time trials

so, transiowa didn't go so great but i did a fairly good job of rehydrating. or self-medicating. one of the two. either way, waking up sunday morning after the failed attempt at transiowa and getting over served somewhere along the way isn't exactly typical pre-race routine but i had certainly been planning on still being out on the transiowa course with no thought of racing the trials. but, i haven't missed a year since i started racing so i dropped all my expectations and wandered down to the registration and threw my name in the hat. didn't leave much time to get my stuff ready and i decided to do some quick adjustments on the jabber that had been virtually ignored for the last couple months getting ready for trans. not a lot of time to do much, but the chain definitely needed to be tensioned. damn. lesson learned (relearned?). don't mess with the bike the day of a race. i took off at my scheduled time and blew up immediately. the race started in the new section of dead pet that had just been cut in that week. it was a swamp. i ran most of it through flowing water and mudholes. after dead pet the rest of palisades was in pretty good shape but my 130 mile warm up ride the day before was killing my climbing. as i come flying out of smeby's i hit the brakes to make one last corner before hitting the road and heading over to van peenen. as soon as i heard it i knew what it was...f-me. tire rubbing chainstay at high speed. i jumped off as i hit the road, looked at my wheel, kicked it, watched it go straight, hopped back on and took off. after carrying so much weight during transiowa i had taken nothing but a water bottle and a gu for the trials...not even a wrench. come to find out i hadn't gotten the bolts on the rear hope tight enough and they were backing out and allowing the wheel to twist into the chainstay. i was stopping every 5 minutes to tighten them by hand as best i could but it wasn't working great. i had no rear brake because everytime i even feathered the rear brake it would pull my wheel into the stay. okay, van peenen (including the hairpin on fred's) with only a front brake sucks. going up backside into the ice cave/dunning's stuff i passed a guy who gave me his tool. i was able to tighten the bolts and ride the last few miles without a problem. apparently all the transiowa training is paying off. i rode 130 miles on saturday, rode 1/3 of the trials with only a front brake, stopped probably 10 times to tighten my rear wheel, and ended up 8th, my best finish ever. going into the race with no expectations...i'll take it. plenty of "what if's?" but i'm really not too hung up on it. congrats to the unicorn for completely destroying the field. jeff doesn't race, but wanted to do this one time just to see. he won by 11 minutes on a 12 mile course. wow.