I was down in Florida visiting my brother over the holiday weekend. I got in some very flat miles. The weather wasn’t great (60-70 degrees, cloudy, light rain several days), however infinitely better than what the Mid-Atlantic had to offer. Needless to say, it was a bit of a shock to the system when I went out this morning in 10 degree temperatures.
Or it would have been if I didn’t almost completely wimp out. I ended up mostly scrapping my normal 8 miler and only did 1 mile to keep my run streak going (day #4181). I was short about an hour of sleep the night before so that was part of it. I also wanted to get into work a little early since I had been out of the office for three days and knew I had stuff to catch up on. And I’m still a little over 2 months out from my next race so I didn’t absolutely, positively have to get all eight miles in.
It’s been so long since I’ve run in temperatures that low that I couldn’t quite remember exactly all of the layers I truly needed. I ended up with two long sleeve shirts, lightweight raincoat, shorts, tights, sweat pants, buff, gloves + mittens, and a winter hat. The sweat pants are a very heavy weight pair I’ve had since college (seriously, they’re 30 years old!) and were a bit of overkill. They’re also so dense that it felt like I was running through water with them on. I tend to err on the side of overdressing rather than underdressing in cold temperatures though. And I was only going to be out for about 10 minutes.
I’ve got another slug of runs coming up with sub-20 degree temperatures so I’ll get a couple more chances to dial in my cold running gear. I should have things all sorted out for it to warm back up into the high 40s next week. Gotta love global warming!