Outrunning the snow

I woke up this morning on high blizzard alert. It's all everyone talked about last night on FB so I expected to wake up to 6 inches of snow. Since I didn't and it was off-and-on flurrying I decided to go to the trail and get in a good run before the snow really hit. I also needed some groceries so I figured I'd hit that on the way home.

I was planning on doing 6 miles, hoping to do 7. I felt good when I started out, I think I just naturally thrive in this weather -- I felt happy and my lungs felt good (they can burn sometimes with the cold air). I had a rough idea where the 3.5 mile turnaround was but when I took out my phone to check Runkeeper I saw that I was already at 3.66 miles so I figured I'd just keep going at that point to the 4-mile turnaround.

It was a sweet run. Average pace was 10:09/mile, not bad for the trail and taking on a 411 foot climb. My splits are great, my pace dropped even as the climb went up and then took a nice drop on the way back. I love the rare runs when each mile is consistently faster.




One drawback today, though. Since I was only planning on doing 6 or 7 I didn't bring hydration or a gel with me. Eight miles is about my max of what I can handle without some fluids. The first 7 miles I was running off of Christmas cookie carbs (the very best carbs of all!) but my legs felt very heavy by the end because I had no glycogen left. If it were hot out I wouldn't have lasted more than 4 miles without fluids. So my lesson was that just because it's cold and it doesn't seem like I'm sweating, I still need to hydrate and supplement now that I'm back up to a good mid-length distance for my long runs.

It ended up being another solid week: 27.43 miles. I wasn't expecting anything close to that because of traveling and Christmas. I think this will be a lower mileage week and I'll go back up in the new year. Two up, 1 back, that's the pattern that worked well for marathon training.

After my run I picked up some groceries, some Chinese food (which was more packed than the store), and headed home. It was the first test of my 4-wheel drive and I had no problems getting up my monster hill.

Oh, and something nice happened the other day. I don't really know our neighbors, our houses are far enough apart that we really never even see them. On Christmas Eve day the neighbor on the end who has 2 little kids brought banana bread around and she asked me if I had done the half marathon. I said yes but I was confused how she knew so I asked her and she said it was in the local paper and that her husband saw it. Who knew? A local celeb. ;)