I originally wrote the following story for The News & Observer, where it ran on Tuesday, July 13. Saturday, I’ll post a similar story that ran July 13 in the Charlotte Observer.
It helped Josh Handest train for a half marathon. It was even more instrumental in getting him into shape to keep up with his preschool sons.
We usually go to outdoors events to participate — to run, to ride, to play. Sometimes, though, we go for inspiration.
That could be the case this weekend at the 6th Annual Reef/Sweetwater Pro-Am Surf Fest in Wilmington. Some 96 pro surfers are scheduled to attend this year’s event at Wrightsville Beach, which offers up $20,000 in prize money. Among them are former ASP World Championship tour standout and Wilmington Sports Hall of Fame inductee Ben Bourgeois, Mike Losness, Paul Fisher, Jay Thompson, Nick Rozsa, Dylan Goodale, Heath “Nutty” Walker and Tonino Benson.
I looked up the road to the next street sign. “That’s it, right?” I asked. “Smallwood Drive?”
“That’s it,” Gavin confirmed. “Now we just have a couple hundred meters to go.”
Not what I wanted to hear on this steamy (92 degrees, 85 percent humidity) evening training run. We’d already done three mile-long fast tempo miles; this was No. 4 and I just wanted it to be over — now, not 200 meters from now. But I was running with my coach and my training group, and so, despite the militant protests by my gasping lungs and cramping legs, I poured it on for another 200 meters.
On April 16, President Obama signed a presidential memorandum “establishing the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative to promote and support innovative community-level efforts to conserve outdoor spaces and to reconnect Americans to the outdoors.” Like most things that involve a proclamation, speeches and four-page memorandums with subsections, it’s unclear what exactly America’s Great Outdoors Initiative actually is. And maybe at this point that’s not such a bad thing, because one of the first acts of the AGOI is to conduct a series of nine “Listening Sessions” across the country, one if which is Thursday in Asheville.
Curiously, when Marcy suddenly sounded like Curly in “We Want Our Mummy,” I thought back to a phone conversation we’d had last fall. I was on the Appalachian Trail, she was in our Cary backyard. I was in the wild, she was in suburbia. I was lounging at my campsite in the woods having tea, she was trying to figure out what to do with the four-foot copperhead sunning on our back deck. Subsequent Googling suggested that the sizable snake was likely a pregnant mama looking for a place to hunker down for the winter after giving birth — to as many as 14 slithering offspring. Marcy’s yelp this suggested that she had found said offspring.