Well we survived the first N’oreastah of this winter. Yes, we lost power for a bit and learned just how good an investment it was to get a whole house generator last summer. What a difference it made in our stress levels during the storm. Luckily we only lost a couple of trees outback and a bunch of branches. Compared to many who are still without power, we were lucky and got it back in the early morning hours. At one point we had over eight inches of nasty, wet snow and then the final round of rain, knocked the total back to five to six inches with a slush/water layer at the bottom, with a hard crust on top.

The cleanup the next day was a bit of an undertaking because even though most of us equate a N’oreastah with snow, this one was a mixture of rain/sleet/snow/sleet/rain/snow, so there was thick crust on top of a layer of heavy wet snow, with a wet, sloppy slurry at the bottom. After three and half hours of snow blowing and roof raking, the old body was plum tuckered out and I figured that was enough of a workout and didn’t run on Sunday.

Today’s run was pretty good the temps were in the 20s, just a bit of a breeze and the roads mostly clear, so I wasn’t risking life and limb to run around the neighborhood. I was still pretty stiff and sore from pushing/pulling and attempting to get the beast of a snow blower to do it job yesterday, so I planned on an easy 5.0 miler down to Pepin.

The ankles were rather grumpy from the slipping and sliding around in my boots and told me all about it for the first half mile. After that, they sort of loosened up and were willing to get this run over with, but were never what you would call happy. When I looked at the first couple of mile splits, I was fairly surprised since I wasn’t attempting to go hard, but still was a bit under 9:00 pace.

That didn’t last long going back against the gentle breeze and up Philbrick Hill, let’s just say I trudged more than ran, but I never officially stopped running up it. The last mile was pretty good and overall I was happy with the way the body responded to running after yesterday’s N’oreastah cleanup workout.

Although I gotta admit that getting the metal roof on the garage, saved me a LOT of hard work roof raking a 24 x 48 garage, even though they didn’t quite finish up last week. If I had had to roof rake that old roof, it might have done me in on Sunday. Getting the metal roof for the garage is another of those concessions to aging. As we continue to get older, we are continually looking at things to save time and/or physical effort to do things around the house, so that it is easier for us to maintain our home. That sort of age-proofing it as much as possible now versus later.

I have to look to the future realistically and not get the false idea that I will always be able to do the same things that I can do today in 10-20 years – the odds say that I will not be able to and I try to be as honest about that stuff as possible.

In other words after all that faderall, it was a good run today. 🙂