Snowy Butts

It dumped snow for a while last night and this morning, but we only ended up with about 3 inches in our part of town.

Shoveling was the first order of business this morning. I woke up early, so I waited until it got light and went outside with the Buffaloes.

It looked like we would get hammered for a while, but it didn't amount to much except making a mess out of the streets and sidewalks. Not exactly good pogo sticking weather.

It was the kind of snow that gets stuck in little icy clumps between Buffalo toes and they needed a day off anyway, so we just played in the yard while I shoveled.

I procrastinated, it was supposed to ease up by mid-day so I took a chance on that. I did my weight workout and watched the snow. By 1 pm it wasn't letting up so I decided to go out and face it. I have some shoe spikes I need to test, but I needed to get some miles in. It's cold enough that this snow isn't going away soon, so I'll check out the MICROspikes on Sunday or Monday.

I started out in the neighborhood and it was slippery and deep, no one ever shovels their sidewalks on this one street I have to run down in order to get to anywhere. The road had icy spots that never melted from the last storm, underneath the new snow that was all torn up with tire tracks.

Usually the footing is best where the cars have gone, but not today, it was all junked up and nasty. So it took me a good half hour to run the 2.3 miles to the Power Trail, where the city has plowed the bike paths. At the beginning of the run, the Power Trail was pretty clear except for a few icy patches, but it was wet where the snow melted. It was 21 degrees when I started.

The wind was coming from the north and freezing my face off in that direction! The sun was sinking and the surface was starting to freeze, leaving patches of ice on the formerly wet surface that was plowed. Slicker than snot.

"Tough as nails" was the expression that ran through my head. I remembered the cold windy conditions at North Coast last spring. I could do it again. On one little spur off the Power Trail that I took, I noticed a sign on a fence that said this section of the trail had been adopted by the family of a former patient of mine, who passed away last spring. I thought of him, he would have loved to be out there in this snowy weather too.

The footing was getting progressively worse and I still had a mile and a quarter along the nasty unplowed side streets to get back home. I finished with 11.7 miles in two and a half hours when I got back to the warm house with waiting Buffaloes. Dennis was out watching a football game. The girls didn't seem too upset at me for not taking them.

Tomorrow is supposed to be in the single digits, I'm planning on doing the Tortoise and Hare 8K but I'm not forcing myself to wake up for it. It starts at 8 am, which is brutal, when it comes to running in the cold. If I wake up early enough I'll go, if I need the sleep, I'll stick to the warm bed. It's hard to get out of the mom sandwich between two Buffaloes when it's zero degrees outside and you really don't NEED to do the 8K.

We'll see what happens in the morning...