On the bright side, at least it wasn’t raining.

Yup, that was a line from a post I was about to publish regarding my thoughts on running in that “non-seasonal” weather on Easter Sunday. I decided to delay it a little bit because we were all being ‘blessed’ with another meteorological treat on Wednesday night.

A few weeks into spring we had ‘winter weather advisory’ showing up in the weather forecast. Freezing rain pelted me as I struggled through my first road intervals in years. But before we get to Wednesday, let’s go back to Sunday…

Whoever bet big money on Christmas having much better weather than Easter must have won themselves a handsome sum.

Consider this: the weather on my two holidays runs was…

Christmas 2014: 52 degrees with 14 mph winds (still felt like 52 degrees though). Amazingly perfect running weather.

Easter 2015: 34 degrees (felt like 28) with 7 mph winds. Now I know the Garmin weather isn’t accurate there because the winds felt 10 times as strong.

If I had a nickel for everytime I thought to myself “you’ve got to be [censored] kidding me” as the wind stood me up right as I tried to run uphill, well I would’ve been out a lot of money.

Unfortunately it wasn’t all internal. It was so bad that by the end I found myself shouting out loud “COME ON!” as the wind continued to beat the dead horse that was my spirit. Since I was ultimately running a loop one would think that the wind would be at my back at some point, somewhere around half of the time. In this case it seemed as if the wind was only at my back for about 10% of the time.

It wasn’t lost on me that perhaps God himself took special interest in making things difficult for me because I was on the roads and not in church. In a way it was deserved then. If I was going to do it, I was going to have to earn it in an especially hard way.

On the bright side, at least it wasn’t raining.

As I sat in a coffee shop huddled over a warm cup of coffee the next day (Monday morning), I heard some disturbing news: “Today is the coldest April day on record for the city of Boston” said the voice coming over the radio. Could that be right? I mean, it was shitty outside (for April at least) but it still seemed somewhat hard to believe that it was the coldest April day ever in Boston.

Rankings and history didn’t matter to me at that moment. I was still recovering from Sunday’s run. Comparatively speaking it wasn’t anything crazy compared to the winter, but considering that the weather I was faced with on my Christmas morning run was FAR better than that of my Easter morning run…I just couldn’t process that. The two holidays basically swapped weather.

Fast-forward to Wednesday evening and once again I was reaching for the thermal tights. What is going on here? April 8th, and the conditions were still extremely trying. For winter weather, this isn’t bad. But we’re into spring now! The dark of winter, with all of its obstacles, wasn’t that hard on my motivation. It sucked, sure, but it was expected (to a certain degree). This shit here, this is way harder for me to deal with. We should be into much more pleasant weather by now and not being there is incredibly frustrating.

But what can you do? Suck it up and deal with it. At the end of the day, either you get out the door and get it done, or you don’t. I’m happy to say I got it done. I’d just rather get it done while getting some sun, too.

Although I’m not running Boston this year I certainly can feel for those who are. There’s no doubt that people are continuously checking the extended forecasts now and hoping that the conditions on Marathon Monday are favorable. Hopefully things get back to normal and there aren’t any unseasonable conditions greeting runners that morning.

COME ON!