Late Season Snowfall

Uhmm....it's April 18th in Western Washington and this is a shot of my back porch. Poor tulips.

It started snowing around 2pm with on and off snow showers, and now it is 6:30. I was fortunate enough to get a short run in with the first falling flakes. I love running in the snow..or the rain or hail or high winds or lightning for that matter. It seems the worse the weather the more I am inclined, or drawn, to run in it. It's the challenge, the raw nature of braving the conditions to log a few miles. Don't get me wrong, running in 68 degrees under overcast skys with a slight tailwind is nice and can make for a good pace but give me adverse conditions any time. The worse the better. Eighty mile an hour winds on the Pacific coast, 14,000 feet and 80 degrees up Mt. Evans, 90 degrees and 100% humidity in Nicaragua, 120 degrees in the canyon lands it doesn't matter I'll run there. Some of my "best", or at least most memorable runs have been in conditions and places like these. The pace can be terrible and the distance not worth writing home about but the experiences are etched in my memory.

What is it about the challenge that draws us to push the limits venturing out to endure way less than normal conditions or activities for that matter? For instance, last night I chatted with an old friend just hours before he might have performed a late night base jump off a building in downtown Bellevue. Some of his adventures include an excursion to Baffin Island to hurl himself off a 3000 foot granite face, a jump off a radio tower in Hungary and a trip to sail off some huge waterfall in Africa. Why? To me it's simple..because. But I have a family so I just run in weird places and in odd conditions with a lower level of risk, where as he doesn't have a family and cranks up the risk. At least I can stop and walk. I appreciate it, even to some extent understand the drive.

Okay, enough about selfactualization. The easy answer for me is that God made me this way, and that's good enough. Visibility wains as the sunlight dims. The snow is falling harder now, piling up on the deilcate early spring bulbs, their stems straining to remain upright. It seems like a kind of cruelty. The folks who try to predict this stuff said there would not be much of an accumulation, right. But hey, I don't mind, I can't wait to go for a run tomorrow moring. I HOPE IT SNOWS ALL NIGHT!

Tony