While Durham officials circle their wagons and privately mull how to come up with another $2 million to build a pivotal pedestrian bridge over I-40, thereby completing the 22-mile American Tobacco Trail, others outside the city are more candid with possible solutions. Durham discovered the shortfall in July when it opened bids from eight contractors on the project, which also calls for about 4 miles of paved trail. The lowest…

We’ve added two more greenways to our greenway guide, both of which offer a potential day of escape, especially for young families. Smithfield: Buffalo Creek Greenway. When we stumbled across this work-in-progress in spring 2010, we were surprised by the audacity of such a project (a $1.2 million, 3.3-mile greenway) in a relatively small town (population 13,000ish). The greenway joins the  city’s historic center with new development on the north…

“I … I just didn’t have anything more to give,” I confided to my cycling psychologist on our ride this morning. “I was empty.” Allen and I ride one morning a week at Umstead. It’s typically a mildly competitive ride where we save just enough air to chat about bikes (lot’s of debate about whether to go the 29er route), rides (mountain centuries that Allen does and I talk about),…

Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast, especially come summer. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. 
To help ease this trying transition, we’re running a new feature every Monday, at least during the summer, called 90 Second Escape. Essentially, it’s a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake…

For 10 years, the Huck A Buck has been an institution for Triangle area mountain bikers. And for the last two years, the race’s organizers, Happy Fun Racing, have said the 2011 edition would be the last. But a month ago, we detected waffling. It might be the last, one organizer let slip. So, was Sunday’s race the last? GetGoingNC.com took its cameras (just one actually, a flip video) to…

The next time you hear about an athlete “juicing,” he may be beetroot juicing. A pair of recent studies have found that athletes who throw down some beetroot juice before an event tend to do better from an endurance standpoint. In November, a study appearing the Journal of Applied Physiology found that runners who beetroot juiced increased their endurance by 15 percent during high intensity running. And a study just…

Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast, especially come summer. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. 
To help ease this trying transition, we’re running a new feature every Monday, at least during the summer, called 90 Second Escape. Essentially, it’s a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake…

Explore Wilmington — quickly — by foot; explore the Triad at 18 mph by bike; or take a mountain hike frequently interrupted by plunges into a cool mountain pools. Those are but three of your options for getting out and exploring North Carolina this weekend. Coast Downtown Wilmington is a swell place to take in the sights: the Cotton Exchange, the waterfront, the historic homes built for sea captains. Imagine…

When Raleigh’s Neuse River Greenway reaches the Johnston County Line in the spring of 2013, it’ll have company. “It should be done by this time next year, if not sooner,” Bob Mosher with the NC Department of Transportation’s Division of Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety said Thursday. “It” is a four-mile stretch of greenway now under construction that starts at the Wake County line near Mial Plantation Road and extends downstream…

The first 8-mile stretch of the Neuse River Greenway in Raleigh is on target to open this September, Raleigh senior greenway planner Vic Lebsock said Thursday. “Yes, I am,” he replied when asked if he was confident of the late summer opening. The 8-mile stretch, from Falls of Neuse Road just below the Falls Lake dam south to the WRAL Soccer Complex, is part of the Neuse River Greenway, which…