Snow daze

James with his new cousin, Parker

I somehow always manage to forget just how crazy December gets! I had all these great intentions of baking wonderful Christmas cookies and drinking hot chocolate in front of our perfectly decorated Christmas tree. Well the butter and eggs were left on the counter for a week to come to room temperature before I finally gave up, Christmas stockings never made it out of the storage shed and the Christmas tree must have found its way into some other family's living room. So I may not ever be Martha Stewart; I guess there are greater tragedies in the world.

As for running, I've been getting in what I can, but I'm just exhausted. Between work, James and Christmas I just need an entire day to sleep to finally catch up. I did finally get my snow day! Wednesday we got about 8" so I worked from home which meant I got to run Confier Mountain in the snow. Of course while I was so excited to run in the snow I may have overlooked that with snow comes cold. It was -7F when I stepped out the front door. That's cold. Needless to say I felt lucky to have gotten in a 5 mile run. Despite my hands being numb and my eye lashes freezing together I still had a great run. There's something about running in the snow. Its just quite and peaceful. You rarely see another person, animal, car, nothing. Its just you and the snow crunching beneath your feet.

Friday I was fried from work so decided to skip out early to run with Dan. We hadn't been to Mt Falcon in quite awhile so we agreed to go climb the hill. The trail was snowpacked, easy enough to run but still gorgeous. I just dazed off staring at the snow covered trees and listening to the crunching under our feet. For some reason as we climbed I began to really miss running with Robert. The running was easy and it was a beautiful blue sky day. I couldn't help but think how he would have loved running up this hill with us just chatting as we went. Definitely one of the best days I've had running in awhile.


Born 3 days apart, James and Sam are destined to be BFFs!

Then we headed to Wisconsin for Christmas. I knew it would be a crazy trip, but somehow I really thought we would be able to get in more runs. I met my lil, or not so little, niece Parker. What a cutie! So sweet to see my sister with her own child, the loving look on her face that I've never see from her before. Dan and I managed to get in one run on the Ice Age Trail. A huge storm hit before we got there and the trail was covered in a foot of snow. The first part was fairly packed down but it just got worse and worse. Trees and branches were down everywhere. It made for a tough but great run. We were posting hole every few steps, but it was quite and beautiful and we just both fell into that snow daze that only comes during a run in the winter wonderland.

It was a perfect Christmas!

Week December 17 - 23

Miles Running: 18.5
Hours Hiking and Running: 3.5

Week December 24 - 30

Miles Running: 10.5
Hours Hiking and Running: 2.5