Winter won’t go without a fight, it seems.
March 18th, 2007
Coming just in time to spoil our plans to leave the state for the weekend, Winter wanted to show everybody that while Spring weather has begun to peek through every few days, it is not quite here yet. I am not sure exactly how much snow we got, since I was out shoveling 6 or 7 times and the wind left drifts everywhere. It was an interesting mix, though. Light powder, that then melted and became slush before freezing into ice, covered with more powder which then began to melt into slush. There was a great layering effect that happened.
I am very glad that we tried finding some snow shovels on clearance in the past few weeks. Our old plastic snow shovels were all torn up at the ends; one of them had lost about an inch and a half all told and the other was all curled and splitting. Our new shovels have a nice metal brace at the end of the shovel to help get the ice up and to keep the plastic from breaking. I also bought an ice pick for the driveway that has already shown us more value than the buck and a half it cost us.
All told, I think that I spent about 6 or 7 hours out shoveling. Thankfully, our neighbor has a snow blower and he did about a quarter of my driveway for me, which saved me about an hour and a half of work. The plows were able to clean up the streets and what was left melted off nicely, which meant that I got a couple of quality runs in this weekend without having to worry about footing.
March 18th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
[…] Nature had other ideas, however. Instead of driving down to visit friends, I got to look out my window at the sleet and ice falling out of the sky. I also got to spend most of the weekend shoveling. I managed to come up with a loop that is just a bit shy of 18 miles that I could run on, though, and it served quite well as a substitute for the half marathon. The last two loops add up to about a half marathon; given the hilly terrain, it is probably more on the order of about 13 and a half miles. I managed to run that in around 86 minutes, which is a pretty good clip for (a) not having anybody to run with/against, (b) having already run a fast 4.5+ miles, (c) dealing with a hillier course despite the finish of New Bedford, (d) having spent around 6 or 7 hours throughout the weekend shoveling snow, ice and slush and (e) not having any money on the line. In other words, I was tired and sore to start, and I managed to run the 18 miles at a pace that would have beaten all of my previous marathons save one. […]