the Way of the Turtle

A LESSON LEARNED
3 Mile Run in the Albany Pine Bush
Thursday, January 17, 2008

The lesson - keep my snowshoes in the car in the winter. Tonight's run would have been a heck of a lot easier with snowshoes.

I stopped at the Columbia Circle trailhead on my way to class, and was surprised to see a couple of inches of snow covering the ground. In retrospect it makes sense - we had several light snowstorms earlier this week, and and hasn't gotten warm enough during the day to melt it.

The fresh snow was no big deal - my screw shoes gave me perfectly good traction. The problem was what was under the snow. In some spots, the trail underneath was bare, and that was good running. But in other spots the snow covered churned up and refrozen snow from the storms back around the start of the year, and the footing was uneven at best. I ended up walking a lot of those sections rather than risk slipping and getting injured. The snowshoes wouldn't have given me any flotation - there wasn't enough powder for that - but they would have provided a much more stable platform for the trickier sections, and I might have been able to run more than I did.

So a tough run, and a short run... so it goes.

On the plus side - word came down tonight that conditions are OK at Savoy, so there will be two snowshoe races there this weekend. I'll be running the rescheduled 3 mile race on Saturday; I'll miss the 5 miles race on Sunday so that I can be out in Rochester running the Mendon Winterfest 10k. Right now it's not at all clear if that will be a snowshoe race or a trail race.

JMH