North Carolina

Since Pennsylvania tends to dry up by may.  I decided that I would work at NOC again for the beginning of the summer.  So several days after I got back from the Cheat Race I loaded up the Blazer and headed south.  Last summer started with some vehicle difficulties but thankfully there were none this year.  After I moved into staff housing I stopped by the store to check my hours.  They didn't have me scheduled to work for another week and while that meant I wouldn't get paid, it meant I had some time to have some fun, and oh what a week it was. 

The first day kicked off with what was my best run of the green yet.  I'm still not messing with the big three yet, but I felt really good on everything else and Ty and I had monster boofs on the bride of frankenstein.  The next day I sessioned Nantahala Falls in the wildwater boat getting 11 runs of it in (this is the only spot on the nantahala where I don't feel 100% in control).  Then the following day I did some highwater devils dip sprints.  The piton was well padded and everything was pretty surgy and squirly which gave it more of a big water feel, then later that day met up with Erich and Samuel for my first proper trail run up Deep Creek, it was really good and the descent was really fun.  The day after that I ran Section 4 of the Chattooga with Bailey and Noel. Its always great running something new and feeling really in control.  I helped chase down a canoe that ran crack in the rock solo and had a pretty sweet boof at sock em dog.  At this point I was hurting pretty bad, so to take an easy day I picked up someone else's shift in the store to give my body a break. After my rest day I hit up a lake session lean steering my sprint boat paired with another trail run later that day.  Then the next day I did a full nantahala run, that was faster than my race time for southeasterns last year so that was pretty good feeling.  To cap of the super week I got up early to meet Terry at the Ocoee to do a wavehopper run, then I headed back to the Cheoah to get a run in on that. Whew it was quite a week and part of the reason I love in western NC, there's always something to do that's pretty close.

When I started work I just got into a groove of training and working and nothing too much exciting other than on the one weekend I headed to Gainesville Georgia to Lake Lanier to train with on the the sprint guys. This was a pretty cool experience I was able to stay at his house and we did 4 sessions in 18 hours in a proper sprint boat. The things were so fast and tippy that I managed to even swim once from a motorboat wake.  All in all is was really cool and I have been curious to see how I would do at sprint. 

The final weeks went way too fast. I did some road biking on my two favorite roads: Wayah and Rt. 28.  I even met a nice person to do some hiking with including another failed attempt to hike for the sunrise from Newfound gap, but we ended up seeing a black bear which was pretty neat so it wasn't a total loss.

Even though I was only down there for 3 weeks I really felt that made the most of it. I managed to get a lot of good training in while having fun.  It was great seeing alot of familiar faces from last year as well as meeting new ones.  NOC is one of those places where the people make it what it is, and it gets harder and harder to leave each year.