There’s a bike ride in the east, a biathlon in the west, and a survivalist 5K in between this weekend in North Carolina.
Coast
The northeast corner of North Carolina may be the best-suited part of the state for cycling: two-lane country roads meandering past forest and cotton fields with little automotive traffic to compete with. Yet how often do you find yourself riding a bike there? Not very, I’m guessing. Usually in a case like this it’s because you simply haven’t had a good excuse to explore the area. An excuse such as this Saturday’s Country Roads Bike Tour. Starting and ending in Scotland Neck, the CRBT offers routes of 20k, 50k and 100k — basically a k for every style of riding, from not-much-at-all (20k) to long greenway rides on the weekend (50K) to the hardcore recreational rider who gets in 100 miles a week (100k).read more
“I ran a 5K in Raleigh on May 1st called Race of Grace,” writes Dixon, who when she’s not running is executive director of the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. “The prizes are cakes home baked by members of the churches that organize the race. Anyway, I have never been so motivated to run harder than I would have in hopes of winning a prize.”read more
“That first 200 was pretty good,” Tim said as he followed me on his bike, “but you need to pick it up for the last 400.”
Right, I gasped to myself. And you can pick up my lung when I cough it up.
It was my first “coached” running workout and a whirlwind of thoughts rushed through my oxygen-deprived brain as I did the third of my four prescribed 600-meter sprints (bookended by a pair of 1,000-meter dashes). Will I be seeing that tuna wrap I had for lunch again? was foremost. Why am I doing this? was a close second. By “this,” I meant hiring, at age 54, a coach to drive me, push me and to make my body feel like it hadn’t since I’d last crossed paths with a coach in high school some 35 years ago.read more
News from the lab coat world that could aid your performance:
Hot workouts, cool results: You know this blazing hot, record-setting summer we just endured? The one when every workout seemed like it was taking place in an equatorial rain forest under a sunlamp? If you gutted out your summer workouts, you should be an animal in fall’s cooler weather.read more
Hello, and welcome to GGNC Playhouse. Today’s a one-act performance, “Buy Local: Your Race Could Depend On It,” is a re-creation of an actual event that occurred at Saturday’s 6 BC endurance mountain bike race at Briar Chapel south of Chapel Hill. The scene opens with a long shot of several mountain bikers coming up to pit row. The riders, nearing the end of a 7-mile lap, are slowly pedaling up the hill, all except one who’s pushing his bike. As the despondent running cyclist nears the pit, Dave Naderman, manager of the Trek Bicycles of Raleigh, manning the store’s mobile service center parked near the start/finish heads down to see what’s wrong. Let’s listen.read more