The First Snow

It has been my tradition as long as I have been a runner, or even close to a runner, that I run during the first snow. Whenever it occurs (usually sometime in October out here in Colorado), whether it's in the middle of the day or the middle of the night, when those first flakes start falling, you can find me out on the roads, trails, or paths running my heart out.

And usually singing.

Today was the first snow in Boulder this year. My plan had been to head up to Indian Peaks today to get in a High Lonesome Loop before the snow closed that route down. Unfortunately I may have left that a bit late this year. The forecast for Nederland today was for 4 to 8 inches of snow to fall in 31 degree weather. While I don't really mind running in that much snow, and in fact regularly find it quite invigorating, I had zero desire to drive up the Canyon this morning with a cadre of other, less experienced snow drivers. The first snow of the year almost always causes a bit of a Charlie Fox up the Canyon, and I avoid it if I can.

Thus this morning found me heading up to Chautauqua to get in a run up Green Mountain. The parking lot was wet, but with rain, not snow. In a tiny bit of cosmic irony as I pulled into my parking spot, "Knee Deep" by the Zac Brown Band, with Jimmy Buffett, started playing on the radio. So I took off up the Amphitheater Trail with the words "only worry in the world 'is the tide going to reach my chair'" bouncing around in my head.

To my great surprise, the initial stair-climbing up Amphitheater felt rather easy today. Whatever shape I'm in, this section tends to hurt, but today I just felt smooth and easy, bounding up the rocks and stairs past the various groups of people coming down. And that sense of ease continued as I followed Saddle Rock trail up across the snow-line, where the soft susurrus of snow falling on the still-golden leaves provided a soothing background to a difficult climb. I had to pick my way across some of the rock-fields on the higher reaches of Greenman, when I got there, since I don't know the trail as well as some other runners. But much to my surprise I felt great even as I got to the summit. I have always remembered this last stretch being a bit of a haul, but today I was still cruising.

That's the magic of the first snow for me: I always feel invincible on my runs. My legs don't get as tired. My lungs don't gasp. On the way down, after stopping and talking to a ranger for a minute, the people I passed kept looking at me strangely. I wondered why, until I realized that, true to form, the words from "Knee Deep" that I thought were merely going through my head were in fact coming out my mouth. Thinking about it now, I must have made quite the picture, running down the mountain at a decent clip, signing "left a note said I'll be back in a minute, bought a boat and I sailed off in it. Don't think anybody's gonna miss me any way" while my feet came down in several inches of snow. The first snow: every year, it pushes me just to the other side of sanity. And I love it.