Long SNOWY Run

Ah, Sunday!

Sunday was either race PR Day or Pacer Day or in my case, long slow run day.

After a four hour drive home from my Aunt's 60th birthday party in Victoria Harbour in the crazy snow storm on Saturday night, I knew that Sunday's planned trail run would not be easy. A normal two hour drive took us a bit over four hours and while I slept in the car, I didn't get to my bed until 2am. The baby was up at 5am to eat as well.

Nonetheless, I was up at 7:15 determined to get out and run the 12k trail that our group had planned. I was sure that by 8:30am, the roads would be a lot better as at 5am, it was not snowing anymore. How wrong I was! The normal 20 minute highway drive to the Running Room took me 30 minutes and I saw 4 different accidents (including an airport limo where the driver was sitting in the car and the passenger was standing on the side of the 401 with his luggage looking ANGRY).

When I got to the store, I heard the marathon group leader telling her group that they'd need their spikes for the 26k run they had planned. I was worried. I barely have any running gear beyond some winter tights, shoes and a new 10 ounce handheld water bottle I bought last week.

When Bing started handing out the route, he gave us a road route. You could tell he was disappointed. This was the second weekend in a row that we had planned to run this trail around a (man made) lake/storm drain and the plan had been foiled by snow. I someone suggested that he should stop planning this route and it would stop snowing on Sunday's.

Before we headed out, he gave the group a choice - run the road route (which was road, but not much better with the icy/non-plowed conditions) or to try the trail which would be much the same, but without cars etc. My pace leader (who has knee issues) decided on the roads and the majority of our group decided to follow the bigger group to the lake.

It was tough, but not horrible. The best part was passing people who looked at us like we were crazy (which I totally understand). When we got to the trail proper, Bing gave the group another choice to turn back on the roads or to keep going to the lake. The group basically had the "we've come this far" mentality and off we went. When we got to the lake loop, the plan was three times around the lake and back to the store again for a total of 12k. After the first rotation, some people left. I did a second rotation but knew that I had 3.3k back to the store and decided to be happy with 9.8k instead of 12k and so I headed back with about 5 other people while a few kept running for the total mileage.

The run back was uneventful. Well, if you ignore the fact that at about 750 meters to go, I got a HUGE soaker by a car (we were on the sidewalk by this point). Dude got me. Head to toe. Man, that woke me up and had me pushing a whole lot faster for the end.

I'm proud of this run for many reasons. Running in the conditions, running on such little sleep, running a longer distance when it was totally okay for me to cut out early. And mostly for completing it in a reasonable time:

9.8k, 1:13:29. 7:30/km pace.

10 weeks until the half marathon!

A big shout out to the people who participated in the Chilly half marathon and Frosty 5k yesterday. I've linked to two above: MARLENE who managed to PR in these conditions and YUMKE who proved that he's a pacer you want to run with, bringing in his 1:45 continuous group in 26 seconds ahead of their goal. CONGRATS!