Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Early Morning Cathance Snowshoe

OK, so yesterday morning at 5:00 am it was -3 with a "feels like -20" reading. Um, yup, I was staying inside. So this morning, when the weather app was telling me it was -5 but with no wind, I thought 'Hurray! Only -5!', put on a few extra layers and decided to stick with my planned run. Man, can you tell it's been a rough winter?! Crazy.

Conditions were so lovely out in the Cathance during our hike with Sam on Sunday, I drove over there and started my run from the ecology center lot. Snowshoes on, I ran along the nicely packed trail down to the river, and wandered along the river bank. The trail was pretty well packed in most spots, with a few softer spots and drifts. The funny thing about running along the singletrack with all that snow was that I actually had to duck for a ton of branches, which typically doesn't happen! Ha.

I got back up the parking lot with the Strava app (Left my Garmin at home. Oops! Thankful I have the Strava app installed on my phone!) telling me I had run 2.4 miles, so across the street I went. The Heath has been a popular loop, apparently! There was a nice trough to run in, except that along the right side of the Heath, the wind had scoured the landscape, making cornices and drifts in the woods, obliterating the trail in many spots. Overall, things were fairly slow going (or perhaps I was taking it slow? Ryan and John certainly managed to run faster out there tonight.) and I only ended up with 3.3 miles, but it was a solid effort on my snowshoes and a nice way to start out the week of running.

Hoping the snowmobile trails will be packed enough for a decent screwshoe run tomorrow morning!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're tough! This winter has taught me that I DO NOT want to move further north. I thought I did. I was WRONG. Stay warm up there :)

Sparkplug said...

Ha ha ha! This winter has been ROUGH! But I don't own a treadmill and I don't belong to a gym, so if I want to exercise I have to do it outside :)

We are due for more snow tonight/tomorrow and then again on Sunday, and although I do like winter, I say ENOUGH! I could use a break here :)

P.S. How's the foot?

Anonymous said...

My foot was doing much better until this morning. Apparently, three days in a row of running on the treadmill was too much.

The gym hasn't been open in the morning this week because of the weather (and now my membership has expired, anyway.) So I haven't been able to cross-train. Instead of going to the gym after work or taking a day off like a sane person would do, I've just been running on the treadmill every morning.

I'm hoping a day or two off will make it feel better again.

Hope the weather gives you a break soon!