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.
This weekend: Plunge, hike, run
Make February go faster by getting out this weekend
Coast
February: on paper the shortest month, in your mind, the longest. Forced to bridge the gap between dread, post-holiday, dreary cold January and the start of spring in March, February can seem interminable. The best way to escape the February doldrums? Jump into an icy cold Atlantic Ocean.
Pedal while you work
We’ll avoid the obvious suggestion of workers powering office equipment when we report a study at East Carolina University that found sedentary office workers like the idea of having a portable pedaling machine under their desk. Like it, and will use it, in the case of 18 workers who had such a device placed under their desks for a four-week period.
New signs give Raleigh greenways direction
I pulled over on the greenway and stared at the sign, puzzled. Puzzled not by the sign’s message, which was clear. Puzzled by its mere existence.
For years, the Triangle’s greenways consisted of strings of half-mile and mile-long bits of elbow macaroni, scattered about. Signs — signs showing you where you were and where you could go — weren’t a priority on a path that simply went from Point A to Point B. But as those greenways grew and those bits of elbow macaroni joined to form longer and interconnected noodles, the need for direction, for signs, increased. For the past decade or so, the main complaint about local greenways has been the absence of signs.