Cool Things That Fit In Your Hand

On the suggestion of Kovas at Midwest Multi-Sport Life (who always has the good ideas), I recently contacted Outside PR to see if there where any products available for testing and review. The first thing they sent me was a nice selection of GU. I know I can't horde the stuff, but there have been quite a few GU giveaways around the blogosphere lately. I'm going to have to figure out a new way to parse this out to you guys and keep things interesting.

Of course, I put some aside for myself. One of them was a plain silver packet with the mysterious name "new flavor" printed on it. Curious, I tried this one first. It was quite tasty. There was primarily a citrus flavor, but I could taste hints of chocolate too. It tasted like a chocolate/orange truffle in fact. Pull this flavor out of your pocket and suddenly mid-race fueling becomes more civilized.

I emailed the guys at Outside PR and got the skinny. This flavor has now been named, it's called Mandarin Orange. However, it's not widely available yet. But if I where you, I'd keep your eyes open for it because it's awesome.


Another thing I picked up recently was a Nuun Hydration starter kit. The kit included a sleeve of Nuun drink mix tablets and a 16 oz bottle. It was $6 and was displayed at the counter of my local bike shop. It was a perfect impulse buy that I was happy to be impulsive about.

Angie from Barefoot Angie Bee is working for Nuun now, and I've been reading what she's been writing. So I definitely wanted to check it out. As I mentioned last week, watered down Gatorade has tended to be my go to choice for hydration. But Gatorade is not without some drawbacks. Even cut with water, it's really sweet and still causes that sticky "filmy" (if that's a word) feeling in your mouth. And occasionally my stomach gets pissed that I'm drinking it, regardless of how much water I add.

I am a sucker for lemon and lime. Nuun's lemon and lime flavor was great. It's really light tasting, has no sugar, has hydrated me plenty when I've used it, and my tummy has been happy. If you haven't already, you should definitely check out Nuun.

One other piece of business. I owe a bunch of you t-shirts, but I'm not sure the e-mails I've been sending through your profiles are getting through. If you've left at least 5 comments on the blog but have not got a shirt (but want one) double check the list here and then email me.

Oh yeah, I'm back from Vancouver and desperate to get back on the bike....