I'm counting the miles, and cursing the signs in between

That's what I've been doing over the last couple days, just hammering with all I've got. Three hours of one class, four days a week, plus ten hours of work a week. For most other college kids that would mean 146 hours of getting drunk and arguing over girls. Not this guy. I'll let girls figure themselves out, thank you very much. I just love running this time of year, and I'm going to tell you why: because very few others do it. Like Dick Beardsley pounding his fists into his thighs every night, running through snowdrifts up to my knees probably doesn't do that much more for me, but it makes me feel like I've got an advantage, when that's really not the case. Plus, there's so much more to see during winter runs, and you have to go slow enough that you have a lot of time to look at the scenery.

Monday began my abbreviated half marathon plan with a five miler. I ran down the river road, across ford parkway and then back up Cleveland. Big mistake. The river road was really nice and ice free, however cleveland and even the better part of ford parkway were terrible. It was like an ice rink, but the key was to keep moving. Yes I fell a couple times, but I tried to go fast enough that I couldn't stay on a patch of ice long enough to slip on it. I made the same mistake on Tuesday as well. I tried to add an extra loop to put some extra milage on my Tuesday group run by going up cleveland and looping around St. Kates. Bad news again, although there are no fatalities to report.

After that I kind of figured things out. I did my mid week 10 miler mostly on the river road and university ave, which was really nice. Yesterday I did 8, which quickly turned into 9 and a half. I'll put the route at the bottom of this post, but it was nothing special. It was snowing relatively hard when I went out, and because of that I only saw like four runners out. It was cool though, the sense of community that runners have; I'd high five another runner when I saw him, and run along talking about nothing for a while- people I didn't know. The only dicey part was the Franklin bridge. It was runable, but icy, and the wind coming off the Mississippi was just brutal. The snow had drifted up along the running paths which made it slow going at times- more of a resistance workout than anything- but that's what made it so fun.