Snowing, slushy, cold, and windy, it’s another New England day, not fit for man or beast.

But Rich Horgan has a run to get in.

“I’ve seen the good and the bad,” says Horgan, who is training for his 22nd Boston Marathon. “And this year has been extra difficult.”

Like other Boston runners, Horgan is contending with more snow than the city has experienced in any seven-day period in its recorded history—40.2 inches for the week ending February 2, smashing the old record of 31.2—with still more predicted, and then more after that.

They’re also balancing snarled commutes, snow days home with the kids, endless shoveling, and canceled training clinics, all in the middle of spring marathon training season.

The New England region has been slammed with snowstorms in 2015. Here, snow piles up in Boston. Jon Marcus

“It’s pretty much making everyone familiar with the treadmill,” says Terrence Mahon, coach of the high-performance program at the Boston Athletic Association, which was forced by snow to cancel the first of its marathon training clinics.

Mahon says he takes his runners to places where the roads are clear and mostly car-free, such as college campuses, “and we just do a lot of repeats of that.”

Boston’s narrow, cobblestoned, and crowded public streets are tough for runners in the best of seasons. Now choked with snow, those streets have no room for cars to pass pedestrians. And Boston sidewalks, which property owners are required by law to clear, range from occasionally pristine to often impassable.

Snow-removal crews are battling to keep the paths open along both sides of the Charles River, which tracking apps show is the city’s most popular place to run.

That challenge is compounded by high winds that blow the snow right back, says Bill Hickey, spokesman for the state agency that maintains the trails, the Department of Conservation and Recreation.

“When you get three feet of snow and then a two-day reprieve and another foot on top of it, you plow them and then you have to go and plow them again,” Hickey says. “We always want to make sure that we can get those running paths cleared as best we can, as quickly as we can. But you can’t deal with the city’s most historic snowstorm without having it take a little bit of time.”

The squeeze is pushing legions of runners onto the longest available stretch of plowed running route: the historic carriage road alongside Commonwealth Avenue on the Boston Marathon route, so called because it was left for horses and carriages during the transition to cars after the turn of the last century.

Wide, one-way, paved, and plowed, the carriage road, in Newton, “is really the only place left that you can run,” says Kate Maul of Wellesley, who was putting in some miles there as snow fell yet again. On weekends, she says, there are so many runners on the road, “It looks like there’s a race” with hordes of people in their neon green and orange popping from the snowy backdrop.

Runner Knox Flynt has a courtside seat to all this; she lives on the carriage road.

“It’s crazy, the number of marathoners that are out here,” Flynt says. “Last Saturday the wind chill was negative 10, and this place was a zoo. Runners around here have a lot of guts.”

These exiles to the carriage road wave and smile at each other in camaraderie, something that doesn’t always happen in warm weather in this town.

“You’ve got to smile. If you don’t smile, you’d get lost out here in the snow,” says one, Jim McGaugh, as he crests a snowbank at an intersection.

“We’re all dealing with the same thing,” says McGaugh, who came from suburban Needham to use this last clear stretch of road. The snowy winter “is the great democratizer of running. Fast guys, slow guys, old guys, young guys—we’re all the same in this weather.”

Some runners’ patience is wearing thin.

“I’m totally sick of it,” says Flynt, out in the snow for a seven-miler. “I don’t know of any other place beside the carriage lane that I can go to run. It gets boring.”

But Maul’s running partner, Gretchen Wilson, who also lives in Needham, takes a more philosophical view.

“It is what it is,” says Wilson, who, like Maul, is training for the Boston Marathon. “You never know what it’s going to be like on marathon day, and you never know what it’s going to be like to train. So you take it in stride.”

There are other apparent upsides. Audrey James, a sophomore at Boston College, says her roommates are also training for Boston. “They go, ‘I was supposed to do 14 miles today, but I did 12 in the snow, so that’s the exertion of 16, right?’” she says.

And Nelson Dupere runs back and forth to work, passing the long traffic jam of frustrated commuters backed up along the other side of the median strip on Commonwealth Avenue.

“I don’t really worry about traffic,” says Dupere. “I just worry about who’s shoveled and who hasn’t.”

The first half of Dupere’s run to his job is on the carriage road in Newton; the second, in Boston, whose mayor, Marty Walsh, has said deserves get an A for the way it has handled the snow.

“For the sidewalks, it’s a C,” Dupere says.

Related:

Five Keys to Winter Training and Racing

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