Take advantage of yet another cool spring weekend with a fitness challenge at the coast, a Mother’s Day hike in the Piedmont, and what may be the most ideal first hike ever offered.
Coast
You think of firefighters, you think of folks in pretty darn good shape. So who better to stage a fitness challenge?
We get older, the joints stiffen, living an active life becomes more of a challenge.
Consider these facts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
Staying active helps ward off the effects of arthritis, and the folks at SoMuchYoga.com tell us, working some yoga into your life is a good way to help you maintain an active lifestyle. Yoga can reduce pain, increase your range of motion, helps you build strength, improves your balance, and offers a host of additional psychological benefits.
Learn more about how a regimen of yoga can aid your active lifestyle at this article, “Yoga for Arthritis: The Amazing Way Yoga Helps Alleviate Arthritis Pain,” from SoMuchYoga.com.
Amazing how good it can feel to actually act on your ideas, rather than simply cogitate on them. Three examples from last week, including the issue, the action, the reaction.
1. Have a goal. I know, I talk about the importance of having goals, about how they’re essential to keep you motivated. And yet … . Beginning last October, my goal was the Umstead Marathon, which was on March 2. I ran (mostly) the marathon, then, according to plan, took some time off. Of course, the plan was to take maybe a week or two before setting a new goal, signing up for a race and training anew. The goal was not to take a couple months, which is about what happened. Oh, I was running — every now and then. I needed a goal — I needed another trail race.
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.
The following story, which I wrote for the Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer of Raleigh, originally appeared in those papers on January 10. It appears here in expanded form, with links.
When Sidney Eagles Jr. went in for his annual physical a dozen years back, his physician reminded him that he was overweight, that his blood pressure was high, and that his cholesterol was up there as well. The reminders had become a perennial checkup ritual for Eagles, who at the time was 60 and Chief Judge of the N.C. Court of Appeals.