January marks the first month of our slow increase in mileage. Our goal this month is just 30 miles per week. It's not a great challenge just yet, but I always find it difficult to squeeze miles in during winter. I'm only running 4 days a week at this point and the mild increase in mileage hasn't been too hard to maintain. I've tried to keep it slow most of the time and that has really made the running pretty enjoyable. Once the running club starts up again here soon, though, it may be tempting to slip in some speed work once a week.
Today Mark and I "ran" a 10k snowshoe race. I snowshoe quite a bit, but I've never tried to run much while doing it. It was a beautiful crisp sunny day for a run at the Flagstaff Nordic Center, but I hadn't anticipated how hard it would be. Foolishly, I thought we'd be running on the groomed trails. Instead, the hilly course followed a backcountry snowshoe trail. I brought my MSR Denali Hikers, but the good folks at Kahtoola let me demo their running snowshoes. They're nice and light, a bit smaller than my MSRs, and there was absolutely no movement of my running shoe in the snowshoe. Take a look at the Kahtoola RNR22 Snowshoe, they're pretty slick.
I learned today that a snowshoe run generally adds about 30% more effort than a typical run without snowshoes. However, the same individual estimated that today's snow conditions likely added roughly 40 to 50% more effort. It was a slog in somewhat unstable snow, roughly 2 feet deep. Our finish time was about twice what we normally finish on a 10k trail race. The race was a great workout by itself, but since I usually do my long runs on Sunday, I put in 5 miles just before it started. You'd think I'd regret that decision, and I probably should, but I got a lot of time on my feet today and I'm actually feeling pretty good.
-jea
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