This is, after all, a mostly personal webpage. At the end of the day, I am the one paying the hosting provider and the one who has built the website with the least possible effort by using WordPress. In light of this it only stands to reason I should offer at least a little nugget of who Joel McCune really is. Looking in the mirror, all I really see is less hair. Along the journey toward this moment, this shorthaired guy looking back at me in the mirror has been referred to as athlete, coach, sir, instructor and a few other choice words on occasion.

As an athlete, I competed primarily as a runner thorugh high school and college. More recently, I picked up training as a whitewater slalom athlete, competing in the C1 class. Most recently I have chosen not to compete, but still thoroughly enjoy getting in my slalom boat and playing with going fast and experimenting with technique. Expriences from being an athlete, more or less full time since I was 14 have logically led to helping others access sport. To this end, I have a side project for accomplishing this, Performance Paddlesport (P2). P2 is a collaborative effort to enable easier access to this crazy sport called whitewater slalom. This accounts for the athlete and coach part.

Instructor, this title I kind of loathe. It is not because I do not enjoy this role. On the contrary, I very much do. Raised by two career educators, I was proud to describe what my parents did as teaching. They were teachers and I thought it was a great thing. Now I have been told apparently my title as a technology educator is an instructor instead of teacher…it feels rather foolish.

Recently though, my two current new interests are photography and mountain biking. I have begun to reinvestigate photography for the first time since high school. It is interesting how much it has changed, but also how much is still is nothing more than fiddling with aperture and shutter speed. Granted, I did not go all out when getting a camera, it is a Lumix G3. Still, I have been throughly enjoying learning about digital photography with my little camera.

Mountain biking is something rather new to me. Fortunately, completely by a stroke of dumb luck, I happen to live in a city with arguably the best access to single track riding in the country thanks to the efforts of the Tarheel Trailblazers. Learning this new sport has been quite a crash course, quite literally at times. Photographer, athlete, coach and instructor… along with occasional other expletives, these titles mostly describe me now.