Categories
Iowa

A cold week

[Monday: 4 miles on treadmill; Wednesday: 3 miles on treadmill; Friday: 6 miles on S. Grandview]

We’ve had hard winter for a little over a week, and it is not done yet. Tomorrow the high is supposed to be something like -5 I think. Most of this past week it has been single digits, flirting with negative numbers, and frequent dustings of dry and fluffy snow.

My running plans hit a snag. I got looking at my available vacation allotment and then I talked to HR to find out why I didn’t get a refill at the 1.5 year point. It turns out that I had 1 week at signup, another week credited at 6 months and a week credited at 1 year. That week needed to last me until late July. I’m down to 11 hours and I decided maybe I should be saving some of this for sick days or something. So, I don’t think we are going to go to Mississippi and run a 20k in early March. I could still change my mind. But it just doesn’t sound very smart to do that.
So today I was scheduled for a cold 10 miler and I didn’t do anything. Yesterday’s 6 miles was hard with 3 inches of new snow on top of whatever ice happens to be there. I wore all the clothes. I took three neck gaiters (we call them buffs) and swapped them out as they got full of moisture or froze up. I still ended up gasping for air some portion of the time.


And to be completely honest, I’ve been eating like a pig and I don’t feel like doing anything athletic. Even on the treadmill my miles have been 14-15 minutes, so a 20k was going to be a 3 hour-plus event which is just depressing.


We put in a cat door. The cat has been living in our bedroom because of the visiting dogs. Chester is OK with the cat on his own. But the guest dogs aren’t so sure, and Chester is not what you would call a leader who could head off the other two. That’s all OK. But it means the cat pretty much stays in our room.

We have windows which look out at the street. And we also have windows which overlook a) the front porch roof and b) the roof over a western single-story room. So we put a cat door in that western window. Unfortunately it has been bitter cold since we did that, with lots of snow on that roof. So the cat has gone out a few times but doesn’t go anywhere. He just sits and looks around for a bit then comes back in.


We are starting to get a little bit stir-crazy in the cold temperatures. Today I walked to the pharmacy. And we have had other short excursions along with exercise and snow shoveling. But also we seem to be a bit on each other’s nerves. Maybe things will warm up this coming week and we can turn the corner on city-lot-snowbound.