Wilderness areas shouldn’t be the private domain of only the most intrepid swashbuckling types who have no compunction about pushing through where the trail disappears, about fording waist-deep streams, about scrambling through rhododendron hells ever-so-deserving of the name. They shouldn’t be their private playground and they needn’t be. Provided you know how to get in the back door.
Hey gals, have a (healthy) heart
When I go to the gym and get my vitals checked, the first two things I look at — before my weight, before my percentage of body fat, before my BMI — are my blood pressure and pulse. I figure if my resting heart rate is low (typically in the low 50s, though I long for the day when I dip into the upper 40s and achieve “athlete” status) and my blood pressure is good (I shoot for 110/70). Not bad numbers for a 54-year-old guy.
How often is she working out?
Wondering where you fit in the How-often-is everyone-else-working-out? scheme of things?
Even if you don’t think of yourself as competitive, the thought probably does cross your mind. Especially if you’ve only recently embarked on an exercise program and it seems like other newcomers you know are losing more weight, keeping up better in Pilates, suddenly shopping the petite section. Are they working out three times a week? Four? Three times a day seven days a week!?
Budget would close most state parks two days a week
On Wednesday, North Carolina’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources announced that attendance at its 39 state parks and recreation areas last year was 14.1 million, just short of the all-time record (The record of 14.2 million visitors was set in 2009.)
Walk now, run by summer
Last fall, I volunteered as a mentor for the Fit-tastic walk-to-run program sponsored by The Athlete’s Foot in Raleigh’s Cameron Village. It was the same program that had resuscitated my running career a year earlier (and the one I had written about a year before that while still at The News & Observer). Mentoring, I figured, was the least I could do for a program that had helped reunite me with a love lost for more than 20 years.