Member Blog of the WeekHoly Calamity, Scream Insanity!By Joshh
Mid 20°'s here in Portland today. In my neighborhood on the hill everything is blanketed in white from the season's first snowfall last night. I was eager to go on a short run to maintain the pads and see what it was like to run on the frozen ground and snow. The postings of brave forum members in sub zero places had me pumped to get out and experience it.
For those of you who don't know me, I moved here with my family a few months ago after living in Tahiti for almost 20 years. In Tahiti, we whine when the weather demands more than a pair of board shorts.
Iran from my house uphill to the park entrance where the maze of trails begins. As soon as I reached the fire road that leads to the trail head I was shocked to realize that anywhere that had been muddy was now a bad joke of jagged edges and spikes. The second punch was from City maintenance which had been there recently and cleared off all the wonderful leaf litter, leaving gravel of the nastiest variety in it's place. Apparently an army of gnomes had passed through and sharpened every last rock to 11 on the spikey scale. Because of the frozen ground nothing moved as well, adding yet another uncompromising, unexpectedly painful detail.
As I was negotiating this next-level gravel experience a man with a dog passed me going in the opposite direction. With unblinking dead-pan he thumbed behind him and said, "there's a bed of nails and a fire, up there a bit." (All-time best wtf comment)
Once onto the main trail it got much better and I was able to leave some choice bf prints in the snow at a big parking lot the trail runs through. All in all it was a great experience though without a doubt the gnarliest to date. If you start to think you are hardcore have a good stiff run on frozen gravel and earth. All I could think about while running was an expression of a friend of mine, "holy calamity, scream insanity!" Big respect to all of you snow bf'ers out there.
