Trail Running in the Snow

This week on Wednesday I did 2 miles, on Thursday I did 4 miles, and the plan was to do at least 6 today, Friday, 11 October. Tonight is our G+ Hangouts-on-Air for #ELBRUSRACECHAT, that we posted pretty heavily on our FACEBOOK PAGE. We have a slew of good questions to answer, and hope to have the YouTube recording and transcripts up pretty quickly after it's done.

Yesterday for Summit County Colorado there was a "Winter Storm Warning" with as much as 20" of snow predicted. At least at the lower elevations, below 11,000' there wasn't all that much snow. Maybe 4". I decided to go out for my run this morning after Angie left for her skating lesson with Todd. I felt like Mr. Pearl Izumi, with a PI windpro hoodie, windpro tights, and Trail N2 shoes.

The lower section of Keystone Gulch Road was pretty bare, with snow only in the shadows. Some of this was quite sloppy muddy wet, and I did some sliding around. About 2 miles up it was covered entirely with snow. There were puddles of muddy slush hidden under the snow surface. The maintenance trucks for Keystone Resort left icy tracks of packed snow. Overall it was a ton of fun. At 3 miles I decided I was good for one more uphill mile, so I went up to 4 miles.

Here's a little Instagram Video I made in Vine showing the surface I was running in, and the surrounding snow-covered trees.

One of my goals today was to work hard on keeping a consistent smooth even pace, up and down. These Strava Stats show that especially on the way uphill I was pretty smooth at 15:00 pacing.

On the way down the snow felt great underfoot and I just cut loose, relatively. I did a couple of pretty fast mile splits, then for the 7th mile I took a little walking break to hydrate and catch my breath. Then I picked the pace back up for the final mile.

Running in the snow is great training for Elbrus Race. It's what you'll be running on in Russia. Eight miles is a good training distance, since the Classic Race is a little over 9 miles round trip. Four miles up and down with about 1000' of elevation gain and loss is good. Training at 9,300' and up is great.

I'm pretty stoked about how fast I did this in slippery wet and cold conditions. Of course, now I have to dry out my shoes ...