lost my brakes

That is a sickening feeling isn't it?  I lost mine on a mountain bike ride when descending a fairly steep hill.  Not fun.  Nice job on the improvisation.  But, I wanted to mention, you really should be using your brakes almost equally.  Certainly you don't want to slam on your front brakes with no rear brake but most of your stopping power is actually in the front.  I wonder if the extra pressure you've been applying to the rear brake to get yourself stopped contributed to the issue? 

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. . . and the HTFU of the Day award goes to . . . . vheart!

Wow, I'm not sure I would have thought to improvise like that.  Good job.

The front brake is your friend.  You should be using your front brake as much as or more than the rear.  I typically use both of them coming into corners and only the rear if I need an adjustment in the corner.  There is way more stopping power in the front because of the distribution of weight. 

I lost a clip from my front brake at Whistler, the lever was pointing straight forward.  I was able to ride down and use the brake if I kept some tension on it, otherwise it would spring back to the straight forward position.  That was a little hairy.

It's happened to me too, only it was the front brake and I was going down a really steep descent.  Luckily I was able to slow down using the back brake.  It made for some very scary descending till I was able to stop and put the back brake on the front.