A cold January run

The weather’s moving in. I’m sitting at my desk staring out the window watching the temperature drop on the deck thermometer while the wind swirls patches of snow around. There’s an Arctic front moving in all over the country today, and even Florida is going to be in the 20’s. Sorry, Florida people, I know you’re not used to this. At least here in Colorado we all have heavy coats, hats, gloves, boots, and ski gear.

Tomorrow’s temps are supposed to be in the teens, with a 10-15 degree wind chill factor. With that nugget of knowledge I decided to do a long run while I still could; tomorrow I’ll be at the YMCA, exercising indoors and trying not to die of boredom.

I waved goodbye to the kids as they ran for their carpool. School is (finally) back in session after a two and a half week Winter Break, made even longer at my house because Connor was out sick the entire week before that. Three and a half weeks of having noisy short people around all the time is a lot, especially when I’m used to having uninterrupted hours of complete silence in which to work. But, I digress.

By 8:15 I was out the door with Kirby. We did a slow loop up the Greenbelt to the pond, then came back home again. This is a mile loop at best, just long enough for her to get in 4-5 pee breaks and a load drop. I dropped her back at the house, stopped for a nose blow, and headed out again with my Garmin. The plan was to go up to Davidson Mesa, loop around, and come home again. This loop can take anywhere from 7-10 miles, depending on the paths leading up to and back from the Mesa. I figured I’d head up and see how the weather was. At the very least, I was going to do 7 miles. After that, it was up in the air.

There’s still a lot of ice on the sidewalks. It hasn’t snowed in a few weeks, but the temps have stayed pretty low and there hasn’t been much melt. Last week I got so cranked at the pool of ice and water in the intersection near our house that I took the kids and a bunch of spades and shovels down there to break apart the three-inch deep sheet of ice and get the water moving. One guy in a truck stopped to thank us, a few other cars looked at us with pleasant expressions on their faces, and the rest just waited for us to get out of the road. Where’s the community spirit of helping your fellow neighbor? Of making the streets and sidewalks passable for ALL community members? How about the elderly people that live just up the block that walk the paths and sidewalks around town? They’re stuck in their little 600 Square Foot apartments in weather like this. The guy in the truck complained about the lack of city services to clear the roads (can you say ‘budget cuts’, anyone?), but he didn’t come down to help break ice either. Again, I digress.

Where was I? Right, the ice on the sidewalks. I did a lot of dancing around the ice, moving from one part of the sidewalk to the other. I fell last April on a patch of ice and chipped my elbow. Really not interested in doing that again, so in my advanced age with this tidbit of information, I’m more cautious.

I got on to the Mesa and fervently wished for my sunglasses. Not that it was sunny, because it wasn’t, but because the sunglasses would have given the snow/ice more definition. It would have been easier to see the patches of ice if the entire world wasn’t totally white. It’s been cloudy and cold all day, with fine little pebbles of snow falling. Once I was on the Mesa the wind picked up a little. There was not another soul up there. Maybe I was the stupid one.

Things were fine while I was heading west, but as soon as the trail turned east the wind blew into my face and took any shred of body heat I had cultivated thus far. I checked my Garmin; I had run 5.5 miles so far and had another 1.5 on the Mesa. I turned up the music, kept my eyes on the ground so they wouldn’t tear up in the wind, and went right on truckin’. I couldn’t go any faster (for safety’s sake) so I tuned out the wind and tried to forget how cold I was getting. I knew I had to get off the Mesa quick though, so I took the fork that would cut the 3-mile loop into about 2.75 miles. Not a big difference, but I was feeling like every minute counted.

Once I was off the snow-packed trail I picked up a little speed, especially since I was heading downhill and the wind died down a little. I decided to keep the run at the short distance and headed home along Via Appia instead of running the extra 1.5 miles along the greenbelt paths. With the mile that I did with Kirby, and the miles on the Mesa, this morning’s run would end up being almost exactly 9 miles. Not bad for a cold, crappy morning in January.