Running In Extremes: Winter

Cascade concrete? Cold smoke? Death cookies? Bring it on.

September 11, 2006

I'm not going to try to convince you that running on ice and snow is a good idea. It actually isn't: It's cold and wet and slow and sometimes dangerous. The only time I've ever broken a bone occurred while cornering too quickly on a sheet of ice, which resulted in my body twisting one way, my right foot the other.

Once I healed, however, I was back to ice and snow. I have little choice. I live in the mountains of western Montana, which means that I live in a lot of winter. It's been said that Montana has three seasons: this winter, last winter, and next winter. This is a slight exaggeration, though it's true that my Fourth of July barbecue has been snowed out more than once.

So if you're committed to running, and you live in a winter-intensive place, and you believe, as I do, that it's preferable to lose your nose to frostbite than to take a single stride on a treadmill, well, then, you're going to spend a lot of time running in--how shall I say this?--pointedly non-ideal environs.

My usual midwinter run, when the roads are too poor to access the mountains without a snowmobile, begins out my back door, on an unpaved alleyway that leads to an extensive trail system. The first step is always the hardest, because if you're not cold for the initial half mile, then you're immensely overdressed. It's a bad idea to sweat too much during a winter run--wetness tends to freeze, and that way lies hypothermia. So I know I'm going to start out chilly, and I need to steel myself for the shock. It's like that first leap into the ocean.

I leap. If it has recently snowed--a fair bet in my part of the world--then I'm printing fresh tracks, each footfall embossed in the trail. I sometimes turn around and look at them, as if to assess the quality of my progress. The trails are softer when layered with snow; the sounds of my rubber-spiked shoes are muffled; the land is stark and clean--the mountains white, the ponds solid, the aspens skeletal. Maybe there's a set of deer prints, or the little exclamation points left by a snowshoe hare. The skies are empty, save for the occasional low-flying magpie.

It's gorgeous yet harsh, and I'm breaking trail through silent woods yet fighting my start-of-the-run shivers--and these combinations strike my runner's heart in a profoundly appropriate way. Running, to me, has always been an intricate juggle of pleasure and pain. I like a side order of suffering with my beauty or I just don't feel right; splendor without effort seems like cheating and diminishes my enjoyment (a concept that nonrunners, I've noted, don't often grasp). Winter running takes all the usual dichotomies and enhances them: There's more pleasure, and there's more pain. Call me strange, or simply call me a runner.