New Year's Eve

It was snowing pretty hard when I started running. I'd just gone over my idea for my birthday FatAss course with a friend of Jerry's who is going to try to keep it packed down with his snowmobile. I'm trying to keep it around 5 miles, but it is very condition dependent. Since I was in my running clothes at the top of the driveway while I talked with him, I was pretty cold when I actually began.

The chill and tight quads (from yesterday's snow workout) made the going slow to start. Ten minutes in was all I needed to work up a sweat. After about twenty minutes running on virgin snow, I crossed path's with Jerry's friend. He had a few questions about where I really meant. We made plans for me to ride with him when all the snow from this system is on the ground and point out exactly where I had in mind. I followed a lot of where he'd snowmobiled and just have a couple of additions. The newly made trail was almost harder than just running amok through the field since it wasn't packed yet.


I was out for 1:04:01. Map My Run leads me to believe it was about 6 miles. This brings my year-end total to 1766.1 miles. Pretty good, but I was on pace for my third year in a row of setting a record. Last year I ran 1815.6. It would have been cool to break that, but, I'm happy. Last year I may have set a mileage record, but I had a DNF at Pineland. Remedied that!

Now, on a cool, non-running note, we had fresh carrots from our garden yesterday! Rick grows a fairly large garden every year. He experiments with it all the time. Unfortunately, this was to be the year of the pepper - unfortunate given the weather we had this summer. He put in over a dozen plants of various types. We didn't even get that many peppers. But! What a great crop of carrots. In the fall we still had lots to harvest. I could have frozen them, but I'm the only one that really likes cooked carrots and it seemed like a waste of such tasty treats to just relegate them to soups. We'd tried storing them in the basement before, but ....sad, droopy carrots were the result. This year, Rick put a heavy blanket of hay over them. The hay, along with the relatively early snow, kept the ground perfectly frost-free.


They are sweeter now than when we were eating them in the summer and fall. By the way, Rick didn't grow the banana - it's just for scale.