"Hardcore"

Hehe, my hubby called me this for running outside today. We live in a place where it snows quite a bit most winters. This winter has been an exception, except when it does snow it's always on the weekends. Crazy. So of course there was a snow storm today, on a day when I was scheduled for a 7 mile training run (I want to run a 25k in May).

Anyway, I did run outside today. My husband drove me into town and I had figured out a 7 mile route home from there. The wind was WNW at 17 MPH. I would guess it was gusting to about 25 MPH occasionally but I don't know that for sure. It snowed the whole time. The bike path hadn't been plowed so I was running in at least 2 inches of snow the whole way. We live out in the 'country', with the houses all a bit more spaced out, so as I got closer to home it drifted more and sometimes I was high-stepping it through 5-6 inches of snow.

On the roads where I had to run on the shoulder it was almost solid ice. I spent the whole time on those roads looking for places where the snow had drifted and caught in the grooves of the ice so I could get some footing. Otherwise I was still running in a couple inches of snow on the shoulder when the pavement was just too slippery. I turned my ankles a couple times cause I couldn't see the edge of the road! Nothing that actually hurt though. We'll see if my ankles still agree with that last statement tomorrow.

The worst part was the 4th-6th miles where I went from running in 3-4 inches of snow for a mile and a half to running on ice directly into the wind. It was the only stretch where I took the full brunt of the wind head on but it was made worse by the fact that I had just come off of having to lift my feet up really high to get through the snow. But I kept at it and I'm feeling pretty exhilarated by the accomplishment.

I got home and laughed during my cool down because my pants had snowballs stuck to the bottoms of them, like you see on the bellies of hairy dogs when they play in the snow. My shoes were soaked through, and I was extremely glad I had chosen to wear my thicker socks today! Even those were soaked through.

Thank goodness my hubby thought of driving me into town so I could run mostly with the wind. Running in a circle like my normal routes would have put me head on into that wind for half the route. I don't know if I could have made it with that much of a challenge.

When all was said and done I made the distance in the same amount of time it took me to run 7 miles last week, when the sun was actually out for most of my run. So I'd say that was pretty good.