I wrote the following article for the Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer in Raleigh; it appeared in both papers on May 15. It appears here in expanded form, with links. OK, time for your daily workout. Put on the sweats, lace up the sneakers and now to get limbered up with some long, deep stretches … . Not so fast there, Jane Fonda. It wasn’t long ago that…
Ashley Honneycutt was giving me a quick overview of the class we were headed to when one thing in particular caught my attention: “… and it’s all done on a roller.” Knowing that I’m a runner and sensing that I was about to wheel and make a break for my car, she grabbed my arm. “It’s not that kind of roller. Not the roller you use for running. It’s softer.”…
Life as an adventure writer is all about survival. Not surviving the adventures; it’s the writing that’s the challenge. Or rather getting paid to do it. When I got into this business 20 years ago at The News & Observer all I had to do to justify writing about outdoor adventure was convince one editor that people wanted to read about outdoor adventure. Fortunately, the first person I had to…
I was talking to Steven Wheelock, a wellness instructor at Rex Wellness in Raleigh, about stretching for a story coming soon to a McClatchy Newspaper (Charlotte Observer/News & Observer) near you when he sought to put the practice in perspective by anatomizing the four phases of the workout: 1. Stretching/warmup, 2. Evaluation period, 3. The workout itself, 4. Cool down. 1, 3 and 4, I was familiar with but 2…
It’s not your stuffed-up imagination; the spring allergy season really is off to early start this year (and, thanks to climate change, may be trending in this direction). You can read all about it in today’s Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer, in a story I contributed to. That story is about spring allergies in general. But what about their effect on the more active among us? How does…
(I wrote the following story for The News & Observer and Charlotte Observer; it appeared in both papers on January 31, 2012. It appears here, with links.) Used to be that neighborhood moms got together for lunch or a game of bridge. Today, they’re increasingly likely to gather for burpies, squats and to work up a good sweat. The boot camp workout, born a decade ago and initially targeted to…
The following story, which I wrote for the Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer of Raleigh, originally appeared in those papers on January 10. It appears here in expanded form, with links. When Sidney Eagles Jr. went in for his annual physical a dozen years back, his physician reminded him that he was overweight, that his blood pressure was high, and that his cholesterol was up there as well….
I was thinking I’d just had a bad day on the wall. Then I opened my climbing journal to record my workout and discovered that my last workout, a week earlier, had been “a bad day.” Likewise, the workout before that, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, had been “somewhat aimless.” Aimless and anti-productive, I discovered upon further review: Had it really been nearly two months since I’d…
While most of you are staring down Day 3 of your 2012 New Year’s resolutions, I find myself with less than five months to go on my annual birthday resolutions. Make that “first” annual birthday resolutions: When I turned 55 last May 11 I got to Googling and discovered that 55 is a somewhat pivital year for a male. Among other things, our muscles and organs begin to atrophy; we…
“You know,” Chris said, “there aren’t too many people who could do this.” After catching his breath, he added, “And I don’t mean people our age. I mean people, period.” We were on day three of a four-day, 50-mile backpack trip on a particularly rugged region of the rugged Nantahala National Forest in western North Carolina. Specifically, we were about a third of the way up a climb that would…