It's still winter.

Yep, March is here. It's been a month since I've blogged. We've been crazy busy--weddings, running, mini-road-tripping. And you know what? It ain't over. You know what also ain't over? Winter.

It's still cold as a mofo here. The snow has tapered off, but it's still on the ground and falling now and then. I can't wait to have our entire driveway back. Since the first snowmageddon at the beginning of January, so much snow has accumulated from the sky, shoveling, and the plows on Joe's side of the end of our driveway that there's just enough room for one car to get through. It sucks on trash day.

The weather is reflecting in my running stats. I've been way more disciplined about getting the miles in than I was at the end of 2013. Last week was my first week over forty miles since Chicago Marathon training last summer and fall. But my pace, it's been strugglin'. This year I'm averaging a sad 6.4 miles per hour. For 2012 and 2013 I maintained a 6.8 average. It's no small task to establish a good pace in ankle-deep snow week after week. I guess that I'm at least getting outside; that's a good thing. Also, apparently Garmin Connect doesn't account for treadmill pace when it's calculating average pace. Although we don't have a treadmill I've managed to do way more treadmill runs in two months than I had done in two years.

To-do list: Buy a house that has a basement so that we can buy a treadmill.

That's reasonable. Right? I've got priorities, man.

I've been killing it on our long runs. The last two weeks we had 17 and 18 miles. The snow sorta helped because it forced me to run slowly, which has gotten me to finally do those real LSD runs. After both of them I felt like a beast and I wasn't sore at all. Okay, that's a lie. I was sore after the 17-miler, but that was because I fell. On ice. Yep, right onto my butt. To boot, there was a Gu packet in my butt pocket, which I had forgotten until mile 14 when we stopped for a Gu break. I reached into my pocket and only pulled out a hand covered in Jet Blackberry. I was mildly upset that I had no fuel, but I think my emotions pushed me through the rest of the run to get home. Note: I've still got a sore wrist from when I broke my fall.

Yes, a Gu exploded in my butt.

I've stuck to my speed work on Tuesdays. I destroyed nine solid half-mile repeats last week. This week I only did five, the last of which was at an incline of two. That was kinda rough at 8.4 miles per hour. But I did it!

Thirteen miles tomorrow. I'll run two marathons in a little over a month. It's slightly-nervous-time.