Winter Is Here
So it snowed the other night. And the next. And last night too. Temperatures have been in the teens for lows and twenties for highs. And it’s windy too, just to add to the fun.
In October. Halloween is next week. And the World Series just started.
Yeah, this sort of thing didn’t happen in California. At all. Not even in the dark days deep into January.
I knew Montana would be a change for me in many ways. And I even anticipated winter. I’m not a stranger to cold weather; I spent many formative years in Colorado, and I went to college in Wisconsin, which certainly doesn’t play around when it comes to winter. But it’s been many years since college, and even then we sort of eased into it with a nice, long, sloping Midwestern autumn.
It seems Montana does things differently. And it’s unbalanced me for the moment.
Oh, I think I’ll recover. Once I got through the shock of the first day of icy sidewalks and cutting winds I was able to right the ship and go about my normal business in a mostly normal way.
Well, except for my runs.
I’d say my trail-running group is snakebit, but snakes are kinda scarce this time of year up here. Still, we canceled the run this morning for safety’s sake. It seems that dark, cold, and ice are a combination that gives pause to even hearty Montana trail runners. No sense taking unnecessary risks. Then again, a local runner won the Big Sky Conference Women’s Cross Country Championship (for a non-local school) in the same weather, albeit in daylight, so there is a limit to the allowances we’ll make for the weather. (As an aside, Montana drivers also impressed me this week — slow speeds and a lot of room between cars on the slick roads, with much patience in evidence. Which also doesn’t happen in California.)
So it looks like I’m going to get an introduction to legit winter running.
I’ve done cold — when I first qualified for the Boston Marathon we started with temps in the high twenties and it wasn’t much warmer at the finish. But I have virtually no experience running in snow and ice. Google will help some, but I suspect that trial-and-error will be my homeroom teacher since that seems to be my factory setting. There might be falls. There will certainly be cursing. And I’m 100% positive there will be equipment purchases I won’t ever need on my visits back to California. (Who knew they made this stuff for running shoes?)
At times when my trepidation peaks — almost always in unfamiliar circumstances — I try to remember that I’m extraordinarily fortunate and that things could always be worse. My good fortune was brought home earlier this week at the library. There are a couple guys who, like me, are daily users, and I notice them because they sit near my normal spot. They are regular guys, a little younger than me but not much, and they’re usually on laptops with earphones plugged in, again like me. But when I arrived Wednesday morning they were talking to each other. About the coming storms.
Turns out one of the guys sleeps in his car, and he was telling the other one about his preparations for the storm. Forty-below-rated sleeping bag. Insulated pants. Snow boots. Balaclava. He was considering the difference between mittens and gloves.
Damn.
I know the Salish, Kootenai, Blackfeet, Crow, and many others thrived here for thousands of years without the benefit of central heating and double-paned windows. I also know I’m not that tough. At least not yet.
But challenge is good for all of us, and the winter that promises a plethora of new experiences for me is getting off to an early start.
