GetGoing NC!

Ride the Divide insights from Matthew Lee

Following Thursday’s screening of “Ride the Divide” in Carrboro, endurance mountain bike racer Matthew Lee answered questions about the race. Some quick highlights:

The Cannondale bike he rode for 2,700 miles (200,000 total feet of climbing) weighed just 35 pounds. “Just,” because the Ride the Divide is a self-supported race — Lee had to carry everything [...]

“Ride the Divide” — a 2,700-mile off-road odyssey

There’s one key difference between “Race Across the Sky,” last year’s documentary on the Leadville 100, an epic mountain bike race two miles above sea level, and the just-released “Ride the Divide,” which chronicles a lesser-known, 2,700-mile race that follows the Continental Divide from Banff, Alberta, Canada, south to the Mexican border. I’ll get to [...]

Reminder: Saturday is National Trails Day

I’m back to remind you that Saturday is National Trails Day, a day when we celebrate the more than 200,000 miles of trail that help us escape the oppressive monotony of day-to-day existence and recoup our souls.
OK, maybe that’s a little strong.
But trails do play a vital role in our physical and mental well being. [...]

Beer for butter, unprotected support and other insights from the Burn 24

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Support your local trail this National Trails Day

If you’ve ever hiked at Crowders Mountain State Park, you may have encountered a challenge or two — tripped over a tree root or scrambled over a rock face. But it’s a good bet you haven’t come across trash or lost your way because the trail wasn’t well maintained. To a large extent, you have [...]

Ciclovia hits the Bull City

The next time you hear someone badmouth all the New Yorkers here, invoke the name of Jessalee Landfried. She’s the reason we’ll get to ride our bikes, free of motorized traffic, over a mile-long loop of downtown Durham streets Sunday afternoon, and she’s only lived here since September.
Think about that. In less than nine months, [...]

Bike to Work Week: Events worth parking the car for

I’m already running behind this week, even on the big news, which is … this is Bike to Work Week.
Since I try to keep these posts to a readable length, I will not attempt to extoll the assorted virtues of riding your bike to work. Of the money you’ll save on gas, of how a [...]

Rain delay

This post originally was to run Monday afternoon but because of my inability to keep track of my 1,527 passwords and user names when confronted with a backup computer, it appears now.
I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Black Mountain. I’m supposed to be on a bike about five miles from here, climbing the Blue [...]