Didn't have anything to post during the holiday week before this: Partially it was some inclement weather, but holiday observances and the visits of two brothers, my own kids and nieces and nephews kept me pretty busy. I have made it to yoga quite a bit, often doing the walk to the gym in my Xeros.
This first full week in January of 2017 I managed one full loop of Central Park and maybe a little more in heavy cold rain, say 6.2 miles, in the Xeroshoe Do-it-yourselfs. That was Monday or Tuesday. I got pretty soaked. Then on Thursday night I did my long 12-mile barefoot run from Brooklyn to Manhattan at night. By 35 minutes into the run, the snow flurries had started. Between the salt crystals and the snow, it slowed me down to 3 hours and seven minutes for the whole thing. My toes were definitely numbing quite a bit and it took a while to get feeling fully back. I did my Qi-kung and yoga breathing to try to mindfully keep qi/prana circulating to the extremities. The wetness and the salt definitely took its toll: The salt made me much more susceptible to a side-of-the-heel callous crack, which I've since been treating with extra rubs of olive oil. And I seem to have been numb enough not to have noticed how badly I had scraped the tip of my left second toe. I kinda remember some scrape, I think, and it seems to have been wet enough that the soft skin blistered up fairly easily. There have been worse storms since with significant snow on the ground and I've been recovering, so we'll see if I get out much next week. But at least I've started barefootin' my way to the gym. So for this week it's 18.2 miles; 12 miles barefoot, all under 50 degrees As always, there are artificial sources of heat, but on my 12-miler I didn't feel the need to go inside any shops or subway stations to warm my tootsies and basically ran the whole thing straight, although here and there I may have paused over a subway grate or steam vent. That's what makes NYC such a safe place to run in cold weather, complete with friendly natives offering me socks...