I am a fairly patient and tolerable person; it takes a lot to get me riled up and I tend to like most things. There are only a couple things I truly hate: mosquitoes and being cold. I would take being hot over being cold any day. When I’m cold I feel like I can’t function, I usually scrunch my shoulders up to my ears which ends up hurting, and I’m liable to lose my usually positive spirit if I’m freezing. For these reasons, I avoided cold weather running for years.

This winter, however, I decided to buck up and power through the cold. It helped that I had set my running goals so I was already motivated. I also started reading a lot about how to properly layer and followed the blogs and tweets of runners out there in much colder climates than what we experience in Maryland. Thanks to some fabulous Christmas gifts and a mini-shopping spree of my own, I built up enough running gear that I could very easily layer up for even the coldest temps. Though the Maryland winter so far has been relatively mild I pushed myself through 30 and then 20-degrees, down into the teens, and my coldest run was in 9-degree weather. Continue reading →