Run in Snow Not the Delightful Romp Man Thought It Would Be
/
Depositphotos.com
A five-mile run in the snow Sunday morning failed to live up to expectations for a local man, Dumb Runner has learned.
Ernie Shackleton, 36, headed out for his run around 8:30 a.m., a source said, expressing delight that several inches of snow had fallen overnight and remarking that it reminded him of being a kid and having a snow day.
“He was giddy,” according to the source. “I think he actually used the phrase ‘winter wonderland.’”
“Then he got dressed for his run and headed out.”
The temperature yesterday morning hovered around 15 degrees F, with wind chills well below zero.
Some 50 minutes later, the source said, Shackleton returned home, shaking hard, crusted with ice crystals, and requiring assistance to remove his shoes. In a phone interview hours later, he said the run was not the happy frolic he had imagined.
“The first two or three minutes were great,” Shackleton said. “But after that, things went south, fast.”
First, he said, he was not dressed as warm as he thought—and the scarf he’d wrapped around his face quickly became wet and frosted over with ice, which irritated his face. Then there was the wind.
“I started out running into the wind, thinking I’d have a tailwind on the way back,” said Shackleton. “But by the time I reached the turnaround point, the wind had shifted. So I had the wind in my face both ways.”
“I mean, what the f***?”
Running on snow itself was harder than Shackleton remembered, making his five-mile run feel “more like 20.”
“At one point, every step was a struggle,” he said, comparing the experience to “running in sand, except that this ‘sand’ was freezing cold and had a thin layer of crust on top that sometimes would hold my weight and other times would crack, suddenly plunging my foot several inches down into the powder, making me sort of lurch to the side to maintain my balance.”
Less than two miles in to his run, Shackleton said, his fingers, toes, and genitals were numb.
Shackleton said he planned to take a zero today, and possibly every day until spring.
