It was Spring Break for my son this week, so we headed down south for a camping trip. We stayed in Davidson River campground in the Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina. It was a 12 hour drive pulling the camper, but you have to drive far to get warm weather in March! It was worth it. It was beautiful! My daughter couldn’t join us because she is in college, so this trip was for Zach. He picked the destination, and the activities. Luckily for me, biking and hiking actually made my injury (hamstring pain, PIA!) feel better, not worse. All of the activity had positive effects on me. Yay on that! I am officially training for Glass City Half Marathon (April 23) now. I ran 23 miles, biked 36.5 miles, and hiked about 8 more miles. Woohoo! Here’s how the week went…. [lots of pictures this week!!]
Sun – 2 miles, walking. I explored the campground with my son as my husband was out for a run. The campground is so pretty! Birds chirping, sun shining. There is a small church on the property too.
9.5 miles mountain biking, DuPont forest, Lake Imaging area. 9 miles of biking doesn’t sound like much, but when it takes you 90 mins to ride that far, it’s a bigger deal! Lot of uphill climbs on this ride. Luckily our son picked out some of the easier trails so as to not kill our legs on our first day of biking. It was a lovely 71 degrees. A bit sweaty, but the warm temps were a great change from Ohio weather.
Mon – 4 miles, running. I decided to give running a try! Things felt OK. Not completely pain free, but not bad. Here’s our campsite, which was nice and private. Also, me getting my PT exercises done in a [messy, needing picked up] small camper space!
10.5 miles mountain biking, DuPont forest, Cascade lake area. Another fun afternoon of biking. This time I rode with my husband and our son went off on his own. No need for the old folks to slow down the teen! Despite getting lost a few times, we had a fun, exhausting and challenging ride. Interesting note – when we arrived to the parking lot my son exclaimed the guy next to us had a popular YouTube channel (with 2.4 million subscribers!). Of course I had to chat it up and get a picture of him 😉
4.5 miles mountain biking, Pisgah forest. This trail was right across from our campground. I was told it was an “easy” trail but I beg to differ! Biking uphill is tiring. The route down was “moderate” and it had a bunch of big rocks and roots to ride over. Several challenging spots which required us to walk our bikes. We know our limits LOL!
Tues – 6.1 miles hiking. The adults declared this as a “no biking” day, so we did a 3 hour challenging hike instead! We hiked to the top of Looking Glass Rock. The freaky part of this hike was the tilt at the top of the mountain. I was afraid we were going to slip off at first! Then I got more comfortable with it. It’s a beautiful view from the top. The other hikers at the top were people from a town just 20 mins from our house. How crazy!
Later we went searching for white squirrels, which are famous in the nearby town of Brevard. We found one scampering around in a yard. I was so excited! He was so cute. They are not albino (lacking color) but actually a white variety of the grey squirrels. There were lots of flowers and butterflies too!
Weds – 3 miles running. I debated on running this morning because my calves were sore from hiking, but the run definitely loosened them up and felt good! I decided to go up into the trails of the campground for this morning’s run. Once again, not completely pain free, but not bad. I cut my run short at 3 miles and opted for doing my PT exercises instead of running another mile.
9.8 miles mountain biking. Today’s biking was at a private bike park which was laid out like a ski resort. All trails started at the same place at the top. 1.3 miles of biking to get to the top… phew!! We learned that E-bikes (pedal assisted) were allowed here and we were quite jealous when they zoomed past us up the mountain! We stayed on the easy trails and they were fast, flowy, and a lot of fun! My Garmin Edge bike computer beeps when I do a jump and I got 26 jumps today. Woohoo! Zach spent a lot of time on the jump line, where he actually got up in the air for more than a millisecond.
A super short hike was in order after biking so I could see a waterfall. This area of North Carolina has a lot of waterfalls!
Thurs – 5 miles running! I started off nice and slow, and hey, things felt good! I wouldn’t even call it a “pain in the butt”, it was more of just a “something”. You know what I mean? Maybe a tiny hotspot? You know something is there but there’s not really a pain. This was pretty wonderful.
One more of day of biking for Zach. He went to a bike park and practiced some more jumps and such. He was quite dirty when we picked him up!
Alan and I went next door to the Sierra Nevada brewery and took a tour! We learned all about beer production. It was mesmerizing to watch the bottles travel through the line and get packed.
We also enjoyed tasting many samples in the taproom. I found my favorites!
We went out to dinner for our last night. It was a such a great trip, making memories with our son, who will be away at college soon (waaaaaa, don’t get me started!).
Fri – 12 hours of driving home. Whomp whomp. Running related – I did transfer to the half marathon at Glass City. My successful run on Thursday left me a bit more positive that I might be able to run the half. Time will tell, but I might as well get my correct shirt size ordered!
Sat – 11 miles, running!! I was going to run on Sunday, but when I saw the weather was almost 50 and low winds, AND I was feeling decent, I went for it! Once again, just a pinch feeling, not really “pain” and it turned into a “hotspot”. That’s all good, and I made it 11 miles. 11 was enough because I have lost fitness in terms of these long miles!! Interesting things on my run – a deer wandered on to the path right in front of me, and I saw the world’s longest worm!
Sun – Rest day. Unpacking the camper and more laundry. Back to reality tomorrow!
Need some more inspiration? I’m linking up with Deborah at Confessions of a Mother Runner and Kim from Running on the Fly for their Weekly Run Down. Check out all of the fun blogs there!
For my iPhone friends out there, pro tip – take a Live picture and then make it a Long Exposure. Voila – perfect waterfall pictures!!
Q: Beer drinkers: what type of brews are your favorite?
I’m not a fan of hoppy IPAs, but I do like seasonal craft beers!
Looks like you had a great trip with some amazing hiking and biking. Fun! Hope that piraformis is feeling good
The recovery is definitely moving in the right direction! And technically now it’s taper time, so that should help more. I’m not sure I’m ready to taper when I’ve missed so many workouts on my plan, but better to be undertrained, right?
YAY! So the hiking and biking did help! That’s great news, and it sounds like you had a blast. The trails you biked looked like the trails I was trying to run on last summer in Texas. They were rated as “easy” and I was really annoyed, thinking “This is NOT easy!” but then realized that was a mountain biking rating… oh. That explains it!
I’m freaking out on your behalf that your son will be in college next year. My daughter will be a freshman in high school, and I’m already thinking how fast those four years will go, and then she’ll be gone! At least your kids seem to stay closer to home (not sure where your son is going) and want to come back frequently. My son is a 20 hour drive away, and my daughter is saying she wants to go to college somewhere where it snows. We’ll really have an empty nest, sigh.
In general I guess the green trails have less of a slope, but I think it’s more the lack of exposed roots and rocks? Even the moderate trails looked advanced for me so I can only imagine how hard the black trails are! My bike doesn’t have full suspension (shocks on both front and back) so it’s a bit of a stiffer ride too.
Interesting that your daughter wants some snow 🙂 My son would love to go to Colorado but the out of state price tag wasn’t really justified for a “cool place to live”. I had to remind him that he was actually going to be in class, not hiking and biking all of the time! He hasn’t made a final decision yet, but he is getting close!
What a fun spring break trip! I think your family would love riding the carriage trails at Acadia National Park. I don’t remember if there were mountain biking trails, but there was lots of gravel and the farther we rode from the main entrances, the fewer people we saw. One of my cycling friends rides an eBike and when she passes me on the uphills I yell at her (good naturedly of course). LOL
Judy taught me that cool tip for taking waterfalls pictures.
Ebikes aren’t permitted on the trails other than in that private park. Which seems kind of silly because they are just pedal assist. I debated on renting one, but then when I learned they were $159 a day I decided I would just suck it up and use my own bike. haha!
Oh, it looked like you’ve had a fantastic time! What a lovely area for hiking and running and whatnot. And some beer too! I’m not big on beer because I’m coeliac but I like a good beer. My favourite for now is a gluten free pale ale made quite locally around here. I think I like pale ale or red ale best but only if they’re not too bitter.
I’m so glad your pain is better!
It was a really fun trip. It went by so fast though!! Interesting that there are gluten free beers that you can enjoy. I haven’t had a need to look for that so I didn’t know those beers existed. How nice that you have an option!
Wow, what a fun trip! I LOVE that photo of the colorful flowers with the yellow butterfly – so gorgeous. And that worm – wow so long indeed! Almost gave me the shivers. I can’t believe your son will be in college so soon — time flies!!
We don’t see a lot of tiger swallowtail butterflies in our area, to it was cool to see them! After I ran past that worm I had to go back to get a picture LOL! There were a lot of worms out on Saturday. A robin’s dream come true 🙂
This looks like a wonderful trip and sounds like just what you needed. I’m glad your posterior is feeling better. You certainly were active even with the lower running miles. It all counts!
I do love a hoppy IPA. What can I say?
Kinda surprising that all of the bike riding helped my PIA, but hey, I’ll take it! Probably all of the activity did too. I’d like to say I did my PT exercises every day, but I think I only got them done a couple of days. Some days I was just too tired after all of the biking!
Wow on your camping trip! My husband has gone mountain biking in Pigsah when my in-laws had a house near Asheville, but that is too scary for me!
Smart to switch to the Half – sounds like you’re already ready for that distance.
Pisgah is such a beautiful area! The pine smells in the woods while we were biking was just heavenly.
Hopefully the half will work out. Since I’ve switched to the half I have to redo my “training plan”. No speedwork, but I’ll just run the miles easy I guess!
What a great trip! And, yay for getting your 11-mile run done. You’ll be ready for your half!
It’s kind of like Ready or Not, here the half marathon comes! 😉 It will be fun to be taking part in race day, so that’s all that matters to me.
Now that’s an active vacation! Sounds like your PIA is acting much more cooperative…that’s encouraging! That squirrel is so cute 🙂
It sure was active!! I was a bit surprised biking didn’t make matters worse, but I’m so happy it didn’t.
While I know it’s not the marathon, I’m so glad the half is in your sights.
This looks like an amazing trip and I am so happy you had the best time. The NC mountains are so pretty.
It’s all good! The (mostly) same race day experience, and half the pain 😉 Hopefully I’ll even be able to walk down stairs normally afterwards!!
It looks like you had an awesome trip, with good weather too.
I don’t think I have ever seen a white squirrel before – that’s so cool!
We lucked out on the weather for this trip. It was a little chilly in the morning (37 degrees) but it warmed up nicely! There are interesting stories behind the white squirrels, that they escaped from a carnival animal truck and their population grew.