Winter hit Ottawa yet again yesterday in the form of a snowstorm.  At any other time I would have used the prediction of 15cm of snow as an excuse to stay in bed and delay my run for a day.  Instead though, I found myself up at 6:30 in an attempt to beat the incoming storm.  Unfortunately, for what I believe was the first time all winter, the weatherman was actually correct in predicting that the heavy snow would start falling in the early morning.  But this didn’t stop me because, quite frankly I wanted this run done so I could say I was officially into my taper.

I did a slow warm up down our long driveway, followed immediately by a complete wipeout on the snow covered ice at the road.  While laying on the ground I made a mental note to make sure I kept to a very slow pace and off I went.  It didn’t take me long to realize that I wasn’t going to have an option about my speed anyways.  When you are running in a snowstorm on an unplowed road it is safe to assume you will not be doing a speed workout.

In short, what should have been a miserable run really wasn’t all that bad.  When blocked from the horizontal snow and wind it was actually quite peaceful.  Running in ankle deep snow for 15.5km also provides one heck of a muscle workout with minimal joint stress – and you can actually have the centre of the road to yourself for the entire run (no one else, pedestrians or drivers, is stupid enough to be out there with you). The two wild turkeys I passed looked a little pissed off fighting through the snow and wind, but then again, wild turkeys just look pissed off at the best of times.  In the end it was a perfect final run to finish a week where I had done a little bit of everything: race last Saturday, speed work on Monday, yoga on Wednesday, steady 10k on Thursday, hills on Friday.  Why not finish it up with a workout in the snow?

So now my taper week begins.  Next Sunday is the Around the Bay 30k Road Race.  I am trying to tell myself that if I can run just over 15km in snow, I should be able to run 30km on dry roads…assuming the weather doesn’t throw yet another storm our way.  And hopefully when I finish the race it won’t look like this:

Snowstorm run done!