Minus Ten Review- 19

No- I probably won't be using Nokon housing on my rebuild of this frame!

Ten years ago this week on the blog there was a bit of chatter about the ending of T.I.v2 and the future of the event itself. First, about the ending of the event that year.....

Due to the fact that the second version of Trans Iowa was a wash out, and it was obvious that no one would make the time cut, Jeff decided to put it out there that the race was on to Algona. Now....we still had a cut off time. It was confusing at best, but since the conditions were horrible, most riders decided for us by dropping out. Only Dallas Sigurdur and Lindsay Gauld were still pedaling by late afternoon.

It took a while to piece together what happened that day, as it does for any Trans Iowa. Now days I have more "eyes" out there in Wally and George and now Mike and Tony. We have two checkpoints and sometimes an observation point for our own information gathering. Besides minute details of particular rider's experiences, we have a good handle on what is going down out there these days. That was not the case at all when Jeff and I ran the event ten years ago. We knew very little about what was going on.

Heck, I didn't even know what had happened near the ending of the first Trans Iowa until a few months before T.I.v2 occurred. I had no idea that Ira Ryan and Brian Hannon had leapfrogged Alex Dollp in the wee hours of the morning due to a cutting of the course. Back in those days, I had a lot to learn, and the learning curve was steep! So, we didn't piece together the end game of T.I.v2 for a couple of weeks afterward. Lindsay and Dallas made it to Mallard, Iowa, sat in a bar and were eating when Paddy called them and found out where they were at. They then, according to the blog ten years ago, decided not to make the big push into Algona, approximately 50 more miles as the course ran, and had Paddy go fetch them. The story was that the two Canadian riders rode up the road to West Bend where they were finally picked up by Paddy. "Officially" we tagged them as having dropped out at Mallard because they accepted that they were done, and that time ran out on them.

The other bit about Trans Iowa was the feedback on the event we sought. Should we run it every two years? This wasn't our idea, by the way, it was driven by a few competitors. In the end, we decided to run every year as we couldn't fathom not having that much fun every Spring!

Besides that, no one wanted anything else to change about Trans Iowa, although there would be one major change coming and that was an influence of the first Dirty Kanza. That story can wait for a bit....

The other all-consuming story of the week ten years ago was a direct comparison of my Karate Monkey and Inbred single speed bikes. I took about four days of posts to break down the differences between the two bikes. I found that the Inbred was a much nicer bike in terms of ride quality and single track handling. Brant Richards, the brains behind the design, was one of, if not the first, to slap a long offset fork on a 29"er to get that "26"er feeling" many companies were trying to get with super steep head angles. Anyone remember the days of 72° head angle 29'ers? There were even some that went as steep as 73°!! All because the suspension manufacturers were locked into a 38mm offset, a vestige of 26"er "NORBA" geometry hard tails from the 90's. You can thank folks like Brant and Gary Fisher/Trek for being the ones that finally broke that mold and allowed designers to finally, as Gary Fisher said, "tune our rides", with front end geometry that actually worked better.

Anyway.........I digress! Sorry about that!