Palmer Happy Run

I have hardly been running at all this winter.  With so much snow, my focus has been mostly on skiing. But today I forced myself to do the weekly Palmer Happy Run again.  I had stopped for the winter because I really like to take the dog with me.  I'm just not that comfortable running on the dark unlighted streets on snow and ice, especially with her. In the cold, I'm more likely to need to carry her also. In fact, I did have to carry her in my backpack for a little over one mile tonight. It was very windy, with gusts to 40 mph. The actual temperature was right around freezing, but the wind chill was brutal, especially when running directly into it.  My dog, Baby, really hates cold wind.  When we hit the airport road, that north wind was right in our faces.  She kept turning around as if to go back where we started, 4 miles back. I wasn't interested in doing that of course.  So I put her in my pack and ran the last mile and a half. That was a different sort of running workout.  She weighs around 9 pounds so combined with the weight of the pack, I was running with 10 pounds bouncing on my back. She seemed much happier though. We were both quite happy to get back to my car and head home.  But I'm glad I came. I need to start doing those runs every week plus of course, getting in some longer training runs if I ever want to have a reasonable marathon finish time again. Running with Baby is a little weird though because like most dogs, she needs to stop at every pillar and post and sniff. But she runs faster than I do, so she does make me push harder to keep up with her. She did a really good job tonight.  We both got our feet wet because there were some snowy and icy sections, plus some huge puddles. But it wasn't too bad.

At least it was a beautiful sunny day for the first day of spring. Daylight Savings gave us daylight the whole way too. A bit chilly, but a very nice run.