All this means is that I’m no expert on Michigan or its climate, but I bet it gets a lot colder there than it does here in Lancaster, Pa. We’re pretty close to the Mason-Dixon Line, after all. Once, for kicks, I rode my bike to the Pennsylvania-Maryland border near where the Susquehanna pours into the Chesapeake Bay. I’ll have to dig up the essay I wrote about that…
Anyway, it tends to be warmer here in the winter than in Michigan. When it snows it’s a bona fide event. Schools close, the mail stops, people lose their minds and fight over bread and milk at the grocery store, and chairs grow out of the ground to hold shoveled out parking spaces. Then, around 4 p.m., it all melts away and we go back to our normally scheduled lives.
But this time is was different. My car is still stuck in the driveway because somehow ice settled underneath the front tires. The glacier still covers the landscape and runners like me curse Mother Nature as their fitness wanes.
In Michigan where the runners in the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project train, it snows a lot. Nearly every day, I bet. It gets really cold, too. Much colder than here where I wore shorts when I went out to run until Jan. 10.
Still, rain, sleet, snow and cold weather, the Hansons get out there to run. In this interview with Brian Sell from the New York Road Runners web site, the 2:10 marathoner with a good shot at finishing in the top three at the Olympic Trials in November reveals that he goes out to run every day.
Outside.
No treadmill.
In Michigan.
The point: guys like me should suck it up and run. So it snowed and iced… big deal.