I don't mean the illness. I'm healthy on that front, have been since I picked up a Canadian cold virus in Toronto in December 2014; I do my part to avoid grabbing another somewhere. I mean the kind that is outside everywhere, permeating my every cell and leaving me almost as miserable as I would be if I were sick.
I grew up in Iowa. Winters are not kind in that state. Some years they start early, with snow and misery happening even in October, and some years they linger into April, when you'll be surprised with a cold and damp snow mid-month just as you're starting to think you might be in the clear. In Iowa, you're almost guaranteed at least a week of shatteringly cold nights and daytime highs that struggle to reach even zero Fahrenheit, and these are almost always accompanied by a razor wind that intensifies the effect. On such days, even wearing glasses hurt, the frames resting on the bridge of my nose and feeling like two needles sucking every last iota of warmth away. The rest of the time, it's just your normal freezing cold, sometimes snowing, sometimes icing, sometimes crystal-blue-sky sunny; always, always cold.*
Given the 30-ish years I spent in this yearly tundra, you'd think that I'd have built up some kind of immunity to it. I now live on the East Coast, where it gets cold in the winter, but typically not that kind of cold. A stretch of days in the 20s is about as bad as it gets, with rare forays into deeper chill; average highs are in the 40s for the winter months, which, when you think about it, should actually feel quite tolerable compared to Iowa where the average highs are about ten degrees colder. The problem is that I very quickly acclimated to the milder winter; I was already having more and more difficulty handling the cold with every year that I lived in Iowa, and after one winter in Delaware, I had softened almost completely. I seldom go back to Iowa for the Christmas holiday anymore, generally due to some outright wretched traveling experiences at that time of year, but also, in large part, because I simply cannot stand the temperature. The last time I went, the warmest it got the whole week was on Christmas day: ~25 degrees. And it felt splendid. (Is it not a sad thing, when the cold is so awful that you are uplifted when the temperature manages to climb to 20? 20 is not warm!)
During the second half of my graduate school tenure, I started up running seriously again. It had been a few years since I ran with an almost-every-day regularity, and when winter came, I did not put it back on the shelf because I was afraid it would be too difficult to start it up again; also, I didn't want to quit running. I would not stoop to running on the very short indoor track at the Field House or, even worse, on a treadmill.** I went out. I ran after the day's work in the lab, so it was dark and the daily high temperature had long sunk with the sun. It was usually well below freezing, and sometimes I had to slather polymers on my exposed face to protect it. My stipend was not generous, so I did not have an array of expensive technical running gear, either. In fact, I had one long-sleeved shirt that was made for running and was not cotton. Of course, cotton is the worst base layer, but unless I wanted to wash that one technical shirt every single night (naturally, I did not), long-sleeve t-shirts were all I had. Until Santa brought me a lined, nylon Adidas jacket in 2002,*** I also did not have any good, lightweight outerwear; I had sweatshirts and a fleece that I loved. (One particularly cold night, I wore the running shirt and the fleece together, and when I was done, I had frost spread across my shoulders. I was amazed at this evidence of how well the running shirt and the fleece worked to wick moisture away to the outside.) I had two pairs of tights and two pairs of nylon pants, one of each I'd had since high school.
One of the attractive aspects of running is that you don't actually need expensive clothes to run, just whatever is adequate to protect from the elements, but now that I am no longer a poor graduate student or post-doc, I can allot a larger portion of my discretionary spending to lighter-weight, better-performing technical running gear. And looking back, I sometimes can't believe how much running I did weighed down by sweats and cotton long-sleeves getting damp and clammy against my torso. It was all I knew then, and I went out, night after bitterly cold night, and got some miles in. If it was "nice" (in the 30s or warmer), I might stay out for 45 minutes or an hour. However, if it dropped below 20, it got to the point where no matter how long I ran, my muscles struggled against the cold to get and stay warm; I usually would not stay out longer than half an hour under those conditions. I would only hang up the shoes and say "no thanks" if the temperature was in the single digits.
I used to be tough.
My years of running in Delaware winters have completely recalibrated my toughness. While snow is certainly not unknown -- see winter of 2009-2010, three giant storms with gross snowfall totals; last year seemed overly snowy in my opinion as well -- there have been several where snow was a stranger. In the winter of 2011-2012, I don't think there was a single measurable snowfall and I ran in shorts most of the season while training for Boston. I'm not completely soft; I will run in shorts until the temperature goes below 40. For the first few years, I ran outside all winter, taking the day off if it snowed or was unusually chilly and I didn't feel like braving it. Then, my workplace opened a small gym with treadmills.
I had never liked the treadmill. I very seldom had used one, because I was so averse to the very idea, and the only time I did use one for a significant stretch was when I was rehabbing a stress fracture in my foot and my PT didn't want me out on the pavement until well after it no longer gave me discomfort. I could not believe how slowly time passed while running on that thing at the Y. I forced myself not to look at the display screen; it would only discourage me to see that what had felt like twenty minutes was, in fact, five. I hated that I had to go to the Y late to make sure that I wouldn't have to wait for a machine. I hated every single thing about it, so when my foot healed, I intended never to go back to one. But then winter came, as it always done, and I needed to train through it for a spring marathon. I had no issues with rearranging the running schedule to get miles in if inclement weather interfered with my schedule, but there were weekly speed sessions that were hard to get done if I couldn't use the track or flat park, whether due to lack of daylight or snow or ice cover. Reluctantly, I took advantage of the treadmill at work.
It wasn't as bad as I had thought it would be. Seldom did anyone else use the gym after work, and I had the workout room to myself most of the time. There was a TV in the room, but it was offset on the wall so I couldn't really watch it; I'd have it on just to prove to myself that time was indeed passing in the real world. I did quality workouts on that machine and some very long miles; threshold workouts and long runs with race-pace in the middle up to 19 miles. The treadmill miles kept me in good shape for my races, and my attitude about running on a machine shifted. My first choice would always be outside, if I had that choice, but even in a relatively mild winter, bad weather would crop up at a bad time. I did not dread those days anymore from a mental standpoint.
The only problem with the treadmill at the gym at work was that it was at work, and work is not a walkable distance from home. There would be days when it would not be prudent to stay at work and run, due to a storm arriving; there were days when weather would prevent me from going to work entirely. Once, I did a 15-mile race-pace workout there and when I emerged, it had snowed several inches, making driving home on as-yet unplowed roads a challenge. After a couple years of this, I finally sat down with myself and faced it: I had not liked how the weather could force me to use a treadmill, but I eventually acclimated to running on a machine; now I did not like how weather could force me to not be able to use that machine. Last year, I decided I'd make the plunge and splurge on my own. In February, I bought a Landice 7 Cardio. Since then, I've had a weird relationship with it. It was a snowier-than-usual winter and it served its purpose wonderfully; I no longer had to worry about getting to/from work to get a workout in if the weather was poor. Bad weather seemed always to hit just when I wanted or needed badly to get outside for a long run -- I needed long, hilly road work to prepare for Boston but it was hard to get out on many Sundays because of ice, or snow, or rain. I did a lot of long running on the Landice and it did its job, I liked the results, but I hated to have to use it. I found it dryly amusing that I had spent so much money on something I hoped I wouldn't have to use.
It was cold on Wednesday this week. The temperature never reached 40, and when I went out to run after work, it plummeted as twilight moved in. My toes went cold and then numb-ish before even half a mile. It's odd how overly-cold toes can both have no feeling yet also feel twice too large inside the shoes. After another 15-20 minutes, the feeling started to come back, which led them to feeling painfully hot for a few minutes before settling into being fine. By the time my toes had recovered, the rest of me was starting to feel too cold. I had not quite dressed right; after a mile or so, I'd wished I'd had tights on under my pants, another light layer over my long sleeves, and my real running gloves rather than the little stretchy ones. It's been since last March that it's been this cold -- cut me some slack for not getting it right on the first day out. I had wanted to do 6 miles, but I wasn't feeling it and stopped after 5.3, which is three laps around the park with lights on its path.
Thursday was slightly warmer, but I wasn't even going to give it a chance. I hit the treadmill at home and ran 10K. I am too soft now to want to run in sub-40F darkness. If it were daylight, I would have been more willing, but the combination of cold (that is, below 40) and dark is too off-putting anymore. I have been on the treadmill three out of four running days this week. Those nights of running outside unless it was single digits are long, long gone.
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*There are some days in the dead of winter in Iowa where there will be a lovely, beautiful anomaly and the high gets to 50-60-maybe even close to 70. While you should enjoy the diversion, do not trust it. Tomorrow -- maybe even this afternoon -- the cold will regain its bitter grip. Don't leave your winter coat at home.
**When I lived near Philadelphia as a post-doc, I did not trust to run outside in the darkness, so I ran on the indoor track on the Temple University campus. It was a great facility: 5 laps to the mile and wrapped around the upper reaches of the Liacouras Center, with windows providing views of the city. I tried to squeeze as many miles in as I could without having to take the later trains home, and I credit the work I did on this track as a large part of the reason I spent 2004 running PRs. I got in a solid base where running 7-7:30 miles was comfortable. When I think about running on that track, I can still smell the mix of working-out people and the track's flat, rubbery surface. I would have preferred to run outside, but this was an acceptable alternative. If there had not been this indoor track available, I don't know if I would have deigned to use a treadmill or would have steeled myself to run on roads I was not completely comfortable running. After about two years in Pennsylvania, I moved back to Iowa for a couple years, and it was back to running outside, even in the darkness.
***One of my all-time favorite jackets; it's a hot orangey-red color with dark gray stripes. I still wear it, but not usually while running.
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