Remembering '93

The temperature dropped down to zero this morning - more accurately, 0.9 Fahrenheit - and I am sure it is well below that in Highlands, which is usually about 8 degrees colder during the winter.  The elevation here is about 2650, and on Main Street in Highlands it is 3850 (contrary to the new "Wayfinding Signs" which perpetuate the fictional 4118).

When it drops to zero and below, the natural world changes in unexpected ways.  In the woods, branches become brittle, and bizarre white flowers of ice expand and push out of the ground, snapping and crunching as you walk along.  The tree house near the back door that I built for Katy twenty years ago and which is connected to two trees pops and snaps in the lightest breeze.  Even walking on the deck is a new experience as it makes little creaking sounds, like I would imagine the masts make on an old sailing ship.

These frigid temperatures have not been seen here in many years, and it reminds me of the Blizzard of '93, which struck Highlands on March 12-13 that year.  That storm was unexpected (I wonder if modern meteorology would predict it today), and Martha was visiting her grandmother in Raleigh at the time with our only four-wheel-drive vehicle, so six-year-old Katy and I were stranded with our Honda Prelude, without power for two or three days.  What a wonderful time that was!  The wild wind blew the trees dizzyingly around our house, and some of them came down.  We had plenty of firewood and we kept the woodstove (fireplace insert) going 24/7, stacking snow-covered wood all around the stone hearth so that it could dry enough to burn, and pulling the sofa up close at night to sleep, waking every hour or two to feed the fire.  We ate almost the entire box of chocolate powerbars in the pantry, as I remember it, and heated up soup on the little propane stove.  For years afterward, Katy and I would celebrate March 13 with a Blizzard Party, re-enacting those resourceful days by cutting off the main breaker on the electrical panel and eating power bars in front of the fireplace.  We would turn on that little Mickey Mouse radio, purchased on some trip to Disney World - our only source of news of the outside world, a radio station in South Carolina:  about 1100 AM on Mickey's left ear.

The weather instruments on the wall to our bedroom still carry that penciled date next to the barometer, just below 28.5 - an arbitrary number, since I simply have the barometer's needle set midway on the dial at the "Change" position because of the low barometric pressure in these mountain, but a point below which that needle has never gone since, during any kind of weather.

And I don't think it's been that cold, either, since 1993.

The Polar Vortex

That's what they are calling it - the Polar Vortex, an arctic storm extending its cold embrace all the way into the South, with temperatures expected to reach zero or just below by morning.  I drove up to Town to run some errands, and while there was a lot of good-natured joking at the Post Office about why I was not out running in my shorts, the thought had not occurred to me.  Temperatures were in the teens by then and continued to drop during the afternoon.  The tops of all the northern ridges were white with rime - hoar frost - and the wind was picking up.  We did not have the 12 to 14-inch snow with three-foot drifts that my sister, who lives in Indiana, has been telling me about, but it was too cold for this runner to venture out.

It was a good day to stay indoors instead and learn to bake bread from this book I gave Martha for Christmas:

About 4:00, I sent out an e-mail, asking where all the runners were, and including a photo of pansies.

I was horrified to learn that Bob had run - about a mile in all - in 6-degree temperatures.  I shot him an e-mail containing photographs of a frostbitten face, but told him he had my grudging admiration.

And then I cut into my first loaf of bread.

Sunday Afternoon: Climbing into Sunlight

Sunday is usually a rest day for the runners in our Club, but I sent this e-mail out to Bob and several others this morning:

Let's meet at Town Hall at 3:00 today. I'll see if anybody else wants to go. With single-digit or sub-zero temps on the way this may be our last opportunity to have a nice long run for 2 or 3 days.

This may indeed be the last good day, with temperatures up in the 40s right now.  And I do not plan on running when the temperature plunges below zero.  The two Bobs responded and we had a great run.  On the way up to Town, I found myself climbing and climbing into brighter and brighter fog, which suddenly broke open into blue sky with a blanket of fog down in the valleys below - a phenomenon which I have seen before and sometimes stopped to photograph at the overlook on the  Walhalla Road.  But it never seems to do it justice:

Too Cold to Run?

The arrival of the first of two cold fronts made running seem a little daunting this morning.  It was 18 degrees in Clear Creek, but I didn't need to look at the thermometer because the tightly-curled leaves of our rhododendron told the temperature.  Rhododendron are nature's thermometer; they respond to the cold by first drooping down, and then curling up as tightly as pencils:

Don't we do the same thing in the cold, wrapping our arms tightly around our chests and pulling our shoulders in toward our ears?

So what about running in conditions like this?  It's actually very pleasant, up to a point, although I know that non-runners seeing us out in cold like this will be convinced that we are all lunatics.  Running gear has improved so much over the years that it now permits lunatics like me to run in comfort unimaginable in the days of cotton, or when runners would wear panty-hose in the cold.  Now we have good, breathable, flexible tights, like the CW-X tights that I prize when the temperature gets down below 30.  A breathable micro-fiber shirt, Gore-tex against the wind, and good head-gear and mittens were all I needed for a short run down the road, where the sun was just starting to kiss the tops of the trees along the ridge-line, pink and gold, and melting the light snow in the pastures.  That keen metallic fragrance of arctic air.  And absolute silence, just the quiet rhythm of my footsteps, my breathing, and the dark, crinkly ripple of Clear Creek flowing alongside.

 

First Winter Storm

We had our first winter storm early this morning.   All night, we lay in bed hearing the wild wind blowing the trees all around our house.  There are a lot of trees around our house so this is a concern.  During the night, we noticed that the power was out - the face of the alarm clock pitch black - and no power this morning.  But we are used to being prepared in Highlands, and I had recently bought some fresh gasoline for the generator and cranked it up a couple of weeks ago to make sure it was working and there was enough oil.  I got it going in no time, and soon both refrigerators and the furnace were working.  We had caught some water, too, so we had water for coffee.  And the little propane burner heated up the kettle for oatmeal.  I even replaced the batteries in the carbon monoxide detectors, although the generator is outside and the house is pretty tight against the fumes.  And I filled the five-gallon buckets with water from the little waterfall out back and was able to flush the toilets, too - Martha could see how much I was enjoying myself.  And  by noon the power had come back on, the community well began pumping again, and all was back to normal.

Feeling pretty resourceful!  But no running today - it was a planned day off anyway.  A day of rest is a day of becoming stronger.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

I am privileged to be a member of a Running Club which contains so many remarkable members.  The men and women I run with are so varied in their backgrounds, dispositions, and abilities that, should a runner want some good company out on the road, there is always somebody to oblige.  Morris can remember more jokes than I thought anyone could possibly have heard, and as the miles build up, oxygenated blood seems to plumb the depths of his memory more and more thoroughly.  Anthony has run 37 marathons at last count, including an impressive string of successive Boston Marathons; he loves to talk so much while he runs that Morris jokes his jaw muscle is connected to his legs.  (When he was asked several years ago, "Are we going to run, or talk about it?" he replied, "Why do I have to choose?")  Fred has 47 marathons in his past, including two only five days apart, but rarely talks while running and never talks while racing (as I learned at Tybee Island many years ago.)

And then there is Glenda, who read the latest Newsletter wherein I watched the weather front approaching my last marathon in agonizing detail (see blog post of December 16) and commented drolly that she thought I was The Man Who Knew Too Much.  That's just like Glenda, who actually reads my newsletters and unfailingly thanks me for putting them together - 135 of them now, since the Club began in 1995.  Glenda decided out of the blue in 2004 that she wanted to run a marathon.  There were some doubtful comments from some quarters since Glenda had raced no farther than 5-K at the time.  But some of us saw the determination in this woman, who had just turned 60, and gave her a few pointers.  We both ran the Richmond Marathon in November, she and I, and she ran an incredible 4:34:40, only (she later discovered) a little slower than her Boston Qualifying time of 4:30.  So the next year she ran the Victoria Marathon in British Columbia, qualified handily, and ran Boston the following year.  I don't think I have ever witnessed so swift an ascent to Boston.   

I am indeed The Man Who Knows Too Much sometimes.  (I even know Glenda's time in Richmond!)  And I know the predicted weather from four or five weather apps on my iPhone, my exact mileage and pace at any given time during a run, my planned distance, my cadence, my approximate heartbeat, the location of the afternoon running group when I have arrived late and must catch up to them, and where that patch of ice will be on Lower Lake Road.  Some of these things are good to know (e.g. patch of ice) but others can distract us from the things we should be discovering along the way, like the aroma of pine needles over by the Biological Station, the light skim of ice on Harris Lake, that indomitable oak tree on Fifth Street that is still clutching all its brown leaves in January.

Thanks for inadvertently making me think again about how and why I run, Glenda.

This year I resolve to know less.  So that I can discover more.

A New Year

What a great way to begin 2014 this morning!  These resolute runners showed up to run/walk anywhere from three to seven miles, beginning the year by dedicating a little time toward staying fit.  I know everyone in this photo, some of them better than others, and they include some truly remarkable runners and people.  For some of us, our best races are in the past, and for others they still lie ahead, out on the open road.  But for everybody who simply showed up this morning:  congratulations!  You are giving yourself a wonderful gift:  getting out the door, enjoying the out-of-doors, moving outside of your comfort zone, taking a risk.  And for those of us who are inexorably growing older and slower, remember that "Growing Old is Not for Sissies."

So run strong in 2014!