I haven’t counted how many racers from the Triangle were in this past weekend’s Burn 24 Hour Challenge mountain bike race at Dark Mountain near Wilkesboro, but I couldn’t walk from our pit to the start/finish without running into someone from hereabouts. These are a few of the stories I picked up along the way.
Category Archives: Kids
24 hours of guts
The kids were doing the math, and the numbers weren’t coming up in Ben’s favor.
It was Sunday morning, around 9:30, and the fact that these 15-year-olds were able to do math at all was impressive. For most of the past 24 hours they’d been racing their mountain bikes at the appropriately named Dark Mountain near Wilkesboro, site of the 10th Annual Burn 24 Hour Challenge, a mountain bike race that began at noon Saturday and ran, straight through, until noon Sunday. During the past 12 1/2 hours, one of the 15-year-olds had thrown up twice during her middle-of-the-night shift-in-the saddle. One had severe stomach cramps early on after finishing a 7.4-mile lap on the hilly foothills course. One kept falling asleep in a camp chair and had to be awoken, for the third time, less than 10 minutes before his last lap. Yet at 9:30, working on maybe three hours sleep per person, their brains were working away.
Challenge yourself — to put a deserving kid on a new bike
Picture this: You’re preparing for the MS 150, or Cycle North Carolina, or the Blue Ridge Brutal. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, about 4:30. You’re supposed to do a 6 p.m. training ride, a 30-miler at an 18-20 mph pace. It’s been a long day at work; You’re beat and what sounds like a much better plan is going out with some coworkers for a beer. Or two. Missing one little training ride won’t hurt, the little dude on your shoulder holding the pitchfork rationalizes. If only you had some added incentive to drag your lazy butt to the ride …
Recreational paradise … in your own backyard?
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.
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: