It’s a stellar weekend for escaping from the insanity of the holiday season. The coast offers a unique glimpse at a waterfowl wonderland, there’s a hike into history in the Piedmont, and in the mountains you’ll find a flatlander’s paradise. Intrigued? Read on.
Category Archives: Cycling
Two-wheeled therapy for a stress-filled world
I once told someone I could tell how I was doing mentally by my last mountain bike ride. If I’d taken an aerobic ride on fire roads — one where I could go relatively fast without paying much attention, one where I could let my mind drift — I was doing pretty good. I was still doing pretty good if the ride was half fire roads, half more aggressive, aggression-relieving singletrack. If the ride was all singletrack, all aggressive, all manic, all fast, well, then the bike was saving me $100 an hour on a leather couch.
Listen (to someone else) whistle while you work(out)
You’ve seen people jogging on the greenway or plodding away on the treadmill, oblivious to all but the ear buds pumping a driving beat into their ears. And, according to science, pumping an extra boost of juice into their workout. The American Council on Exercise recently reviewed seven studies conducted since 1999 that all agreed that listening to music has a positive impact on your workout. (There’s a caveat, but first the facts.)
New River Trail: 57 miles of bike trail less than 3 hours away
The physical therapist hesitated, then issued his edict. “Maybe. If it’s a short hike. And if the trail doesn’t have a lot of rocks.” He hesitated again, “I dunno … .”
“What a bike ride?” I asked.
It was Marcy’s first meeting with a PT to deal with a nagging case of planter fasciitis. She’d been hobbled off and on by the annoying muscle irritation; her most recent flair-up courtesy of a walk-to-run program. We were at Cary Orthopaedic’s Performance Therapy unit — because past experience revealed they were just as interested as we were in getting us moving again as soon as possible. PT Kevin Raymond was on board with that, he just wanted to make sure Marcy didn’t go out too fast.
Your next race: train hot, train consistently, take a calculator
News from the lab coat world that could aid your performance:
Hot workouts, cool results: You know this blazing hot, record-setting summer we just endured? The one when every workout seemed like it was taking place in an equatorial rain forest under a sunlamp? If you gutted out your summer workouts, you should be an animal in fall’s cooler weather.