This morning at 6 AM, I
ran on the park trail that goes by my home. At night, this unlit trail becomes
the setting of a bad horror movie, one in which someone does something unrealistically
stupid and gets a limb chopped off by a machete-wielding maniac. For me, the
stupid was choosing to run in the dark at 6 AM, but since life isn’t a movie, I
mercifully got to keep all my limbs. Funnily enough, though, I wouldn’t have
noticed if I had lost a limb, since they were all numb from the cold anyway.
Anyway, let’s talk
about winter weather in Chicago and running.
It is awful. There is
no aspect of it that is not awful. The only defense I can imagine is that it
will make you appreciate running in other seasons more. Before winter truly
took hold, though, I was hopeful. There was a brief time, during my first run
after a heavy snowfall, where I was momentarily struck by the beauty of my
park’s changed landscape. Powdery snow ghosts, kicked up by the wind, danced on
undisturbed snowbanks, and yellow streetlamps gilded the white tops of bare
tree branches.
It took my breath away.
Then it took my footing.
I hit a patch of black
ice, playfully hiding under the fresh powder, and fell into a snowbank that,
while cushioning my fall, also inserted about ten pounds of pure-driven snow
into my jacket via the sleeves and neck.
Oh, I thought, so that’s how
it is.
Since then I’ve
considered winter and myself enemies when it comes to my running goals, and she
has not done much to call a truce. Obviously there are her acts of direct
aggression: snowstorms, negative temperatures in the double-digits, and long
hours of darkness that turn every outdoor run into the aforementioned
horror-movie.
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| Pictured: my morning run |
But it’s the subtle
aggression that so dispose me to hate her. For example, just two weeks ago, we
had a light thaw. Temperatures soared into the high 30s, sunlight broke through
the clouds, and everything in Chicago dripped for 48 hours. Great! I thought, naïve little runner
that I was, my path will thaw too!
Everything’s coming up Milhouse! However, when I stepped onto the
downward-sloping start of my park trail, I immediately slid 14 feet forwards to
where the trail leveled off. I wish I could remember the curses I yelled out as
I slid, because the swears preceding physical injury are always the most
creative. The kids playing nearby certainly looked impressed.
It turns out that my
path doesn’t thaw. Instead, it develops a highly original method of breaking
people’s legs. First, you have an un-thawed layer of ice over most of the trail.
Nothing short of spring will strip that away. But then, since it is slightly
warm, a filmy water layer forms to cover the already-slippery ice. These two
elements combine to form a surface that has negative levels of friction. Stepping
on this surface will shoot your foot off in a random direction at roughly 80
miles per hour.
But that isn’t the
worst. If I came to the trail and saw a wall to wall wet-ice combo, I would
leave. I’m not a masochist. It’s the fact that there are spots where the trail
is clear. Where the concrete pokes through with its delicious dryness and
firmness. That’s what made me run that day: hope. Hope that I could weave a
path through the patches of terra firma
without breaking my neck. That the dry concrete and wet ice looked almost
identical to the naked eye was incidental. I was teased with the hope of
winning, even in the face of insurmountable odds.
It was The Hunger Games. Except more dangerous,
and without a boring, forced love triangle.
The other subtle way
winter messes with running is in the clothing choices it forces upon you. First
off, running is a beautiful pastime because it is so cheap. Got running shoes?
You can run. (You should wear pants as well.) In the winter, though, all of a
sudden you have to balance athletic with warm. I run in a discolored hoodie (I
spilled drain-o on it once), gloves, sweatpants over my running shorts, and a
ski-mask that both inhibits breathing and, I feel, makes me look like a serial
killer. On one hand, this mask is great for keeping my face warm. On the other,
it traps my warm breath under the mask, heating my cold nose and making it run
like a faucet. Since I cannot wipe my nose during a run, the snot runs into my
mouth the whole time. If that was gross to read, just imagine living it.
We also have the
problem of warming up as you run. What keeps you warm when you start out will
boil you alive when you get going. But if you start out wearing too little,
you’ll end up like Jack Nicholson sitting frozen at the end of The Shining. And if you have any sort of
cool down outside after you’ve finished running, you’ll be doing it in wet
clothes, so again, you’ll end up as frozen as an alcoholic who chased his
telepathic child through a frozen hedge maze.
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| It happens to the best of us |
So, winter. I could go
on about the ways it upsets me, but by now you’ve gotten the point. At the end
of the day, though, runners don’t run because it’s easy. Adverse conditions
make things harder, but the act of distance running is also adverse to my
natural laziness. So that’s the other thing I’ll say in defense of winter
running: you get a fierce and satisfying pride from completing your run when it
is awful outside. I think it’s because the winter reflects how difficult
distance running inherently is. Your brain must be harsh to your body to get it
to run, and winter is likewise harsh to both of them. Rather than being pitted against each other,
your brain and body must work together to overcome the odds, growing closer as
things get worse, until they win by working together to overcome the Capital…
It’s The Hunger Games. I’m talking about The Hunger Games again. Damn that Jennifer
Lawrence’s natural charisma!
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| So much charisma! |
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