One thing I love about going back to Colorado is I never know when I’ll bump up against celebrity. Celebrity in my case meaning a rock star of the outdoor world.
Two weeks ago I was in Loveland, home office of my wife’s employer, Interweave. Interweave produces books, magazines and Web sites covering the crafting world. Not the kind of workplace where you’d expect to find leaders of the mountain biking world or pioneering female rock climbers. Not unless that workplace is in Colorado.
It was a telling commentary on the times four years ago when Liz Baird came up with the idea for Take A Child Outside Week. The simple notion that you needed to dedicate a week to encouraging kids to go outside and play would have been preposterous just a decade earlier. Yet with the proliferation of video games and parents increasingly fearful of threats real and perceived, kids were staying inside — and being kept inside — in record numbers. The dilemma was chronicled by author and advocate Richard Louv in his 2005 bestseller, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” an account of how our kids had gone from being weaned in the wild to garrisoned in the great room in less than a generation.
This weekend, may we suggest …
Coast
You built up a good head of fitness steam over the spring and summer and it seems a waste not to capitalize on it just because summer is now officially over. Well, here’s one more chance for your day in the sun: The 32nd Annual Wilmington YMCA Triathlon in Wrightsville Beach. It’s the biggest race in the North Carolina Triathlon Series, drawing 1,300 participants. The event starts at 7 a.m. with a 1,500 meter swim with the current from the Blockade Runner, followed by a 12-mile bike ride and a 5K — all very flat. $65 (add another $10 if you aren’t a member of USA Triathlon).
My slogan as a guidebook writer: I get lost so you don’t have to.
Yet in the case of London Bald, there’s no guarantee that even my most meticulous directions, derived from wandering 20 miles in less than 24 hours with GPS and maps in hand, will spare you from a similar bushwhacking fate in the rugged Nantahala National Forest. For London Bald, like the 26-mile Appletree Camp trail network it’s a part of, is in a National Forest, and when you step foot on a National Forest trail, anything can happen.
Ultra-endurance events can be bad for your heart. Or maybe not.
That undefinitive statement comes courtesy of contradictory studies both reported Aug. 31 on the Science Daily site. We’ll start with the up(heart)beat report.
The Karolinska Institutet and the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences studied 15 athletes (12 males, three females) at the Adventure Racing World Championships. The event covered 800 kilometers in the disciplines of mountain biking, trekking, kayaking and in-line skating and took about six days, with competitors essentially going nonstop for 150 hours at an average work intensity, measured in terms of VO2 peak, of 40 percent. Before and after the event, the athletes were assessed to see how their hearts responded. While some of the athletes registered increased levels of certain blood markers, suggestive of cardiac damage, immediately after the race, those markers were back to normal within 24 hours. Researchers believe the spike wasn’t the result of cardiac damage, but rather the body’s way of protecting and regulating growth. Further, the athletes who finished strongest and did the best had the least affected hearts.