Snow adventures

It snowed again in Boulder this weekend. Our Saturday gang still managed a pleasant run in the light fluffy stuff. (The picture shows some of the gang - AndyE, me, Joe - after a run on another recent wintry day...as you can see, there really is a lot of the white stuff in town these days.) The footing was pretty decent on trails and roads - and deceptively slick on concrete - so we chose our surfaces carefully and had but one tumble between all of us.

After the run, I trotted over to watch "The Best Cross-Country Race on the Planet" - a race that has been held the past few years as a tune up for xc nationals. I do believe this was the most difficult short-distance race I've ever seen. It was cold. It was snowing. The footing was extremely tricky and getting trickier as the race went on (chopped up snow and getting slick). And, for the men's race, the wind even picked up. Yet despite all that, those runners were flying! What a race to witness.

Today I tried my own little cross-country adventure. I was running to a neighboring town where I was to meet my husband and was following a little two-lane road that had a fair amount of traffic. I was approaching a trail head and decided I'd really rather be on trails than on a busy road with narrow shoulders, so off I went to the trail. The trick was, I was going to need to take a fairly new branch off the trail that in order to go in the direction I needed to go in. It was looking good for a while, there was a pretty decent track laid in the snow by a few skiers and hikers/runners as I climbed higher on the trail. Then I got to the branch - and saw exactly one ski track in the long expanse of thigh-deep snow that I'd have to traverse. So I turned around....and saw how high I had climbed and how steep it was to get back down to the trail head. Plan B (aka always have an exit strategy). I followed a different trail that I knew would take me around the mesa I was on and over to a less steep trail that I could follow down the hill to the trail head. This was a pretty good plan - except for the wind that had come up while I was climbing and that I was now running straight into. No sense in having a dull run through the snow, eh?! The run was fairly uneventful - just a couple of rolled ankles, a few slips and slides, and one plunge into a snow hole - until I got to the very last stretch. Lo and behold, there had been so much wind and drifting during the time I was running that the trail was completely obscured by snow. Ah well, I could see the trail head gate and just made a bee line for it....and was back to the road where I had started this snow adventure.

So my easy week has concluded. Only 50 miles, only one run per day. My body and spirit are refreshed and ready to rock and roll.