Peanut Butter Energy Bars

I should preface this with giving credit where credit is due. This recipe is basically just a variation of the recipes Georgia Gould put on her website. If you want her varieties, you should check them out here, http://georgiagould.com/blog/2012/02/the-best-homemade-energy-bars/. Her directions are also probably a bit better than mine.

When my mom was visiting she made two varieties of Georgia's recipes and they were awesome. My wife remade the fruits and nuts bar with some variation based on what we had on hand. They turned out really well also.

Peanut Butter Energy Bars --

Ingredients:

2C (cups) rice crispies
2C rolled oats
1 package of bacon (fried, then chopped into small pieces)
1C peanut butter chips (chocolate chip pieces but in peanut butter flavor. sometimes hard to find. I use chocolate chips as a substitute)

1C creamy peanut butter
1C brown rice syrup

Directions:

Put your dry goods into a large mixing bowl and pre-stir.

In a sauce pan, heat the peanut butter and brown rice syrup over medium heat until it's combined and pretty runny.

Pour over dry goods.

With a spatula or wooden spoon mix the rice syrup/pb with your dry goods. Work quickly because when this stuff starts to cool it's going to get hard really fast. After about a minute, ditch the spatula and use your hands mixing it all together into one big clump.

Pour your mixture into a greased (crisco works if you got it) brownie pan.

Press the shit out of it to flatten it as much as you can. You want to try and get it about an inch thick. This will make sure everything holds together later.

Set it aside to cool for at least 1 hour. 2-3 is better. You can even leave it over night if you don't have time to mess with it.

Once cool, use a butter knife to cut equally sized bars of whatever portion you want. Since you wont' be trying to eat them on a bike you don't need any fancy wrapping instructions. Aluminum foil will work just fine. Store them in the fridge, though I'm not sure this is actually necessary.

Roughly 200 calories per bar if they're about 2" squares.

If you want, you can basically substitute any dried fruits or nuts for the bacon and peanut butter chips. You can also use almond butter or sunflower seed butter instead of peanut butter if you wanted. The more ingredients you add, reduce your rice crispies and rolled oats to 1C each. I've done tons of varieties and haven't found anything that isn't good.

Jefferson Cup. Not Good.

The Race: Jefferson Cup Road Race
The Course: 6, 11ish mile laps. 1 climb, the rest steepish rollers w/ a long false flat to the finish.
The Field: 3/4 Men
The Finish: Not DFL but not sure I actually got scored either.

It's less than 24 hours after I watched a group of guys pedal away from me up the climb at Jeff Cup. I guess I knew it was coming but, ever the optimist, I decided to start the climb at the back telling myself I could definitely at least just stay in contact over the top.

Well, that didn't happen and I had the pleasure of rolling it in by myself for the last 75% of that lap. Weird thing that I can't figure out is after the decent, I rode at threshold, by myself, avg about 24mph for the rest of the lap. My ability to go 200% of ftp for a sustained period on the climb which is what was required to stay in the group was zapped, that's a fact. But still riding at ftp for another 20minutes or so means that I definitely didn't bonk. I think this points to an even worse scenario, total mediocrity.

My teammates Thom and Mike rode really well. Thom well above where he expected himself to be and ended up 7th. Mike was strong and it's really too bad that I sucked so much and couldn't be there at the end to help him. That's definitely the worse part about sucking when you have teammates attempting to race as a team. The feeling of letting 3 other guys down is way worse than any embarrassment of pedaling in solo after everyone else has already started to explain to their friends why they didn't win. Mike had to avoid the crash that was in the finish but still ended up 8th. Luckily he didn't get tied up in that.

The positives:

- Not crashing when the kid in front me missed his bottle in the feed and it immediately went under my rear wheel.

- Not crashing when the junior forced me off the road and into a gravel driveway with a mailbox at 35+mph on one of the descents.

- Seeing Jill holding Hudson and the mesmerized look on his face as the group rolled by every lap.

- 65 miles in around 2:45 is a good training day and I suppose that's how I should look at it.

The negatives:

- The race was basically 2 laps too many. If we'd have done the 4 in the morning and not the 3/4 in the afternoon I think we'd have come to line with 4 guys, organized and able to win. (It should be point out that it's my fault we did the 3/4 as I made the sell and convinced everyone it was a good idea. Another reason I feel pretty shitty about how my day went).

I didn't see anybody taking pictures but if I end up on You Got Dropped I'm retiring and taking up bowling.