If you are worried about mining, I would buy ores and smelt them each time you learn a skill that way you can stay above the curve. So when you first start at 1 buy some copper ore and smelt that to 40, iron at 125, mitril at 175... This will make sure you can mine any nodes you see and cut down on the total number of nodes you have to mine. I wrote a guide, it's too expensive to probably do it all the way but great way to level fast.

Lazy Miner's guide