Winter showed up early... again.

Apparently last week while I was in Las Vegas it was 53 degrees there and closer to 70 back in NH. Not really typical. But then, probably 36 hours after that little warm-spell, it snowed. That's usually the way it goes around here. So when my plane landed at about midnight on Sunday night (I'm probably pretty lucky I got out, there were huge delays and cancellations everywhere, people lying all over the airport terminal, but I was on a direct flight) I could just make out the whiteness covering the ground, signaling the onset of winter. Technically it's still fall, at least astonomically speaking, but that never seems to matter.

The past couple of days have been spent trying to recover from my 2am bedtime that night I returned. Oh, and trying to get some workouts in. It hasn't been easy, as my motivation has been severely lacking. The more I think about it, the more I think the biggest issue is that all of my training sessions are done solo. It's not like this hasn't pretty much always been the way I've trained, but I think towards the end of the season I got to spend a lot of time with my teammates, and there were always at least a few things to break up the monotony. But currently I'm staring into the face of 4-5 months of winter Ironman training done mostly by myself. Yikes. And to top it all off, I still need a TV series to watch on the trainer. Fortunately I am pretty sure Netflix is going to be one of my Christmas presents. When trainer season hits, let me tell you, you can get a whole lot of mileage out of your Netflix subscription.

Wednesday morning was when winter really decided to hit. Normally I like to be up and in the pool as early as possible, assuming I'm starting with a swim workout, which inevitably on any weekday I will be. But since I was still exhausted and on Pacific time, I decided not to worry about it, and it worked out quite well because there was quite a snowstorm that hit overnight and into the morning. I also happen to own a terrible car for driving in the snow. Small Sedans that weigh maybe 95 pounds just love sliding all over the road. Somehow in the 8 years I've owned it, I haven't had any snow-related accidents, but I've sure skidded out on the ice a lot. more than anything though, it is probably just that I choose not to drive it in bad weather if it is at all avoidable.

So anyway, the swim was put off until much, much later, after the majority of the roughly 8" of snow had fallen. And even later than that I finally went out to get my run done. I hate the treadmill. I have done exactly two treadmill runs in about the last 4 years. One was for about 5 minutes when I was sort of doing a test run on one of my many injuries of the recent past. The other was almost exactly a year ago when there was a major ice storm that knocked out power for a week, made a tree fall on the house, and caused hundreds of roads to be closed. Considering the amount of trees and limbs lying on the ground and across the roads that day, I decided I might just be better off running indoors at the gym, where the power fortunately was never lost so at least I had somewhere to shower for the week.

So anyway, the point of all of that was that I ran outside on Wednesday. I timed it just right to finish as it got dark. I also ran on roads that I had never run on before. I had decided I'd be better off on much less-traveled roads, so that if cars went by me they'd be less apt to splash me with slush or, more importantly, slide into me and break my legs. It worked out well for the most part, except I did get splashed a few times, but all of my bones remain unbroken. It was actually raining by then, which made it quite pleasant.

So now we have a solid coating of white on the ground, and no sign of warm weather to take it away. It may be too soon to say so, but it looks like we might have a white Christmas for the third year in a row. What's strange about this is that we probably had three total white Christmases in the entire 20 years preceding. I know we still talk a lot about global warming, and to me we definitely experienced it for at least a little while (I spent the winter of 2002 as a ski instructor, routinely teaching people to ski on slush-clovered slopes while they wore t-shirts, and having to take our skis off at the bottom of certain trails to walk across the grass and get ther rest of the way to the bottom) but the past couple of years have been brutal, and I fear that this one is going to be the same. May first certainly seems awfully far away right about now.