Spring in Wisconsin Can Be a Fickle Friend

Ah, Northeast Wisconsin, where the sounds of thunder rolling through the area overnight don't result in a morning filled with the smell of wet earth and the sight of new buds and bulbs awakening from their winter's sleep.  Rather, one is greeted with the sight of ice: ice covering the ground, ice covering the trees, ice covering the cars.  Windows are iced over, the garage door is iced shut, and area schools (well, not ours for some reason, but many!) are either experiencing a two-hour delay or are closed altogether because of power outages.

While this event is very beautiful in its own way....

Love how everything is perfectly encased in ice.  Listening to it all creak, though, is pretty crazy.

Poor little tree. Hang in there!

Frozen grass - LG's favorite part of this weather fiasco.

...it does have its inconveniences.

Frozen sidewalk - what helped me decide to run inside today.

For us, we have gotten off rather easy.  Our power still works, luckily, and our school did not close.  Aside from the fact that our garage door was in fact frozen shut (a matter my husband solved with WD-40), our day has gone on more or less as usual - so far.

The one snag in the morning was that after looking outside at the mess, I opted not to join my Peeps for the Wednesday Morning running group. While I was saddened by that, I reasoned that it was for the best.  Aside from the possibly slippery footing, I am still a bit sore from the 18 miles on Saturday and was kind of wondering if I could run at all.  I thought I would give it a shot at the indoor track and see what happened.

On the schedule for today I originally had a modest four miles with another 10 scheduled for tomorrow. Since I have a trail race on Sunday, though, I thought in an ideal world I would flip-flop those two days and get the 10 over with today.  Heading to the track, I thought if I could run an hour, I would be happy.  That would then give me enough time to drive over to the coffee shop and meet the Peeps at least for the post-run Kaffee Klatsch.  As it happened, things turned out better than I could have anticipated.

I got to the track and decided that I would approach this run very conservatively.  With that in mind, I thought I would just try to do a run/walk with my chosen interval being run three laps and then walk .75 of a lap.  That way, I figured I would probably be getting close to 3 minutes of running and 1 minute of walking.

Starting out, I was pleasantly surprised that things felt okay: not great, not terrible, but okay.  Given that I was feeling okay, I was a bit disappointed with the idea of stopping after an hour to do coffee, but meeting up with everyone seemed more fun than running in circles so I was determined to stick to that plan.

Surprise, surprise, though, because forty minutes into my run who comes in but Peeps A. and El.  They apparently were the only two at the coffee shop, which had lost power, and with the conditions as they were they opted to head to the track as well.  I got in another hour of running with my Peeps - for an hour and forty minutes total - and then enjoyed a decadent mocha from the coffee shop downstairs with Peep A.  A great start to this icy day!

Happy Running - safely!