They call these ones "Character-Building"

Hubs and I were enjoying a quiet evening at home last night, constantly checking theweathernetwork.com (as usual) for our long run in the morning. There wasn't any snow in the forecast, so imagine our surprise when it started coming down like crazy and continued non-stop for several hours.

It was not quite Snowmageddon Part 2, but we ended up with a generous dumping of the white stuff, resulting in extremely sloppy roads the next morning.

Didn't we have enough of this stuff already??

It was s-l-o-w g-o-i-n-g on the run. I often felt that we were moving more backwards than forwards and every step took an enormous amount of effort. Some roads were somewhat cleared, but the footing was still treacherous for the entire run. It was exhausting and one of the toughest 20-milers I have run to-date.

Not my pic, but you get the idea

Thankfully, I had some great company to keep me going and we whined our way through it together.

The temperature was on the mild side (only slightly below freezing) and I was actually comfortable in just a long sleeve race tee and light wind jacket. It was a treat not to be bulked up in countless layers, but the warmer weather also meant that the snow was wet and heavy and messy, adding slush and puddles to the fun.

As the title of this post says, it was one of those character building runs. And as always, we got it done.

The reward was sweet:

And that is just about all I have to say about that!