So far, 2014 has been a
challenging year for maintaining a running streak.
A storm on the second day of
January brought over a foot of snow, making the footpath on which I normally
run unusable since the town’s budget doesn’t cover clearing the footpaths. This
left me with the option of running multiple random laps up and down our long
common driveway, from one house to the next to the next and out to the road,
sort of a starfish shape, each complete tracing of the starfish earning me
about three-quarters of a mile. Which meant I needed to trace the course at
least twice even to earn the minimum one-mile requirement that keeps a streak
runner on the USRSA registry. And since one mile isn’t really much of a
workout, if I want any of the other benefits of running aside from remaining
qualified as a streak runner, I needed to do a little more than that. Three or
four laps along the branches of the common driveway gets very, very tedious in
very little time.
But before the snow had any chance
of melting, the polar vortex descended. I had never run in sub-zero temperatures
before, but I did last week. Not for very long at a time, though. On the
handful of days that it was under ten degrees, I put on as many layers as I
could wear while still remaining upright and did just a mile. I found that by
wearing tights, pants, a t-shirt, a heavy sweatshirt, and then a lined hoodie
belonging to my husband, with sleeves that ran a good four inches past my
fingertips and a hem that ended almost at my knees, I was plenty warm enough,
at least when the wind wasn’t blowing directly into my face. But all the
apparel gave me the shape and mobility of the Abominable Snowman. A mile was
all I could manage before the sheer weight of all the clothing exhausted me.
Finally at the end of last
week, the sun shone and the chill abated a little bit. It was warmer by only a
few degrees, but that was enough to start the melting process.
Which, of course, meant ice.
So I put on my YakTrax, which
give me decent traction in the snow but, like the layers and layers of warm
clothing, also adds a certain ponderousness to the run. Yak Trax aren’t heavy
or clumsy, but just cumbersome enough to make the run tiresome.
And then on Friday I tired of
the Yak Trax and convinced myself that the layer of powdery new snow would provide
enough traction that the ice wouldn’t be a problem. I enjoyed a pleasant run
that day. It wasn’t too cold and the powder did feel nice on my unfettered
feet. Until the last ten yards or so of the route, when I hit an ice patch that
was invisible under the new snow and fell flat on my back.
My first thought was typical
of a streak runner: I was within a snowball’s throw of the two-mile finishing
point, so I’d definitely cleared my necessary daily mile and the run still
counted. My second thought was that nothing hurt too badly.
But it’s hard to fall flat on
your back on the ice and not hurt at all. Soon I realized how sore my tailbone
was, and I’d wrenched an arm while trying to catch myself as well.
So it was a tough week for
running. But on Saturday, the temperature was well into the thirties by the
time I was dressing for my run, and the ice was gone from the roadway. I ran a
warm, comfortable, safe, easy ten miles, savoring every step all the more for all
the weather-related travails of the preceding days.
“Doesn’t a mile on the
treadmill still count toward the streak?” a friend asked on one of the coldest
days last week.
Well, yes. According to the
rules of the United States Running Streak Association, running on a treadmill
is just fine. But I consider being outdoors for at least ten minutes part of
the challenge along with completing the mile, I told her. I like having a
streak of not only running every day but spending at least a small interval of time
outside very day. No matter what the weather. In snow. On ice. During a polar
vortex.
Still, this week is better.
The air is milder; much of the snow has melted. We’re not even halfway through
January; more winter weather will probably occur before the season ends. But
days like the ones we had last week remind streakers that it’s almost always
possible to get that mile in, one way or another. It gave me a chance to become
ever more creative at dressing for the cold weather, and it reminded me of the
value of Yak Trax.
The streak continues, and my
tailbone has mostly recovered from the fall on the ice. I’ll be grateful for
milder temperatures this week. Wind chill isn’t a particularly good feeling,
and neither is a bruised tailbone. But persistence feels good, and I’m glad to
have made it into another week of streak running.
Well said.
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