Trek Polar Fleece Helmet Liner
This thing is so good that it made me give up my beloved helmet ear warmers I've been wearing since way back when the ill-defined trails of Borderland rolled beneath the wheels of my '86 Rockhopper and its 26x1.5 Tricross tires. What's so good about it? It fits. Over the head and ears, and down the back far enough so that the helmet locking device sits right up against it. All I have to do is give the adjuster a turn or so and everything fits into place. It's warm. Better than the wool hat/earmuff (huh-huh) combination. Too warm? I don't think so. For a race, yes, but for a normal road ride it would have to be pushing 45 before I'd take it off, and at that point you'd survive with just the helmet. This gets 5 powermeters. Why powermeters? Well, everyone knows that the powermeter is simply the greatest, most marvelous creation ever to come from the minds and hands of humankind, so what would be a more fitting product for all others to be judged against?
Kurt Kinetic Rock and Roll Trainer
I've had this for a year now, and I still like it. My last trainer was a Blackburn Fan Trackstand, and this was a big upgrade. Not at all portable, and it takes up a ton of floor space, but it's pretty quiet, well-made, and provides far more resistance than the Blackburn. The rocking feature is not as "loose" as I expected it to be, but it is adjustable and should get looser as the elastnomer breaks in. You get a noticeable bouncing up and down if your pedaling is choppy, very natural like on the road. Much better than an ordinary trainer. Only other con is that if your feet are big, it's possible to have a clearance problem between your heel and the wheel clamp. Short chainstays and long cranks would contribute to this problem. I had to be standing and flexing my foot in an unnatural direction for it to happen. Kurt offered to replace the entire trainer with the newer (green) model free of charge, as apparently they made a design change to address this issue. I felt that was unnecessary so I kept the one I have. 4.5 powermeters.
PowerBar Electolyte Drink Mix
I got a shitload of free samples of this stuff at the Lexington Battle Green 5k. Natural Berry flavor. It has sugar, about a half dozen of the usual chemicals, and beet juice listed as ingredients. One sample is 20 calories worth and is supposed to make just 16 ounces of drink, but I used it in a full 27 oz bottle. I am not going to claim that it had any magical powers but it tasted really good and I was pretty bummed when the bottle was empty and I had to revert to bottle #2 which I'd filled with plain water. 4.0 powermeters.
Genisoy Potato Bakes - Parmesan and Roasted Garlic Flavor
I picked these out because I was lost in the supermarket and looking for something salty and crunchy, perhaps more tasty than a rice cake. And of course, being a weight-obsessed male cyclist I was reading nutrition labels in search of something without the calories of Yogurt and Green Onion Kettle Chips. With me, it's pretty much a given that I'm going to knock off the entire bag of whatever I buy in one sitting, and even for a normal fat programmer, 1500 at a whack is a touch excessive. But just try finding snack foods with much less that that at Roche Brothers. Anyhow, forget the whole Genisoy label, I didn't even notice that until the bag was half gone. These claim 110 calories a serving, and the bag is just 3.5 servings, so 385 for the whole bag. Sodium is 270 mg per serving, so not too horrible there either. Yes, we so-called endurance athletes need to keep our sodium intake up sometimes, but overdoing before an event is a guaranteed way to bring on pre-race bloat, thus wiping out all the benefits of the past months binging and purging. So what about the taste? Good enough to satisfy the crunchy and salty craving. No grease though, so you're out of luck there. Truth be told, I made the bag last two sittings, so they weren't good enough to be "addictive." 3.25 powermeters.
MacBook 2.0 something something something
I got this computer last January from the Apple store as a refurb for $999. It was only supposed to come with 1 GB of ram but it had 2 GB when I got it. It also looked brand new, not refurb. I needed a new laptop and even though Apple stuff is generally more expensive than commodity PC equivalents, this was pretty nice hardware for that money back then. Plus since OSX runs on top of Unix, you can be greppin' like a mofo right out of the box, but still not have to struggle with missing codecs when you want to watch a video. You can make it play nice with the Polar if you want to put in the effort, or even run Windows on it if you don't mind throwing money at the problem. I never bothered to do that, as my day job requires that I keep a Windows box running here anyway. MS even provides a free remote desktop client and it works like a charm. This is only the second laptop I've owned, but the trackpad is way cool and once you get used to two finger scrolling you'll never want to live without it. One con about this thing is the case has very sharp edges, kind of nasty to rest your wrists on. One of the reasons I bought this was to make a special second anniversary nodcast. Astute readers may realize that we're coming up on the 3rd anniversary of this crappy blog and no such 2nd anniversary epic has ever made it to the server. Well, I'd heard that IMovie was all intuitive and shit, but, no, it wasn't. This year I've resorted to RTFM and we'll see how that goes. Of course, the machine is now a year old and I did not purchase any extended warranty. No problem, because of no problems, but then the other night I was watching 30 Rock on hulu and poof! down she goes. WTF? Started right back up, so I guess the CPU overheated and went into self preservation mode. Since then all is well, but who knows.
Thanks for reading.
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