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.
Category Archives: Cycling
A Frank approach to modern exploring by bike
In Friday’s blog: Monday, Marcy and I went to hear author/historian David Herlihy talk about his new book, “The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance” at Quail Ridge Books & Music. His talk inspired a bike journey of my own. In today’s blog: That journey.
Bike race on the bottom of the sea
Thursday, I mentioned in passing a bike race on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. How, you might wonder, could one mention a bike race on the ocean floor in passing? An oversight on my behalf, so I’m back today with a rebroadcast of a story I wrote for The News & Observer in 1996 on the 13th annual Underwater Bike Race on the Indra. It’s a tale that needs no more introduction, so without further adieu, a trip down memory lane — not to mention down 60 feet below the surface of the Atlantic — for the 1996 Independence Day running of UBRAI.
Cycling adventure through a new Lenz
My wife leaned over and whispered, “You’re thinking about something.”
It was hard not to. (And drat the telltale look that signals when thought is finally occurring.) It was Monday evening and we were among 30 or so others listening to author David Herlihy recount the adventures of cycling explorer Frank Lenz. Lenz was a Pittsburgh bookkeeper who became caught up in the early stages of a cycling boom that swept the country in the late 1800s. He started pedaling a “high wheeler,” participating in races on dirt (usually mud) roads and tracks that might draw 20 competitors and thousands of fans. Begrudgingly, he switched to a “safety bicycle” — the prototype for the modern bike — when that style began to curry favor. In the meantime, he was honing his skills as a photographer, and in 1892 convinced Outing magazine to back an ill-fated trip around the world. That trip is the basis for Herlihy’s “The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance,” and constituted the bulk of his talk and slideshow Monday at Quail Ridge Books & Music.
Team Bandwidth.com’s 3,004-mile sprint
The following post on Team Bandwidth.com’s winning of this year’s Race Across America originally appeared in the Work & Money section of The News & Observer on Sunday, June 27. I’ve written more on the team’s experience here.