Sunday, February 7, 2010

I see a treadmill in my future

In Maryland, we got about 25 inches of snow as of Saturday afternoon. Now thats a lot of snow. Growing up in Illinois, I remember many large snow storms, but not many top this amount of snowfall. When I was in the 8th grade, my family went on vacation to Florida (where my grandparents lived) in January (1979), and came back to a huge amount of snow. I don't really remember how much we got, but we had to crawl over the snow to get to the house. We parked the car down the road at the neighbors and our fresh Florida oranges froze while we tried to dig out our driveway. I think I went to school only a few days that January. Well here we are in 2010 and the snow fall amazed me. This picture was taken Saturday morning, and shows my patio table with about 24 inches of snow on it. The black pole next to it is a broom handle I stuck in the ground to get a feel for the level of snow. Only about 30 inches of the 65 inch handle is showing. My wife went out to measure the handle and almost did not come back because the snow was up to her waist in the backyard.

So, needless to say, my outdoor running will be a bit limited in the near future. The first issue is how to shovel 24 inches of snow?? I tried, I really did, but its a ton of snow. Thankfully, my neighbor has a snowblower and after she blew some of my driveway, she let me have a turn and I finished the driveways. In this picture, I'm actually snow blowing the street. I look way happier than I really was. I did get it finished, but it shows just how much snow is on the street. One of the guys I worked with asked if I was going running, and whether I plowed an eight mile path before hand. I told him I plowed a 0.1mile loop on my driveway and planned to run 80 loops!

In reality, treadmill running is all I'm going to be able to do in the near future. I don't mind the treadmill, but I'd much rather run on the road.
The treadmill forces you to go at a constant speed and is not forgiving. When I run on the street, my pace picks up and drops off as I feel necessary. Pushing a button does not work as well. But I do it and I typically watch TV to make the time go quicker. So for the next week, I'll be watching a lot of sitcoms and movies on DVD. I hope the snow get cleared somewhat by next Saturday, since I have that 18 mile run planned. I'm not sure I'd survive 18miles on the treadmill, but if i gotta do, I'd do it.

Why did I choose winter marathon training?

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