and now I have a blister.

Outside of being a photographer, I am also a runner and a coach. Actually I’m an assistant coach to my head coach husband – and I love it! I’ve been a part of a team for a long time and I’m glad I’ve been able to keep it up. Each day at 4:00 we meet for practice, and go through the same routine of the workout for the day. While workouts vary, the days are generally similar… except for today. We’ve had so much snow that we actually brought out the snowshoes for the distance runners to use today. The first time you run in snowshoes is usually awkward so we knew everyone would be in for a treat. I remember vowing under my breath to never do it again, never mind the fact that my husband has several records in the sport. It’s a completely different kind of workout and if you are wondering what I mean, you really just have to try it. Oh also, if you are imagining those old tennis racket like snowshoes you saw in a picture from your history book in middle school or on the sweater your husbands grandmother gave you for Christmas (true story)… no, you don’t use those anymore – they are more like this.

After a trial run (literally) it was clear that snowshoes weren’t the best choice for our workout today. So, after reviewing a few other options Campy and I decided what needed to be done: shovel the track. We didn’t know how big the task ahead of us was, but grabbed our shovel (we only had one, but it didn’t matter) and got started. The plan was to shovel a loop all the way around for everyone to run on, and 10m in I realized this was going to take a while. It was actually good that we had one shovel, so that we could take breaks and trade off turns. After the crew finished 4 repeats, we were finally done with the whole loop and I even had a blister to prove it. Even though I’ve lived in snow, this was a first for me. I’ve never shoveled a lane on the track and believe me it was such hard work especially with the heavy wet snow we were working with. You’re probably thinking that we’re crazy for doing this… and while you might be right it was also totally worth it. Besides the fact that everyone had a good practice, it was also the kind of day you pass down in stories years later “there was one time that we had to shovel off the track to do a workout… and run uphill both ways”