Weather-Training Bloggo Update

I'm not getting or taking much time at updating this unread, hopelessly unreadable, excuse for a blog. My wife thinks it's a waste of time, and said so just yesterday, which is a good indication that it's time to say something here.

Now into my fourth year in Alaska, the weather never ceases to be an overriding factor in just about everything. Due to jetstreams and stationairy high pressure systems that build up in the Arctic or Gulf of Alaska, our weather is streaky. You can get locked into systems that last for weeks or months. So February and March were the coldest average on record. We didn't get the 50-60 below, but we had weeks of 30-45 below, followed by weeks of 20 below. Glad that's over with. Then, what do you know, it got warm over the first week of April and we ended up with one of the warmest and most boring weather Aprils in history. It was pretty much 30s every night and 50s in the day with no precipitation. Snow melt and mud season ended within two weeks. Didn't even go out for a cermonial last ski. One day it was decent the next, terrible; so I called it a year on the 9th of April.

Now I'm running full time and kind of hating it. Every spring I go through this rather strange month of aerobic self-loathing. Skiing makes your muscles feel heavy and your joints just don't want to endure hours of pounding each week. The transition takes three to four weeks to kind of feel decent, and six to actually feel like a runner. And that's if everything goes well.

I was scheduled to do the Chena River Run 5k last Saturday but twisted my ankle and hyperextended the tibialis a few days before, so I opted out of racing and ran it with my son. We ran 30:30, which is almost exactly my personel best X2. Although I had never run in the back of the pack in a road race (had a few of those in college, however), I enjoyed running with him. Hopefully, he'll have a good memory of running his first ever road 5k with dear old dad.