Winter Wonderland

This is my third winter in New York and most definitely the coldest. I went for a 5 mile run with my running club this morning and it took me two hours to defrost when I got back. Fortunately, my good friend Angela made me a deer corn bag that you just pop in the microwave for a couple minutes, and you’ve got a homemade heating pad that smells like fresh cornbread. It has kept my feet nice and toasty at night, so I’d like to give a big shout-out to Ange for the thoughtful (and useful) gift.

One perk about a colder winter is that we’ve had a lot more snow than I’ve seen in the past two. It snowed all day on MLK day and I couldn’t wait to get out in it. So, I suited up in my under armor, laced up my running shoes and headed out to Central Park, where the snow is always prettiest. I had never run in snow before. (Well, I take that back, I was insane enough to run in the Ted Corbit race right before Christmas, when it was under 20 degrees with slushy snow all over the ground. I couldn’t feel my feet at all for most of the race, so it seemed like I was hovering.) But, I’d never actually run with snow falling from the sky. It was beautiful. It felt like I had stepped out of a giant wardrobe, right smack into Narnia. The streetlamps on the side of the road helped with this image, as well. As I ran, the snowflakes clung to my eyelashes and floated into my mouth and nose, and when I ran downhill, the snowflakes seemed to pause in mid air so I could race through them as if I was in a video game. It was exhilarating for the first 4.5 miles, but then I started to get pretty wet as the snow fell harder and began to stick to the ground. I think I was a little too ambitious to try to run 6 miles in the snow, I knew I was pretty sure I could survive one more mile.

As I kicked into the last mile, my shoes starting to slosh by now, I tried to clear out my nose (because it tends to run when it’s cold), and so began one of my annoying nose bleeds. I looked down to see my sweatshirt stained with red splotches. Dangit! I slowed to a walk, plugged my nose with my glove and tried my best to look indiscrete as I meandered through the tourists and joggers with my head down. I was bleeding so much, though, that I had no choice but to bend down and clean my gloves off in the snow. To put it bluntly, it looked like I’d committed a serious crime. After several minutes, the bleeding finally quit and I was able to jog the rest of the way home, but not without receiving some concerned/disgusted stares. I was a sight to behold, wet, bloody, and frozen to the bone. So, what initially began as a magical winter wonderland run, ended up looking more like a crime scene from CSI.