“It was sensational,” Whittaker said. “It just goes to show he’s one of the bravest guys in sports. If I could pick one guy to win this, it’s the bravest guy out here, Jack Mason.”

Mason’s team, VeloTek, placed third overall in the general classification.

But as thrilled as Mason was after Sunday’s victory, he said the fateful race two years ago was the one he would remember the most.

“It still is to me. It was the top of all races because even though it was a race that almost took my life, it was a race that taught me how to live my life,” Mason said. “You don’t take anything for granted, and that’s why this race was so important, because to come away from that and come to this point is amazing.”