Winter is a boundary. It is both the end of one year and the beginning of the next. The natural life cycle anchors to it. In the cold parts of the world, it is a time when we reacquaint ourselves with the physicality of water. It is a time when the landscape fills in, smoothes out and builds up to meet the clouds. It blurs the line between earth and sky.





RT

Embrace the season as another training challenge

The season technically exists for one quarter of a calendar year, though the reality can be much longer. The winter solstice, December 21, marks its beginning in the Northern Hemisphere; the vernal equinox is its end. This solstice is both the shortest day of the year here and the longest night. The deep heart of winter is still a month or two away: The earth still holds some residual warmth from the summer.Winter forces runners to cope with changes to terrain. Some runners hang up their shoes for the season or pound out miles on the treadmill, but the rest of us bundle up and keep running. Assenior editor Scott Douglas says, “We soldier on.”It isn’t a physical hardiness that separates the winter runners from non-runners, but more of a mindset. Winter is not an affliction; it can be a welcome challenge. Those of us who run outside during all four seasons have adopted strategies for coping with hardships. They can be purely practical ways to keep motivated, but they can also be romantic: finding beauty within the pain. What follows are three examples of runners embracing winter and turning its power to their advantage.Running through winter requires the right attitude. Take, for instance, a runner living in rural Western Alaska. John Aerni-Flessner, occasional RT contributor and post-collegiate runner, spent two years in Kwethluk , a town of 700 people, located at the confluence of the Kuskokwim and Kwethluk rivers. These waters define the area, where water travel is more common than land travel. Aerni-Flessner writes:In the small villages of western Alaska that are not connected to each other or anywhere else by roads, winter brings freedom from the small number of gravel “streets” that town has to offer. Once the river, tundra and lakes freeze, the number of running routes increases infinitely. However, winter also brings long hours of darkness and a biting northwest wind coming off the Bering Sea via Siberia that can blast the frozen lakes clear of snow cover, making running across them almost impossible. The stillness of a windless day, however, cannot be matched. Run outside of town, past the dump and through small groves of trees that brave winter’s chill to climb the local hill that overlooks town as well as the 40 miles of lakes and swamp-tundra between here and the distant mountains. Crest the hill and pause. Absolute silence. Not a branch moving on the trees. Not a sign of human habitation as far as the eye can see. Time stands still (if you are willing to stop your stopwatch). Has it been one minute or 10? No way to tell. Time it right and in January or February you can leave home in time to catch the first rays of sunlight poking over distant mountains at 10:30 a.m. Turn back and take the trail across the lakes and frozen tundra, thankful that the hunters have been out again on their snowmobiles, packing the trail down nicely and covering up the slippery ice. Back home, peel off the layers, defrost the nose and settle in for a nice mid-morning cup of tea.Aerni-Flessner approaches running from the collegiate athlete’s perspective. He still focuses on quality miles at a decent clip and so favors roads or road-like training — running that feels like running. Geoff Roes (pictured above), accomplished trail runner, has developed quite a different approach, but possesses a similar mindset. Roes built a reputation in trail and ultra racing by being a tough and savvy racer. He favors strength and endurance training over turnover work. He genuinely enjoys slogging miles through deep snow and prefers running up hills that climb thousands of feet per mile to running up more shallow grades. When I asked him how he came to feel this way, he responded:I think my preference for and, in some cases, tolerance for running up steep things or in deep snow is kind of a result of my racing. I didn’t always like running much more challenging types of training runs. I used to focus on high performance: Where can I go to do runs where I can really run 6:00 miles for X amount of time. Whereas now, it’s almost like I try to focus on where can I go to run where it’s gonna be so steep that it’s just a power-hike all the way up or go run through snow or nasty weather.It’s not something that I’ve consciously gravitated towards, but it’s been something that, as I’ve raced more and more ultras, I’ve come to see the significance of training in that kind of stuff. I actually really enjoy it.You essentially train yourself for these points that don’t feel good. It’s more the mindset of minimizing the negative aspects of going up something so steep or minimizing the negative aspects of running in a blizzard.Roes isn’t so much searching for the runner’s high as he is training to cope with the lows. He believes that training in demanding conditions works in his favor when races aren’t going well. “Optimizing your pace when you’re feeling really good can save you maybe five or 10 seconds per mile. But being able to run when you’re feeling really bad can save you minutes per mile.”Running in the winter and enjoying it is a lot about getting out the door and being open to the possibilities the weather can present. It can be a time when the rest of the world has calmed down or at least is locked inside watching The Weather Channel. Conditions can be perfectly quiet — blanketed in snow — or more treacherous due to a howling gale, but both situations provide the opportunity to pay attention to the small things. Gancho Slavov , an ultrarunner originally from Bulgaria, identifies a few of his favorite things about running in his homeland during winter:•The more frightening, yet somehow more powerfully luring look of mountains after a heavy snowfall•The crisp, crushing sound of thick frost or dry snow under my running shoes (probably makes me fantasize about being a bigger and stronger, Yeti-like creature)•The miracle of feeling perfectly comfortable in severely cold weather, just from the heat generated by my own body•The first smell of smoke when I approach a village or town coming down a mountain•The taste of an orange peeled with semi-thawed fingersRather than let the cold numb the senses, try letting the season sharpen your perceptions. Running in the dark, in the cold, in the snow, can all be opportunities to experience another facet of the world we think we know so well.

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