frigid friday

Workout: 5 mile road run
Location: Wallingford (starting at Choate)
Folks: Fran, Karen, Craig, me
Time: 6:00am
Temp: Somewhere between -2 and 0 degrees at the start; 11 degrees at finish

I haven’t spent much time running on the roads lately, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to run with some of my favorite runners. Yesterday, I took the kids sledding at Brooksvale, and the trails were calling my name. I decided then that I would ski instead of run today; however, Bryan had other plans for me. A car part needs to be picked up in Milford, and since I’m on break until the 24th and have spent much of my non-kid time playing in the snow, I could not, in good conscience, say no. So, I sucked it up, set my alarm, and joined the regular Friday crew at Choate for what turned out to be an enjoyable road run.

Frigid this morning, and yet I still managed to over-dress (though my hands could have used a thicker layer). Wish someone had brought a camera to capture our faces at the end: Craig joked that, with our white hair and frozen “goatees”(thanks, Jack Frost, for highlighting all of our facial hair), we looked as we would in twenty or thirty years. When I got back to my car, it took my hands at least a minute to warm up to the point where I could actually turn the key and open the door. The ignition posed another problem. I was reminded of when I lived in Anchorage, Alaska, and would get out of work at 10 or 11pm; the temperature gauge in my rusty Subaru would often read something like -25. In the short walk from the door of Alaska Children’s Services to my car, my hands would freeze enough to make starting the car an issue (I was never well-off enough to afford a car with a remote starter).

At the conclusion of the run, Fran exclaimed, “I love that we’re all just willing to go out and run in this!” As difficult as it was to get up at 5:20 this morning, I’m grateful once again for my fellow lunatics.