New Years´s Greetings from Paraguay! Here is wishing a very successful year of running and many happy live´s events to each one of you.

Visiting my family has been grand! It seems like every moment of the day is taken by visiting with family members and friends and eating incredible delicious native food.

As far as running, I was able to welcome the 2013 with 10 miles this early morning before getting ready for another big family dinner.

Internet connection is still very limited here, I will catch up to what is going on around here once I am back to cyber space world.

Cheers,

Nancy

Happy New Year!

Cold and windy in the north country!  DS went off to ski practice only to have the lifts close after a short time due to high winds. They had set a slalom course so the kids just hiked up and skiied down it. They got a workout...

I had planned to do another little hike today  but discovered my DD had run off with not only the ski pants i said she could take but also my climbing pants and both snowshoes and microspikes.   Having neither pants nor traction,  a hike seemed unwise.  So off to the local gym I went, paid and did 85 minutes of  spin bike workouts. Knee not thrilled after but then it is seldom thrilled...

DD had a great time at the hut party. She said one of their group tried to summit Mt Adams but turned back...90 mph winds and large snow drifts. I was very lucky last weekend to run up Eisenhower. It can be pretty wild in the Whites in winter...

Well, we survived the resolution run. This morning it was pretty grim, with hard rain getting slammed against the side of the house. Which helped spawn the idea to make it a one-way, downwind run. A stroke of genius if I may say so.

But with all that rain and the persistent ice cover on the roads, traction was in question to a level where even I, the ice scoffer, decided to gear up. My friend Mo had to cancel as there were serious ice-related vehicle issues at her house. Or to put it another way...her husband ran off the driveway sideways into the trees at her house, blocking their driveway completely, and giving them a sense of mission and purpose for their new year's activities. One that, sadly, didn't involve running.

But Neal made the mistake of answering the phone when I called, despite having talked himself out of a run today. To make sure I could do it, I tore around looking for my stash of sheet metal screws, purchased for just such an occasion. After locating them, I performed prosthetic surgery on my shoes.

Prostheses successfully installed, we hit the road with a ride from a friend. We got dropped off at the top of Pike Ridge, at the highest point on the road to Lake Camp, and started with a downhill warmup. I'm always expecting to get pretty thrashed when I run with Neal, but he was pretty gentle today, and I ran a lot faster than I have been running. And managed to feel good doing it. The tailwind is obviously helpful, but the warm temperatures make such a difference it is surprising when I get out for my first run in warmer weather after a cold snap.

But all that preparation with the ice cleat additions to the shoes proved unneeded. On the drive out, the rain had just turned to snow, and we had a layer of snow on the ground with good traction the whole way. But I'm sure it didn't hurt me to have been ready for worse conditions, and I only threw two screws on the run. We ran through the more scenic section without me remembering to get out the camera/phone. By the time I had remembered, we were passing through the military base, so today's photos are post-industrial artwork of a special kind. And the first one is a test for visually-induced motion sickness. I thought it was pretty funny when I got a chance to look at it, so if you're squeamish, might want to scroll past this one...

I did snap a couple that were a little more normal...

Have a marvelous 2013 everyone...I plan to...

I found out the answer to my question of how to figure my 2012 mileage total:

Log -> Reports -> New Search -> Date Range = Last Year, Activity = Run -> Search -> Summary

I ended up with 2232.4 miles for 2012, which is down 238 miles from the year before.  I need to stop being such a slacker....