Yesterday I finally got sick of us slacking off, and pressed pretty hard out on our run. The snow's piled up enough that we had a few good hurdles to jump along the way. The only problem with jumping a snow bank is you better get up on it first. You can't jump without seeing the other side. One blind leap onto a patch of ice on the other side and it's "Sub Zero wins," runner fatality (at least in the sense that you'll be rehabbing a while).
The other thing about jumping and climbing snow banks is that it will steal the wind right out of you. You're doing fine, and suddenly you're trying to catch your breath. It isn't really advisable to be sucking in air too hard when it's this cold, either. We came across the other side of some of the banks with heavy legs, that's for sure.
At least this time, though, we kept pushing hard the entire time. We didn't slow to a crawl to catch our breath or let the legs recover. We just kept dragging our tired selves along kicking and screaming (at least our muscles). We even actually had a nice sprint going for the last 1/4 mile, which we haven't done much of lately. Sure we've sped it up, but flat out sprinting (as much as it can be done on ice/snow) has been out of the question.
The end result wasn't all that favorable time-wise, but it was about 3 minutes down from the last few times. I was exhausted after, and I'm still sore today, so I know it was a good run this time. We need more like this. I think the new goal is to push to get down to our warm weather times in this stuff. We'll have to take another 2-3 minutes off for that, but I think it can be done. Obviously the snow's not going anywhere, and we're supposedly getting another foot here tomorrow night (should make Wednesday's run interesting), so we should have plenty of opportunities to conquer it.
I should probably get Jason's phone back to him before Wednesday, though. It was on our recliner, so it must have fell out of his pocket. Hopefully he'll be home when I try to run it out to him today. I'm not sure if he knows where it is at all, but hopefully if I miss him at his place, he'll come to ours looking for it.
This is essentially a motivational blog for myself to keep track of my renewed love for running. Well, maybe love is too strong of a word, but let's say I try to enjoy it, even when I loathe the very thought of it. I also hope it will serve as a motivator for others like me that aren't your typical sized athlete, but still have the grit to go out there and challenge their limits. A little motivation from anyone reading this couldn't hurt me too much either...
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