Ya, it’s cold

It’s been a while, I had to wait for my fingers to thaw in order to type a blog, somehow -6C feels ‘warm’ now. Actually I couldn’t think of anything interesting to write about, and I still don’t, but thought I’d throw a training update out there and let y’all know I’m racing a half marathon next weekend.

Earlier in the week I had an over-distance run of 44km with an 11km pickup from 28 to 39km. It was -13C, almost no snow on the roads, little wind and sunny so it was actually quite nice out, relatively speaking. We had to put our bottles in a insulated bag (with a hot water bottle in there) in order to keep our drinks in a liquid state. With all the gear one typically wears in frigid temps I know I’m not going to see the exact paces I would like and I just have to trust I’m getting in the appropriate effort.

I’ve contemplated going somewhere else to train but I’m actually dealing with the cold weather fine. As long as it doesn’t snow much in the next 7 weeks it will be alright in Guelph. It’s good to be running with the Speed River guys as a bunch of us are focused on the same mid-April marathon. Since returning to low altitude in late January I’ve upped my weekly volume, hitting a high of 220km this week.

Yesterday four of us did a 32km run on snowy roads. The footing wasn’t too bad in the beginning and we were chatting a lot. The whole time it was snowing quite a bit and the footing got worse as the snow piled up. In the final third of the run our legs got heavy and the chatter died down. With less than 2km to go a snowplow came by and cleared the road. It was crazy how different, and good, it felt to run normally again. Those are the runs that we tell ourselves are making us tough, anything to justify slogging along for that long.

Tomorrow it’s supposed to plunge back below -20C, which means another treadmill session.

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Next Sunday, March 1, I’m going to race the Chilly Half Marathon in Burlington, ON. This is going to be a fitness test and a chance to get on closed roads in a race atmosphere. Right now the weather looks like it will warm up a bit, maybe I’ll be able to actually run marathon race pace outside.

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On March 15th a bunch of us from Speed River are going to High Park for a Harry’s Spring Run-off free training run put on by the fine people at Canada Running Series. There are 8km and 5km group runs planned for all levels.

Here are some random pics I took on my flight from Nairobi to Amsterdam a month ago.

Lake Turkana (Kenya) in the distance

Nile through outskirts of Khartoum, Sudan

Nile, just North of Khartoum

Lake Nasser is a man made lake on the nile, close to Abu Simbel, Egypt.

Crop circles in the middle of Sahara Desert

Nile in the distance, close to Luxor, Egypt

Mediterranean Sea, about 125km East of Alexandria, Egypt