Father's Day Weekend

For father's day weekend this year, we decided to camp at Bradbury State Park for two nights with a small group of friends and a pile of kids.  The "plan" originally was to get to the park on Friday, go for a mountain bike ride, camp Friday night, ride Saturday and then get up at the butt crack of dawn Sunday and make the trek to New Hampster for the Pinnacle.  The Pinnacle is a super fun race, and one I've sworn to do every year but, with our camping trip and my "issues" last week with the King Kahuna, I decided I'd just lay low and hang with the fam all weekend instead and I'm glad I did.  Without the stress of a race and super early departure on Sunday, I was able to do and drink as I'd like all day Saturday.  That'll cure your missing a race blues right quick.

One thing that I was able to do was get out for a wee little run with my father's day present, a Garmin 110 gps watch.  Saturday I planned a quick 45 minute run just after breakfast but when I got to the trail there was a group of ultra marathoners getting ready to do the second part of their trail run for the day (a couple were planning a 15 mile day) so I hopped on with them for a bit planning to peel off after a little while but once they got talking about where they were going I just had to go along.  Their plan was to head over to the Tryon Mountain area, an area I haven't really dabbled in, so I figured this would be as good a time as any to give it a shot.

One of the new bridges on the Tryon trail

Photo by BenjaminMWilliamson

I ended up with 1.5 hours of running and some extremely sore legs from the approx 2500' of vertical.

This new section of trail opens up lots of possibilities and potentially some linkage to the Yarmouth and Falmouth trail systems but it will take some splorin' to figure it out.

The run was followed by B getting out on her bike for the first time in weeks.  More importantly, she was riding on unpaved surfaces, up and down small hills for the first time ever.  And then, THEN, she hit her first trail ride.  It was short but I was super proud as she rode over rocks and roots.  Now we just have to work on her steering and braking!