The course was awesome. For someone who has ever really tried to put together a route there is a lot of work that goes into this. The route was very well put together and clearly it took advantage of some great scenery as well as some torturous landscape. I might have cursed once or twice about mileage being off here and there, but over the whole thing... there's some understanding about a margin for error. I say that now that I'm done
Including some of our un-planned detours, missed turns, and what-not... I had almost exactly 350 miles from start to finish.
I was pleased to have met many great people.
Cale - We met on I think the first climb out of Decorah and rode together for most of the ride.
Tim - Duluth man. Another MN guy. Way to go!
Matt - I cannot remember exactly where along the way that you joined our little group.
Dan - (Tennessee Yazoo man) it was a treat to have you along for so many miles. You did the right thing by pulling out when you did. I know you were suffering and to put another almost 200 miles on top of that would have been silly.
Ken S - Sat across from you at the mixer at Mabes. It was cool to run into you out there covering the miles.
Travis - You joined up with Matt and slowed down enough for me to hang on toward the very end. Thanks, from the results portion, I finally learned your name.
Skip - You too... from the results I learned your name. Assuming you are the one on the IF Planet X? Seemed like you did some soul searching there in the 4-5am on Sunday. Glad that you came on strong again once the sun came up. Third time is the charm... you finished.
Travis, Matt, and Skip... You guys should have finished before I did. Thanks for holding back to let my sorry rear end catch up after some of the descents. By late into the ride on Sunday, I had slowed down to only about 21 or so on my comfort level for descents.
In the past, I've been morbidly curious as to what it is like to do something like this. Now I know. I questioned, speculated, and agonized over what to bring, what to ride, gearing, etc. In the end, I stuffed a change of clothes in one of my bags and headed for the starting line with my bike. I went from commuting to work on Thursday to "racing" the TransIowa on Saturday without a change. (People laughed at just how dirty my chain is on my bike... Yes... It really is that dirty almost all the time.)
I showed up with no contingency plan for not finishing other than a map of Iowa stuck down in one of my bags. Should something catastrophic have happened, I suppose I could have called, but when I left home to participate... it was clear that my wife gave me one of those looks like: "good luck buddy, you're on your own." Everything came together and I finished.
As for riding it fixed... well... that's just what I am comfortable riding. It also offered a small degree of motivation to the idea of finishing too. I rode 42x19. My maximum speed was 29 early in the morning on Saturday. That works out to be a cadence of 160. I unclipped my feet on one descent sometime mid-morning on Saturday. When I got to the bottom, I felt guilty like I had cheated and that thought bugged me the rest of the event... So, I never did it again. Based on my calculations, I moved my legs around more than 368,000 times.
Thanks again everyone who participated and added to the level of excitement. Thanks most of all to Mark and Jeff for all of the hard work that went into organizing this! 'twas fun.