Running in the snow

Today was another group run day with TNT. I was scheduled for 10 miles. When I woke up, the temperature was less than 20 degrees. Not unexpected for an early December morning in Michigan! As I headed out to the park where we run, I saw it was starting to snow. It was snowing fairly hard, actually, and starting to accumulate. A new adventure! I've never run in the snow before.

I went into the warming room where we meet and here's what I saw: two coaches, two mentors, one LLS employee, one LLS volunteer. NO other runners from the team! The coaches and mentors said "We were just talking about whether anyone was going to show up and we all said Cathy will be here." Ha! I told them I had strongly considered just going to the gym instead, but running 10 miles on the treadmill alone isn't my idea of a good time. I really enjoy the group runs because long miles are more fun with other people around and definitely better done outside.

So we headed out into the snow. It's kind of intimidating being the only team member there and having two mentors and two coaches focusing themselves on me. I tend to be a pretty slow runner and I feel more conspicuously slow with all those people paying attention to me. Everyone is really awesome and supportive, though I suspect the running coach is not too impressed by my pace. She's quite athletic and usually runs with another team member who is impressively fast and also athletic (in addition to being a very nice guy).

As it turns out, running in the snow is not totally fun but is WAY better than running in the rain. The snow accumulated quite a bit as we ran, so it wasn't easy going. My legs felt much more tired than normal so I took some walk breaks. We all had snow frozen to our eyebrows and lashes. My lips were blue, as usual!

It felt great to finish and I rewarded myself with a delicious oatmeal cranberry cookie. Yeah, yeah, rewarding yourself with food is bad, but the cookie was fabulous. Plus, I burned over 1,000 calories on the run so I can get away with eating one cookie. :-)