Coast

WWJDD?

What Would John Denver do if he were still alive and living in the Wilmington area? We reckon he’d be taking part in Saturday’s F.A.R. Out Family Adventure Race at Brunswick Nature Park.

A total of four challenges —  trail running, mountain biking, “team challenges” and optional kayaking —of which family teams need only complete two. You get a map at the mass start, the rest is up to you. Courses differ by age category and are color coded. Plus food, vendors and more.

Logistics: Saturday, June 20, 9 a.m., Brunswick Nature Park, Winnebow. Race day registration starts at $75 (plus $8 if you need a one-day U.S. Adventure Racing Association membership). More info here.

Saturday forecast: High of 90, chance of thunderstorms.

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Looking ahead: Into surfing — or at least surfing-curious? Check out the O’Neill/Sweetwater Pro-Am Surf Fest July 17-19 at Wrightsville Beach. Details here.

Piedmont

What does the adventurous dad truly want for Father’s Day? To spend some fat time with his kids.

And that’s just what he’ll be doing if you take him to Lake Crabtree County Park in Morrisville on Sunday for this year’s edition of TORCFest, a k a the Triangle Fat Tire Festival. Put on annually by the Triangle Off Road Cyclists, this is a day of mountain biking fun. There’s a time trial (including categories for kids 12 and under and ages 13-17), group rides, bike demos, BBQ and a skills clinic (and knowing these folks, possibly a BBQ skills clinic). Plus, join TORC and get a free chiropractic adjustment!

Logistics: Sunday, June 20, 10 a.m.- 4 p.m., Lake Crabtree County Park, Morrisville. More info and to sign up, here.

Sunday forecast: Sunny, high of 98.

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Looking ahead: A night triathlon? There’s one in Cary, on June 28. Check it out here.

Mountains

Would dad mind celebrating Father’s Day a day early? Not if it’s as part of the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy’s June Jamboree in the Roan Highlands.

Five hikes are planned as part of the Jamboree. Don’t quite have your full hiking legs under you? Try the Roll n’ Stroll in the Rhododendron Gardens atop Roan Mountain (11 a.m.). More interested in something the kids would dig? Try the Salamander Scavenger Hunt at 11 a.m. at Hampton Creek Cove. Something a little more ambitious? How about the Ed Schell Memorial Hike from Carver’s Gap to Grassy Ridge (9 a.m.). And for those of you seeking a true challenge, there’s the Challenge Hike starting at 8 a.m. from Hughes Gap and ending 15 miles later at Hampton Creek Cove. This hike includes the longest contiguous stretch of grassy balds in the world.

Read more about the Jamboree in the Asheville Citizen-Times.

Logistics: Saturday, June 20, hikes start at 9 a.m. in the Roan Highlands area. Free. More info here.

Saturday forecast: High of 83, chance of thunderstorms.

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Looking ahead: Celebrate your independence this July 4 with a mountain run in Lenoir — the Firecracker 10K, 5K and fun run. Details here.

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Those are our thoughts on the weekend. Find more options at the sources listed below.

The post This weekend: Family adventure, a Fat day for Dad, high hikes in the Roan Highlands appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

I wrote the following for both the Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer; it appeared in both papers on Tuesday, April 23. It appears here in updated form, with links. A story on Big Muddy participants Dave Case and his son, Owen, appeared in this space yesterday.

Adam Spisak thinks a good way to spend time with your kids is covered in mud.
Last fall, nearly 1,100 parents and their kids agreed.
That’s how many showed up for the inaugural Big Muddy Challenge, an obstacle race with a twist: It’s for families. Adult-oriented obstacle races – the Tough Mudder, Spartan and Rugged Maniac, to name three – have grown in popularity over the last three years. While some have separate kids’ courses, none were open to parent-kid teams, until last September’s Big Muddy Challenge.
Based on the success of that first race, held outside Raleigh, Spisak has turned last year’s hunch into a seven-race mid-Atlantic series in 2014, with two events in the Triangle and one near Charlotte.
The idea for the Big Muddy Challenge came to Spisak, who lives in Raleigh, in 2012. He had just completed an adult obstacle race, the Tough Mudder in South Carolina, and he envisioned someday sharing the experience with his newborn daughter, Margo. Trouble was, he couldn’t find a family-oriented obstacle race.
An obstacle race, with its emphasis on running through mud and water and getting dirty and climbing over and through stuff, seemed such a natural for a parent-kid combo. So he started putting together the Big Muddy Challenge.
“We planned for about 200,” Spisak says of the first event, “though I was secretly hoping for 500.” By race day last September, 1,092 parents and kids had registered.
“It was neat to see whole families competing together,” said Lynn Marotta of Raleigh, who competed with her 7-year-old son, Graye. “And the course was challenging without being too challenging.”
Spisak says the emphasis is on fun, not competition. That shows in the 12 obstacles he has planned for 2014 year’s first Big Muddy Challenge, Saturday in Youngsville. Obstacle No. 3, for instance, is called Chips and Dip. In about 10 inches of mud and water, says Spisak, family teams will need to find a specific combination of colored chips before they can proceed. At MudCasso, Obstacle No. 6, contestants will emerge from a soupy quagmire to draw a team portrait on a whiteboard.
“We’re expecting lots of family photo ops at that one,” says Spisak.
Family is the name of the Big Muddy game for the extended family of Andrea Norman of Huntersville.
“Let’s see,” she said, ticking off the roster for the June 28 Big Muddy Challenge in Weddington. “It’s me, my two sons, my sister her husband and their two kids, and my mom and dad.” Her mom, Sharon Norman, did one of the Spartan adventure races with Norman last year.
Based on participation in the first Big Muddy and early registration for this Saturday’s race (more than 1,200 had preregistered as of Monday — Spisak believes that number should top 1,500 by race time) — family adventure racing appears to strike a chord.
While family competition has been common to many 5K races and fun walks, Cynthia Edwards, professor of psychology at Meredith College in Raleigh, says there’s something different about this type of event.
A 5K, for instance, sends a good message about exercise and healthy living, says Edwards. Throw mud and water and a climbing rope into the mix, and the message expands.
“By watching their parents play, kids learn that life can be joyful,” says Edwards. “Playing teaches kids that parents are people, too. That life is fun.”
Getting muddy and being silly are especially important for budding adolescents about to discover that their parents aren’t perfect, she says. Working as a team, as equals, to accomplish a goal is also good, she adds.
That was one of the things Dave Case appreciated about last year’s race with his then 7-year-old son, Owen. “It was neat helping him through some of the things,” says Case, who lives in Apex. “And it was great to see his sense of accomplishment when we were done.”
There was another benefit for Dad. Two years ago, Case, who is 38, realized he’d become a couch potato. He enrolled in a three-day-a-week boot camp, lost 55 pounds and got turned on by his trainer to obstacle racing. Last year, he completed three Spartans, earning the Trifecta designation; this year he’s signed up for six and is going for a Double Trifecta.
“I can get competitive,” he says, “but all that was out the window with Owen. It was kind of a refreshing feeling, actually.”
Fun over competition isn’t the only difference between the Big Muddy and its adult counterparts. Bolting through live electrical wires (sizzling with up to 10,000 volts) and jumping through flames are signature obstacles for most adult races.
And the Big Muddy?
“No electricity,” says Spisak. “And no fire.”

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The Big Muddy Challenge

Triangle race: Saturday, April 26, waves of racers will be sent out starting at 8 a.m. until 5 p.m.

Location: Hill Ridge Farms, Youngsville.

Cost: $78.01 per parent-child team. Additional charge for additional adults and children.

More info here.

Charlotte-area race: Saturday, June 28, at Hunter Farm in Weddington. Waves of racers will be sent out starting at 8 a.m. until 5 p.m.

Cost: $63.79 per parent-child team.

More info here.

A portion of proceeds from all Big Muddy Challenges benefits Big Brothers Big Sisters.

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Muddy facts

• Course length: 2-2.5 miles, 12 obstacles
• Average. time to complete last year’s course: 47 minutes
• Minimum age allowed: 6
• Oldest 2013 competitor: 72
• Demographics: 57 percent of kid competitors in 2013 were male, 43 percent female.
• 12 percent of 2013 participants were on a team of 10 or more

The post A Muddy Good Time appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

Adam Spisak knew he was on to something three weeks before his inaugural Big Muddy Challenge in September. That was when he realized he needed more T-shirts. A lot more T-shirts.
The idea for the Big Muddy Challenge came to him in a dream of sorts. It was last fall, he had done the Tough Mudder obstacle race in South Carolina earlier in the day, had driven back to Raleigh and was trying to get his daughter back to sleep. It was 2:30 in the morning, and Spisak needed to be to work in a few hours. Thinking about his own active lifestyle — he was a runner, played golf, was in an adult soccer league — and thinking about his daughter, with whom he wanted to spend time, he got to thinking it would be fun to do an obstacle race with her when she got older. Trouble was, he discovered Googling the next day, no parent-kid obstacle race existed.
“So I decided to create one,” Spisak says.
The notion of parent and child frolicking together in the mud seemed a natural, but who knew? Spisak got to work planning the inaugural Big Muddy Challenge for Sept. 7 at Hill Ridge Farms in Raleigh. Organizers of similar events — charity runs, for instance — told him to expect around 200 participants for a first-time affair. Spisak secretly hoped for 500.
“I wanted it to be big enough to have a significant impact for my charity,” Spisak says. Profits from the first Big Muddy were designated for Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Triangle.
The other organizers he consulted told him one other thing: about 75 percent of participants sign up within three weeks of an event. Three weeks from the first Big Muddy, Spisak says nearly 400 parents and kids had signed up, about double what he’d been told to expect. As promised registration took off from there.

By the time the first wave of Big Muddy participants hit the course at 9 a.m. on Sept. 7, registration had hit 1,072.
“In addition to my full-time job, I was putting in another 40 hours those last three weeks on the Big Muddy,” says Spisak.
Among other things, he had to round up another 20 volunteers (in addition to the 35 already committed), make sure the venue could handle the increased demand, handle a deluge of last-minute requests (“We signed up for the 10:30 wave but we need to change it to 11:15”), and get more T-shirts.
“Fortunately, we had a very flexible T-shirt vendor,” says Spisak.
The event went off without a hitch, as did the two days of clean-up that followed. On the Tuesday after the race, on a 6:20 a.m. flight out of RDU for his day job, Spisak finally had a moment to reflect on the event’s popularity.
“I thought, ‘How can we make it better next time?’” Spisak recalls. “And that’s when I realized we’d do another event.”
Several, it turns out.
Already on the calendar for 2014 are two Big Muddys in Raleigh, as well as events in Charlotte and Richmond, Va., Dulles just outside of Washington, D.C., and Fayetteville. More Big Muddys are possible.
“I think we really touched on something here that’s special,” says Spisak as he prepares to launch BMC 2014. “Parents like to encourage their children to be active, but there’s a huge difference between being a spectator, being a parent watching a child do something, and having an event where both go and participate.”
Spisak is in the process of lining up local leadership for the new races and streamlining the administrative side of the event. He’s also working to improve the “customer experience.”
Next year, expect 12 to 15 obstacles for each event, up from 11 at the first BMC. Instead of employing “handy friends” to make the obstacles, he’ll be teaming with professionals — home builders, for instance — to make them. A big goal for 2014: to make sure no one emerges from the course unsullied by mud.
“There was one point [at the September BMC] where a boy and his mom came up to a mud obstacle and the boy hesitated. ‘Is it really OK if I go through there?’ he asked his mom. That brought a smile to everyone’s face,” says Spisak.
Registration has opened for the April 26 race in Raleigh (early bird team fee, through Feb.1, is $60.07). Spisak says to keep checking the website for details on the other races scheduled for 2014.
Here’s the website.

The post Big Muddy has big plans for 2014 appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

The three-day Crystal Coast Paddle Festival opens in Swansboro Friday while the inaugural Green River Games promises to offer some of the most challenging competition the state has seen. Meanwhile, in the Piedmont, it’s the Big Muddy Challenge, big muddy fun for parents and kids.

Coast

Our pick for the state this week is at the coast, the Crystal Coast specifically, home to the aptly-named Crystal Coast Paddle Festival. The festival kicks off Friday and runs through Sunday, and includes kayak and paddleboard vendors, demos, tours, workshops and races (including dragon boat races), all out of Hammocks Beach State Park in Swansboro.

It’s a great opportunity to take a guided tour and check out the latest in boats. And the weather promises to be ideal.

Logistics: Friday, Sept. 6 — Sunday, Sept. 8, Hammocks Beach State Park, Swansboro. More info here.

Saturday forecast: Highs in the low 80s, dry Friday and Saturday, 50 percent chance of rain Sunday.

Piedmont

Adam Spisak had an “ah ha!” moment when most of us would be having an “oy vey!” moment. … That’s how we began our post on June 27 about the Big Muddy Challenge, a mud run for the family that takes place Saturday in Youngsville. We won’t repeat ourself; rather, you can read the post here.

Suffice it to say the BMC — parents and kids wallowing in the muck together — is an idea overdue in the mud race milieu.

Logistics: Saturday, Sept. 7, 8 a.m., Hill Ridge Farms, Youngsville. $73. More info here.

Saturday forecast: High of 81, partly cloudy.

Mountains

Let the wild and crazy games begin. That would be the inaugural Green River Games, a series of adrenaline-infused competitions highlighted by the Silverback, which includes: an 8-mile paddle on a stretch of the Green that includes the Class V Narrows, an 8-mile mountain bike race with 3,000 feet of climbing and a trail run on the same 8-mile course. Good spectator potential for those of us who aren’t crazy.

Logistics: Saturday, Sept. 7, 11 a.m., Tuxedo Hydrostation on the Green River south of Asheville. Read more about the event here, go here for race details, including fees for the various events.

Saturday forecast: High of 79 with 20 percent chance of rain.

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Those are our thoughts on the weekend. Find more options at the sources listed below.

Like us on Facebook and get health, fitness and outdoors news throughout the day.

GetGoingNC.com

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The post This weekend: Paddling at the coast, getting spanked in the mountains appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

“It was last fall and I had run the Tough Mudder in South Carolina earlier in the day,” says Spisak, who lives in Raleigh. “It’s 2:30 in the morning and I’m up with my daughter, trying to get her to sleep.” The obstacle race is going through his head, he’s experiencing the joys of fatherhood, he’s reflecting on his active past — he played soccer through his freshman year at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia and has since evolved into a runner — and he’s contemplating the future.

“I realize I want to incorporate an active lifestyle into my daughter’s life, but I don’t want it to be where she’s doing a sport and I’m on the sidelines cheering her on, or I’m doing something and she’s cheering me on,” says Spisak. What he really wants to do with his daughter, he realizes, are events like the Tough Mudder.

Problem is, he discovers Googling around over the next few days, there are precious few adventure races that cater to families. “Some have a kid element, but it’s basically a playground for them while you do the race. It’s almost a secondary thought to the main event.”

That realization lead to the creation of the Big Muddy Challenge, which makes its debut at Hill Ridge Farms in Raleigh on Sept. 7.

The Big Muddy Challenge is geared to parents and kids between ages 6 and 12. The race will be a scaled down version of the grown-up-geared obstacle and mud races that have mushroomed in popularity over the past five years. The Tough Mudder series alone has grown from 50,000 participants in 2010, its first year, to a half million last year. Most races are so overwhelmed with participants that racers are sent off in waves every 15 minutes or so. Often, the events take two days or more.

Spisak says the Big Muddy Challenge course will be two miles and have 10 obstacles. Some hay bales to scramble over, water and plenty of mud, assures Spisak, but, “It will not be purely physical. We want to make sure the children have an opportunity to take the lead.”

For instance, there will be something called “Two Eyes, Four Legs.” “The adults will be blindfolded and the child will have to guide them through a maze.”

There will be no fire or electricity.

Participants are welcome to be competitive, but Spisak says the race will not be timed. “We don’t want to target endurance athletes, but we do want to attract them,” says Spisak. “What we really want to do is promote family togetherness and physical activity.”

Spisak, who manages a software development firm by day, is relying on his experience running soccer camps and as an efficiency expert, as well as three dedicated volunteers to pull off a race that he believes could attract as many as 3,500 participants. Already, more than two months out and with little promotion, the Big Muddy Challenge has 150 registered.

Cost to participate is $63 for a parent/child team. You can add another kid for $30, another adult for $33. Proceeds benefit the Rex Healthcare Foundation, Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Triangle and Playworks of Durham.

Tough the Big Muddy has grown from Spisak’s personal wants, he believes the race will resonate with other parents.

“Right now, the reality for me is that we’re looking for things that are fun do to, that are healthy and safe, and that we can do with friends and families. To me,” he says, “this checks all those boxes.”

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For more information on the Big Muddy Challenge, go here.

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