Winter's Last, Brutal Kick???

Joy here...February 2nd is Groundhog Day here in North America, and while Bill Murray may have made that day famous in his movie where he is doomed to live the same day over and over again and Punxsutawney Phil and Wiarton Willie are a couple of groundhogs in the US and Canada who pop up on that day in the middle of winter to make their little, furry prediction about how much winter is left until spring arrives, it really just remains to be seen whether or not a little rodent (cute as he may be) can really predict spring's arrival.

But after Friday's great ski in newly fallen snow, winter began to kick and fight rather harshly against the rodents' predictions of an early spring.  Saturday came with howling northerly winds gusting up to 70km/hr, closing out the day with blowing, icy snow.  Instead of running out there in that, I settled onto the bike for a 60minute ride in the basement and then did some pushups afterwards, staying nice and toasty warm indoors.

Can you see how crusty that is?

Then on Sunday, The Man, the Sashinator, and I all headed back out to that park to do a ski loop.  To quote Julia Roberts from Pretty Woman:  "Big mistake. Big. Huge."  All that wintery wind and ice from Saturday had turned the entire landscape into a frozen skating rink.  Instead of snow that you could easily glide and ski through, feeling your legs push with each step, we were stuck trying to move sticks over a layer of snow frozen solid.  Imagine a crusty layer that crunches, but does not break, and you'll get a sense for what we tried to "ski" through.  But, being the troopers we are, we stuck at it for an hour, not getting any grip or any good glide, but doing our crunch, crunch, crunch loop nonetheless.

After that, when Monday came, I just curled up on the couch when it was time for me to do a workout and watched some special features on my 8-movie set of Harry Potter blu-ray discs.

But Tuesday came, and I dutifully put on my minimus running shoes to head out the door.  My last run was two weeks ago, so I was a little worried.  At this rate, I'm not going to get to the finish line of my upcoming 1/2 marathon, but when faced with a kind of lag in training, all one can do is get out there and just keep going.  So that's what I did.  I was out the door in the cold, chill air that the weather network is predicting just might be the end of winter.  By Wednesday, so the predictions say, we might be experiencing +10C temperatures.  And so while I didn't run far, and I didn't run fast, as the tips of my fingers felt chilled right through my gloves, I just told myself over and over again that it might just be the last, brutal kick of winter.

And that, my friends, is something to celebrate!

So if I can't celebrate a milestone run where I was super fast or super fit, I can celebrate a milestone run that may just bring along the end of winter.

We'll see.

Over and out,
Joy