Even I Think I’m Crazy Sometimes

I know last winter was the worst winter in metro Detroit history, but I really feel like this winter is trying hard for second place. Maybe the reality is that I just never trained for a marathon before last year, and so every winter that I train for a marathon seems interminable. :p

Case in point: last Friday morning, I had 7 miles on the schedule. Fridays kind of suck, because I have to go to work, but I also have to do a long-ish run. I had decided to do this training plan because I felt like I wasn’t prepared enough for my last marathon, with running only four days per week. So, I bumped it up to the intermediate plan, which includes a fifth day that happens to be a longer run, but also the day before your longest run of the week. The plan calls for it to be a Saturday-Sunday pairing, but I can’t run on Sunday mornings, so I (foolishly) decided to do Friday-Saturday instead. Which wouldn’t be so bad, if I didn’t have to actually work on Fridays. :/

So this past Friday morning, I got up at 4:30 and headed out at 4am to run 7 miles before going to work. Sounds unpleasant, right? It was. Oh, by the way, did I mention it was -2°?

No lie, I went out and ran 7 miles at that temperature. It wasn’t quite as bad as I expected, although it certainly wasn’t pleasant. 😉 I made sure to get a post-run selfie to show off my new snow-do.

That’s a combination of my sweat and my breath all over my hat, making it nice and frosty. Although the run was tough, the feeling of accomplishment afterwards was pretty awesome. Every time someone complained to me about how cold it was that morning, I made sure to say, “Oh yeah? Well I ran 7 miles in it!” 😉

Then came Saturday morning and a 15-mile run.  I got up at about 7am, since I had some time and didn’t have to be anywhere directly afterwards. I was dismayed to find that it was snowing. That wasn’t in the forecast. 🙁 But the forecast that I then looked at said it would end by nine, and I figured I could handle an hour and a half of running in some light snow.  This what it looked like when I went out:

That was the last picture I took for 15 miles, because it was such a miserable run! It turns out that the snow that was supposed to end at 9 AM actually got worse at 9 AM! Besides the hard-driving snow, the winds were brutal, coming in at around 20 miles an hour. At several points, when I would get to a spot where the open fields allowed the wind and snow to come roaring at me, I was ready to quit. But a quitter I am not, and although I must admit it was a very slow run, I made it.

(My watch is new, so every new long run is a new record, lol!)

The snow was coming down hard when I finished.

That picture really doesn’t even do it justice–it was awful!  I wanted to just go home and lay out on the couch for the rest of the day, but Jamie had had a couple of friends over the night before, and I had promised them pancakes when they woke up. So I ran 15 miles in a snowstorm, and then made pancakes. :/ As they cooked, I sat there on a stool next to the stove, with my hands over the griddle, trying to warm up my frozen fingers while the pancakes cooked. :p

Later, I had to take Jamie to another schoolmate’s house to do a project, and the snow was absolutely blinding. I couldn’t see 20 feet in front of my car, and we nearly got hit by a train. 😮  This was what the sky looked like in the space of about 10 minutes.

It was truly scary, and I was glad to go home and eventually lay on the couch and drink wine. 😉

Just when you thought that was my final “extreme running “story for this week…I’ve got one more for you! I had 5 miles on the schedule this morning, and here’s what the thermometer look like when I got ready to leave.

I’d say we could probably just round that to -8, right? :p. And yes, I am crazy enough that I actually went out and ran all 5 miles on the road at that temperature.  As much as it sucked, and my legs were pretty frozen, I did get to see a beautiful sunrise.

Not my best photo, but my fingers were frozen!! Surprisingly, I wasn’t quite as much of a snow bunny after this one.

Okay, maybe I was, ha ha!  I actually can’t believe that I really did it, but I guess I’m a pretty determined person. 🙂 And once again, it was pretty cool to casually tell everyone at work, “Oh, yeah sure, I ran this morning.” 😉

I will offer this one piece of advice that I learned from my cold-weather running experience these last few days.  After my run last Friday, I came home and immediately jumped in the shower so I could get ready to go to work. Who doesn’t love a hot shower after running at -2°, right? But when I got out of the shower and began to brush my teeth, I was dismayed to find myself feeling dizzy. I thought it would pass, but I had to finally spit out the toothpaste and rush to the living room, where I lay on the couch for several minutes before it passed. I am not a person who ever has fainting spells, so this was very alarming to me, alarming enough that I mentioned it to my husband (a paramedic) on Saturday. He explained to me that my body had been in the freezing cold for almost 90 minutes, and then I shocked it by immediately putting it in hot water, which caused all the blood to rush from my core to my extremities immediately, and therefore made me dizzy. He warned me that the next time I do something so crazy as to run in that kind of cold weather, I need to take 15 minutes and let my body warm up gradually before I hop into a hot shower. I make sure to give myself an extra 15 minutes this morning, and that made the difference.

I weighed myself again like I do every Monday, and although I wasn’t confident in what the scale would tell me, I was pleasantly surprised.

That’s down .8 from last week, and only .2 above where I was two weeks ago, when I was at my lowest in six months! I have to say, regardless of what the scale says, I feel really good about weighing and measuring everything now. I find that I feel better knowing that I really have stuck to the plan, regardless of what the scale says, and therefore, fluctuations like last week aren’t nearly as upsetting, because I know I’m doing it right. One can only hope that with a long-term plan to keep “doing it right,” it will provide the results that I’m looking for!

That’s it for now! Thank you for reading, and for following along with my crazy winter running adventures! I want to say that it’s got to get better from here, but I said that last week. 😉