Running In The Snow

Did an 11 km run today. In the snow. Uphill both ways. Ok, maybe that last part isn’t quite true, though given how hard it is to run in the snow, it may as well be.

I’m at my sister’s place in Toronto for the holidays, but since I’m still in the running study, I have to do my scheduled runs here, where they’ve recently gotten a big pile of snow. I chose to run along main streets in the hopes that the sidewalks would be clear, but that was only true for portions of the sidewalk, while most of the sidewalks were filled with slippery snow. It actually felt a lot like running on a sandy beach – except for the fact that my face was freezing. Between the hard work of running through the snow and the fact that I was being extra careful not to slip, I was a full minute per km slower than my normal pace (!). But I did it, so that’s the main thing.

And speaking of running, I recently checked out my Runkeeper stats for the year and noticed that I’m actually getting somewhat close to my revised 2013 goal of running 600 km. I’d originally set the goal at running 400 km this year, but then I decided that was too easy, so I upped it to 600 km to make it more of a stretch goal. As predicted, I have long ago surpassed the 400 km mark for the year, and I’m actually approaching the 600 km mark. In fact, after today’s 11.37 km, my total for the year stands at 565.5 km! Which means I need to do just 34.5 km more in the next 16 days! The trick here is that I have to follow my running program from the study pretty carefully (or else I’ll mess up the study), so I’m not 100% sure if I’ll get that done. For the rest of 2013, my running schedule includes: a 12.9 km run scheduled for next Sunday, plus a track workout on Tuesday (about 50 mins) and 3 other short runs (30 mins, 40 mins, and 40 mins). For me the track workouts in past weeks have worked out to about 6.5 km and 30 min run is about 3.5 km, so a 40 min run would be about 4.5 km – those latter two are times on the treadmill, which are slower than I am outside in Vancouver, but on par with how fast I ran today in the snow. If we add that all up, we’d get 31.9 km – which is awfully close to the 34.5 km that I need to do. Of course, if I ran my timed runs a bit faster I’d cover more distance and could totally make up that difference. So really, my chance at achieving this goal all comes down to how clear the sidewalks are while I’m here in Toronto! Keep your fingers crossed for no more snowfalls and a lot more people shovelling the sidewalk!

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