Sometimes you miss a goal, and sometimes that is just fine. Such is the case this week. I missed my “normal” weather goal of 30 miles of lumbering in 5 days. I also missed my 20-mile Winter Contingency Act goal, coming in at 18.88 miles in 4 days. But as I said, I’m fine with it.
After a 45-minute treadmill lumber on Friday, the weekend came and went, and featured all my favorite/tolerable indoor winter-time activities, including a come-from-behind 2-2 draw for Spurs against City. It was swell.
After making breakfast, cleaning the kitchen, and seeing Wifey off for a day in the office, I collected my gear, opened the garage door, and saw a steady snow falling.
I wasn’t thrilled to be driving as it snowed (part of the aging process, I suppose, like sporting large tufts of ear hair, unkept eyebrows, and sagging scrotums tucked in socks), but a quick look at the radar showed that it should be over soon.
With that, I took off like a herd of turtles, and as I was nearing the park, the bright orange sun was now rising over the trees in the farm field to my left, and was made more luminous by flakes in the air. I couldn’t help but stop on the empty dirt road to admire the glow and snap a pic.
On the first day of our current deep freeze, I headed down to the Not So Stankment to lumber on the treadmill for 3 miles.
I had a plan for Tuesday, but that plan fell apart for multiple reasons.
First, I saw the weather when I woke up; 2˚ with a “real feel” of -11˚. Hmmm, 12˚ was bad enough on Monday, screw that.
I also started doing the math in my head for how much time I needed for the lumber, plus the Cul-De-Sac-Shack duties I needed to get done, plus driving 45 minutes each way to the dentist, not including the time actually spent at said dentist.
Shit, this whole dentist thing is a real stick in my spokes.
With that, I aborted the lumber and freed up some time to get things done proper without rushing around like a nut.
Speaking of sticks in spokes…
TUESDAY
With my rediscovered motivation via the not-so-subtle art of self-fat shaming, I was back on the trails Tuesday for another lumber in the snow.
The additional snow that fell over the weekend had turned softer, and while not that difficult to walk in, it was mildly irritating when I suffered from the age-old problem of wet clumps of snow forming within the chains of my microspikes. One minute I’m walking along fine, the next minute it’s like walking on high heels made of snowballs.
With that, I had to make some adjustments to my gaiter straps, the main culprit of the clumping. The “clumprit” if you will (sorry). And during this adjustment at the .50 mile mark, I realized that my Garmin had accidentally paused right after I started. Thankfully, after thousands of miles on these trails, I knew that I was indeed at mile .50 and was able to make the correction when I got home. It took my dim bulb of a brain a little while to process the mismatched mile-math along the way, but somehow I survived.
After Saturday morning’s loud clackity-clack-clack of a lumber on the still icy trails, and the remaining weekend filled with slack, sloth, and existential outdoor fitness ennui, on Monday, I found myself hurling Escape II down the road towards the trails and another lumber.
Saturday afternoon, we got around 2″ of wet snow, and it turns out it was just enough to cover the ice and allow for more grip, less ass cleching, and way less ice-crunching noise. Yes!
The week started with two days of indoor lumbering/running (not affiliated with the 2026 Soiled and Ignorant Tour), and was followed by two days and 8 miles on trails covered with solid ice, slush, and standing water. Which, come Friday, I had had enough of. Well, at least my feet had enough of the lateral torsion caused by hiking on lumpy ice and slush.
We sort of lucked out on Tuesday when the predicted day of ice and sleet ended up being a day of rain, on top of 3 or 4 inches of remaining snow and ice. This made for some Grade-A winter slop. It also forced me to retreat to the Not-So-Stankment to bust out another 3 miles of intervals on the treadmill, leaving some Grade-A sweat and uncontrollable projectile body fluids in my wake.
After two days and six miles of running intervals, I was determined to get into the woods on Wednesday for some miles and pics.
I was up early as per usual, got my gear together, and then proceeded to do some laundry and make Wifey breakfast as I waited for daylight to make an appearance.
