I am being forced to run and train at night this week because of my work schedule and it just so happens that March has decided to pretend it’s winter and dumped about four inches of snow on us yesterday as well. I ran out the Balaine mushing trail for a 7 mile out and back, still recovering from a very difficult, knee aching 12 mile run on the Fireplug Trail Sunday.

The run was very challenging, not from the darkness thanks to a great headlamp and not even with the stream crossings being wet. The fresh snow was laying over a hard trail of glazed snow and overflow ice, every step was a gamble of whether or not I’ll find myself sprawled out on the trail. With the falling snow, light wind and fading light the run was actually really peaceful until a step on hidden ice beneath the fresh snow brings me back to reality.

It gets really frustrating when you’re out running really good training miles with strong paces and then here you are running a flat trail and hitting paces of 10 minute at each split. It really me me want to run harder but I had to remind myself the trail conditions are doing this to me and it’s not due to my training.

I ended up running the 7 miles drama free minus one jarring ankle twist on a frozen rut buried under the snow while running across a lake, but no worse for wear. I’m running the same trail tonight for 8 miles, we’ll see how well that goes this time!