Balance nutrition bars

Confession: I LOVE energy bars. Clif bars make up an embarassing proportion of my diet. I've tried most of the bars on the market - especially the ones under $1.50 each - and Clif remains consistently my favorite. But they were $1.19 (good, but not awesome) at the market today, and another bar caught my eye at the same price: Balance nurition.

I glanced at the ingredients and nutrition info, and found it to be inoffensive enough to buy: 210 calories, 15 g protein, no HFCS or hydrogenated oils. Okay.

Bought a couple, brought them home. Am now eating one. It's hard and chewy, like many of the high-protein bars on the market, and claims to be "caramel nut blast" flavor. Meh. The caramel is inoffensive enough, but for the texture of the bar, I would expect it to have more than 15 g of protein (out of a 50g bar). Chewy. Not really tasty. Meh.

Think I'll go back to Clif bars.

good bye road season

Well, I finished up the road racing season last weekend with the Eugene Celebration Stage Race. I really enjoyed the whole race, ended up taking 5th overall in cat 4, and got myself a stage win in the crit. Stage racing is so much more difficult than single-day races - it's hard to recover and eat enough food and get enough sleep in order to get up the next day and race again! It was really fun though. I'm kind of glad that road season is over, but am definitely looking forward to 'cross, and to next year.

Up next: Psycho Cross #1 this Saturday. I just need to install cables and a chain on my Cross-Check and it's all ready to go! Can't wait. 'Cross season is going to be off the hook.

In the meantime, I spent the past week out in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada riding a cruiser bike around the playa, climbing no hills whatsoever, but learning a lot about holding my line in a sand pit. I wasn't expecting my trip to Burning Man to be anything vaguely resembling training, but I actually got quite a bit of exercise riding around the city and the playa. Black Rock City is something else entirely - a temporary city, built by volunteers, populated by artists, intellectuals, freaks, geeks, hippies, celebrities, and "normal" people. I could probably spend a couple of hours talking about everything that I did and saw, but I think I'm going to leave that for later, or for another forum. I survived my first Burn, and I have a feeling that there will be many more to come! What a week. I think that's all I'll say about it here and now.