Shoulder Season Running

After along day of travel yesterday, we arrived home around 10:30 pm. We put Sam straight to bed, started to think about unpacking our bags, thought better of it, and got into bed ourselves. I didn't get out of bed until 8:30 this morning, with Sam and Ryan getting up soon after. I guess we were all tired! The next few hours were spent unpacking and doing laundry, but I finally hauled myself out the door for a run. I knew conditions were bound to be interesting, but I thought I'd try the Snowplug 50k loop, just to get a feel for as many sections of trail as possible. Well, let's see, there was a bit of bare ground, lots of ice, lots of soft snow, a fair amount of undermined, postholing snow and some mud. Down along the river, the trail was very icy. I really was wishing for retractable screw shoes at that point - they would have been fabulous on a run like this! I was slipping and sliding about, and just knew the rest of the Cathance trail section would be really slow going, so I bagged it and headed back up to the ecology center. From there, I ran the paved road back to the powerlines and home. The splits for the 5.25 mile run ranged from 8:41 to 11:55. Guess which mile was run completely on pavement? Ha!

Guess we're in for shoulder season running for a while... There is still a lot of snow out there... Should make things interesting for the next few weeks, that's for sure!