I am not sure where any of the readers of this blog may live, but I am in Upstate New York – Syracuse, NY to be exact – and we have been getting hammered with some consistent snow fall. This has absolutely been messing with my desire to go running. For those not familiar with my running preferences, I stopped running on a treadmill a few years back when I kept getting shin splints afterwards. I found that running outside is really the only way to go. I can and will run on a treadmill if I am traveling, but at the same time I really do my best to run outside. I have plenty of cold weather gear to stay warm, but also be safe. In the end with the amount of snow we have gotten has made it a bit dangerous to run outside because of the height of the snow banks. Because of this I opted for a change of pace and headed out to Beaver Lake Nature Center for some snowshoeing.
I have not gone out yet this year, but had been wanting to for awhile now. It seems like last time I was ready to go there suddenly wasn’t enough snow on the trails. I found myself very early on really taking in the world around me. It was simply amazing to hear some of the birds chirping, and see many tracks of the small animals. Whenever I am on the trails at the Nature Center I make sure to go unplugged – no music or phone – to interrupt my ability to soak in everything I can.
My mind of course wandered quite a bit, and at one point I felt a little guilty while I was out there because I haven’t ran in over a week, but in some ways it was a bit of taking the “easy way out” for the work out I wanted to do. In the same thought process, it came to me as I reminded myself, that just like cancer patients have their good and their bad days, I do too. Any healthy person can have a good day or a bad day, but you can still always make the best of it.
As a side note, I can STILL feel the burn of my quads 5+hrs later!!!
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