A First From Me

I need spring to come early.  Wait, what?  Get out a pencil and jot the date down.  It probably won't be mentioned again for awhile.  It's something I've been thinking about for awhile and now have finally said it here where it will be kept for as long as this page is here. 

See, here is the problem.  When I was made aware of an early March run around Blue Marsh lake I thought it was a perfect opportunity for me to get in a long distance trail run.  Normally the only race they have at the lake is a 50k.  That's about 15k more than I'm willing to do.  The shortest option you have at this run is 20 miles which I'm willing to go for especially when they have aid stations every three miles.  Besides, I never consider these races.  I had not thought about what the conditions might be like.

I try to get over to the lake almost every weekend to run the 7 mile loop that contains various elevation changes and running conditions.  It's just enough of a challenge to be fun and annoying at the same time.  That has changed recently.  Normally on a spring or fall day you will catch other runners out around the lake or at least people in general.  That hasn't been the case lately.  In fact the past two weekends that I've been there have yielded a total of one other person and that happened to be the guy I work with who caught up to me on the loop.  He's an actual hardcore runner.  I'm not so much.  We both looked at each other and said this sucks.

Trying to run in hard packed crunchy snow is horrible.  Your legs and feet take a beating.  It's like running on uneven rocks the entire time unless the trail happens to be packed down.  Some places your feet go down to the bottle and other places you barely crunch awkwardly through the top.  This past weekend I was getting so frustrated I started kicking the snow.  I ended up being out there for over three hours and never saw another person over 13 miles.  The last two miles saw more walking than running and the course was about as flat as it gets.

I'm not liking my chances of having this stuff melt by the time the run takes place.  Especially when every time you look at a forecast you see more cold and chances for more snow.  The one thing I do have going for me is I've been out to the course every weekend so I know exactly what to expect.  There are going to be a lot of people showing up who have no idea.  That's if the course is still covered in snow and ice.  As bad as last winter was the temperature on March 8th was 52.  The problem was February had almost 30 inches of snow so it's not like it was melted by that date.  The run is also early in the morning so it was probably in the 30's.  And if anything the warmer temperature melted just enough snow to turn things into slush which gets your feet wet and freezing cold in a matter of minutes.  This might turn into more of a hike and less of a run.


Here is what we having coming up over the next five days.   

Neither model is calling for much in the way of snow on Saturday.  Both sit at around one inch so expect some light snow here and there with little accumulation.

Interestingly both models also keep the next system on Tuesday to the south and the east.  I'm not going to post maps because if I had posted yesterday it would have shown us getting socked by the storm.  Now it has us on the edge.

Euro totals thru Wednesday have all of the area receiving six inches while the GFS has all of us at three inches.  I'll talk more about the Tuesday system later as I feel this one has more potential than any other storm we have seen this year.