As a kid growing up in 1960s suburban America, I played “stadium” baseball, rode intricate routes on my bike, trampolined, played tackle football, engaged in hours-long games of hide-’n’-seek, went sledding played indoor basketball and tightroped. And I did it all without leaving our block.
Stand-up paddleboarding: The video
Thursday, I went to Lake Crabtree County Park where the Great Outdoor Provision Co. was holding a boat demo. Included in the demo fleet: stand-up paddleboards. I took my river shorts and my video camera and came back with a 5-minute video about what this modern-day sport that grew out of Polynesian mass transit is like. Check it out.
Small Steps
Sometimes — a lot of the time — it’s the small steps that get us headed in the right direction.
That’s the thinking behind the Small Steps Web site run by the government (the White House and the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services).
Small Steps is a small but effective, non-overwhelming Web site that appreciates that people have various challenges to living a healthy life, not the least of which is making a second career out of trying to live a healthy life. It offers quick tips and suggestions for being more physically active and eating better. The site is divided into two components:
Stand-up paddleboarding: masochistic or mainstream?
In the April Outside magazine, I read about stand-up paddleboarding and thought, there’s another crazy thing I’ll never try.
Last week, I walked out of Great Outdoor Provision Co. and thought, Man, there’s something I can’t wait to try.
The difference perspective makes.
Here’s how the Outside article started (quoting from the drop headline): “Masochistic surf kook bent on taming very large stand-up paddleboard seeks Graveyard of the Atlantic for island-linking expedition entirely at whim of wind and waves.” Masochistic … kook … taming … Graveyard … whim — not descriptions I look for when deciding whether to try a new sport. The article — about the author’s six-day, 70-mile vertical paddle from Ocracoke to Nags Head — didn’t quite live up to its beware-all-ye-who-enter-here headline hype. But passages such as “ … averaging a fall every five minutes or so, accumulating abrasions on knees and knuckles …” and “Nevertheless, I go down hard, cracking my jaw on the deck and bloodying my lip. And I haven’t even reached the real turbulence yet … ” keep me from adding stand-up paddleboarding to my to-do list.
Ciclovia hits the Bull City
The next time you hear someone badmouth all the New Yorkers here, invoke the name of Jessalee Landfried. She’s the reason we’ll get to ride our bikes, free of motorized traffic, over a mile-long loop of downtown Durham streets Sunday afternoon, and she’s only lived here since September.