Swift Fish Net

We ended up with a couple of inches of sleet from this past week’s storm. It quickly froze to a rather solid sheet of ice. With that, and the failure of some prompt sidewalk clearing, I suspected that finding a running route where I wouldn’t get run over by cars this week might be challenging. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually ended up not being a problem for me.

At first, with the cold temperatures, the ice wasn’t all that slippery, so with the nice solid crust, I just did my running on the sleet. The only difficult parts were where footprints had been set before the sleet froze. I had to go slower to make sure I didn’t step in a hole and sprain an ankle or worse. Once I got onto the Rock Creek Park trail with fewer footprints, all was well.

On Saturday, I didn’t get out quite as early, and by the time I did get out, the sun was well up and causing some melting. It made the surface quite slick, but it was still runnable as long as I stayed off any sideways slopes. It was quite the workout with the low traction making it impossible to get a good push off the toes. The key was keeping my weight centered over my feet on level ground. On slopes it was important to get some momentum going to get up without slipping back down. Downhills were fun: just slide on down with both feet like skiing or skating but without the edges. Fortunately, none of the downhills ended up in the creek!

Despite the diversion, I won’t be sorry to see all this ice melt. Hopefully, it should be happening starting Tuesday (according to the latest forecasts).