Category Archives: Cycling

90 Second Escape: Sunset (on a busy day of hiking, biking and running at Lake Crabtree)


Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb. read more

This weekend: Celebrate the Scuppernong, do an Amazing Race, Dig the Du

Scuppernong River at Columbia.

We’ve got a celebration of the Scuppernong River by paddle craft, a Great Amazing Race for you and a member of your family near Charlotte and a duathlon (trail run/mountain bike) on private property (worry not, it’s legal) near Asheville.

Coast read more

This weekend: Bike, curl, ‘scope

Selma Cyclepaths: Top fundraising team at Bike MS for seven years in a row.

Ride not one but two days at the coast for a great cause, acquaint yourself with a sport that takes stones, cozy up to the night sky atop Mount Mitchell.

Coast

This may not be something you can pull off at the last minute; for one thing, fundraising is involved. But you should definitely put this weekend’s Bike MS out of New Bern on your list for 2013. read more

First date

Harris Lake: a good first date ride venue.

“Hey, you still wanna ride? I’m off Friday.”

Even though we had discussed riding together a time or two, I was caught off-guard. I may have even blushed. Those first outdoors dates — be it for a backpack trip, to go climbing, to do a trail run — are fraught with tension. Are you as accomplished as you’ve let on? Can you really do 15-mile days in the Appalachians with a 35-pound pack? You may have done a 5.9 route, but that was 20 years and 30 pounds ago; can you do one today? And yes, you may have run 9-minute miles in a 10K — but that was on pavement, on a downhill course. read more

This weekend: Tri, or try yoga paddleboarding

Swim is in a pool; full Marine regalia optional.

Explore Cherry Point via a triathlon, participate in the VIII Lake Lure Olympiad or try your hand (and feet and sense of balance) with yoga on a paddleboard. Just another summer weekend in North Carolina.

Coast

I’m partial to events on military bases, in part because it gives civilians such as myself access to the otherwise inaccessible, to a world we otherwise don’t get a chance to see. That exposure is compounded when the event is a triathlon, which lets you run and ride through these forbidden lands. read more