Dec 9, 2009

(Don't) Let It Snow

Ugh, the snow is here and I think it's going to stay. It came down all night and I awoke to a nice drift on the driveway to shovel. I must admit that ever since I lived in the warm-weather city of Tokyo that I am a weather-wimp. Minnesota is not a good place for me to live. But here I am and now I have to make the best of it which, more times than not, means the treadmill. Especially on days like today when it is snowing, blowing 30 mph gusts and has temperatures in the single digits.

So after relocating the snow from my driveway to our lawn and unstucking my wife's car from the driveway, a process that took 90 minutes by the way, I headed to the health club to run. I got to come up with a way to count the shoveling as a workout. Like say, each shovel throw equals a step and they all add up to miles somehow. Too bad Mr. Garmin won't count shovel loads for me. Anyway, I started out on the treadmill at a nice and easy 8:57 pace and didn't expect it to feel as good as it did. I sped up and still felt good. And then I did it again. I was feeling so good that I decided to turn it into somewhat of a progression run with each mile faster than the last. I ended up with the last one at 7:35 and the whole run at an 8:11 average. Not incredibly fast overall but at least the last few were at a decent pace and with a good amount of miles too.

Monday, which might have been one of the last outside runs of the year, was 17.14 miles. Usually my long runs are a little slower than I ran but I wanted to get out of the cold and wind so the pace was a little faster.

Okay, I'll try to stop complaining about the weather so much but don't count on it.

All in: Today 12 at 8:11
Monday: 17.14 at 8:32

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I am learning a great lesson from reading these winter blogs...be grateful for our weather here. I don't know how you'll do it, keeping up with your running, but you will! It sounds like it's exhausting just keeping the snow out of your driveway...and why did you leave Tokyo???

San said...

Yeah, the weather can be a bitch. I'm "happy" that we've got only rain so far. Though snow is said to come tomorrow, sad thing is, that it never stays put in Leipzig.

When I read your starting pace, I cheered, because that's my pace. But then it occured to me, that you run miles not km and this means you're a lot faster than I am. Ah, the agony.

Enjoy your treadmill, I'll have to go out running no matter the weather.

Greetings from the other side of the big pond!

AZ said...

Meg, we left Tokyo because the job left Tokyo. Absolutely LOVED it there though. Great running community too.

Lindsay said...

while it "snowed" here it certainly wasn't anything in comparison to what you get!

shoveling snow is definitely a workout. heck i call mowing the lawn a workout... still a great pace after all that shoveling!

Jean said...

Quite the storm the other day! We didn't get too much snow up here in the north metro, but I understand you probably ended up with more. At the rate we are going, this could be a long winter!

Nice job with your training!

Glenn Jones said...

Man - 12 miles *after* shovelling? That is quite the workout. I'm also there with Meg - we don't know how good we have it here in Southern California!

It's the depth of winter, tempratures are in the 50's and we're all complaining becuae it's supposed to rain 1 inch today. We are wimps.....