Picture this, woman gets home from work, changes into running clothes (a light long-sleeved cool max shirt and a single layer of running tights), and goes for a run outside. So you are thinking, what is the big deal about that, people do that every day, why in the hell are you wasting my time with it on your blog? The big deal is that it was December 14th, and I ran outside with only one thin layer of clothing on my body. Not only did I only have one layer of clothing on, but maybe 2 miles into my run I felt too warm and wished I had worn shorts instead. It was December 14th, seriously, in the Frozen Tundra it is not supposed to be warm enough to even consider running outside in shorts in December. That is why I own a treadmill. I don’t like to run in the cold, I don’t like to have to don 3 layers of clothing just to freeze my ass off while running. I much prefer outdoor running to treadmill running, but being the weather wimp that I am I always opt for shorts and a sports bra in the climate controlled house over icicles forming on your neck gaiter because your warm breath condenses in it when you breathe and then freezes.
I know there are die hard runners out there; it seems that one of my neighbors is of that variety, but as far as I’m concerned they are crazy. I am not one of them. I used to run outside more often through the entire winter, at least doing my long runs outside to break up the monotony of all of that treadmill running. I find it difficult to motivate myself to run much more than an hour at a shot on the treadmill, so I would take my longer runs outside and just grit my way through it. Now I’ve decided that if I just don’t sign up for a long distance race that will be run before April or May I can just skip all of those longer runs until it is warmer. I can fit in a 7 miler in an hour or so on the TM, and I figure that is good enough to get me through the cold months in decent condition.
As I was running my 4 miles last night, I couldn’t help but ponder why it is that we have no snow on the ground in mid-December, why it was almost 50 degrees when it shouldn’t be much above 32 F. I started really thinking about the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, that I’ve been hearing about. I haven’t watched it, nor was it high on my list of things to buy for Christmas gifts, but I know I want to watch it eventually. I caught part of Al Gore on Oprah a few weeks back, and even the brief views of the documentary had a tremendous impact. It is easy to say that one day of above average temps doesn’t indicate anything in regards to global warming, but the fact is that we’ve had pitiful snow fall for several years now, hotter summers, and warmer winters. It makes me want to buy a hybrid car, but honestly I don’t feel all that motivated to do much more. It feels like such a big problem, and I guess that makes me feel helpless to solve things all on my own. Is it really terrible for me to say that I don’t mind the warmer weather? It is just too bad that there are so many nasty consequences that come along for the ride.
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