Snow Run and Weekly Wrap-Up

Yesterday morning Lisa was mentioning that she had told someone that I run 7 days a week and … wait, I said, I only run 6. Then I thought about it a bit more – I have run 13 of 14 days in December, and it is 18 days since Thanksgiving, and I have run 17 of those days. In fact, when I look at the days since my last half-marathon, I have run 32 out of 35 days. So while not a running streak, it sure was close!

My plan was to run Saturday and take Sunday off for a great family day baking. Saturday was also going to be the first REAL snow storm we’d had this year, so of course Lisa was working and both boys had things going on. As it ended up, the snow started early and pretty much never stopped, but it never hit the 1″ per hour that was forecast for the heavy periods. So we got about 6″ total, not too bad overall.

The problem with snow in our area now compared to when we were back in Townsend is not the quantity but the road conditions – we would get much more back in Massachusetts, but it seemed they were better about getting on top of things. So later in the day on Saturday the roads got really tricky – going down a hill picking up Danny from a party there was almost no traction … even my 4WD Escape!

But naturally I got in my run on Saturday – but I knew the main roads would be tricky so I altered my course to minimize main roads and maximize neighborhood loops. I was glad that I did that, because as it was I found the road edges a bit slippery – or maybe it was just my ‘bald tire’ Sauconys?!? I ended up with a little over 8 miles, and it was really great running in the snow.

When I came home we had a couple of inches with more on the way, so I decided to shovel – and figured I would leave the heart-rate tracker from the Magellan on and switch off the GPS in the Wahoo app and see how that worked. Here is the graph from Garmin Connect (Wahoo is mobile-only, but exports directly to Garmin, MapMyRun, and many others!):

I am really enjoying the use of the heart-rate monitor!

Anyway, let’s get to my week in review:

Sunday – 12.5 miles as noted here
Monday – 6.75 miles ‘baby it’s cold outside’ run
Tuesday – 6.75 mile route
Wednesday – 6.75 miles – same again
Thursday – 6.75 miles again
Friday – 6.75 miles
Saturday – 8 mile ‘snow run’

Those numbers are rounded, so based on the Garmin and Polar data I did close to 56 miles for the week. Not bad when the average wind chill temperature for the week was 8F.

Yeah, I ran pretty much the same course all week long. I knew it was going to be cold and windy, and the wind chills for my runs ranged from ~10F down to -3F during the week. There is pretty much no way for me to avoid winds, so I just choose a route that consolidates ‘good’ and ‘bad’ wind parts, and gets me through a decent distance.

This post was originally supposed to go up yesterday (Sunday), but we were exhausted on Saturday night, and then Sunday was our all-day family baking day, so I stayed low-tech for the most part … no regrets there! I will share some baking stuff later on today!