Winter is a complicated season. For some people, the holiday season presents itself the opportunity to meet up with family and friends, enjoy good food and cozy up indoors. For others, the lack of sunlight and being locked inside due to the cold is taxing on the mind, body and soul. For me, it radically changes my running.
Running in winter is also complicated. The days when it’s too cold and you’re forced to run on the treadmill or be on an indoor track make me want to pull my hair out. I feel trapped; the air is heavy and hot, something always ends up hurting and I can’t ever find my rhythm.
However, you get the opportunity to run outside in the cold every once in a while. Running outside in the winter is, well, complicated. Sometimes, you make a gamble to run outside, and the weather humbles you. The conditions are cold, you have trouble breathing and you feel powerless as the winter air rips your energy away. Running in the winter is raw; you are the most exposed to the elements; it’s man versus nature.
Every once in a while though, your gamble pays off and winter treats you well. Running is often an act of meditation; you are granted to the ability to be a leaf in the wind and let your mind wander from place to place. Combine this with the qualities of winter, a season that often isolates you from many people and places and forces you to look inward.
When you run outside in the winter and you’re not focused on life-or-death survival, you feel like a fly on the wall. It’s a solely solitary experience, you and the elements. You can feel the crispness of the air; every snowflake seems to hang in place. Every tree, landmark and trail is blanketed in snow. It feels alien and foreign, but your mind and body know how to adapt to it. Its as if you alone are the only person alive if only for a moment.
There’s a stillness in the air and yet you are moving forward, sometimes despite natures commands. Your body is fighting to maintain its warmth through movement and yet the world around you is completely still. Running in the winter is freeing; you are given power even if temporarily, over a force of nature that is seemingly unflinching and unforgiving.
I have no idea what this winter will bring to me, nor do I want to know. But just as the weather moves from fall to winter, so to must we move with it. Maybe it’s defiant and stubborn of me to run when the conditions are begging me to hunker down inside me. But maybe there’s a beauty in that struggle, of someone trying to move in a world that still, in someone trying to stay warm in a cold world, maybe it’s just complicated and it’s a little bit of both.
