Snowed under

I thought it was going on holiday that would hold me back from blogging. It turned out that blogging only dried up when I came back to base - for various reasons. One needs time to settle down and get back into the rhythm of things. If you add a sustained stretch of ice-age weather into the mix, life becomes a bit of a struggle, and blogging a luxury.

Until last Monday we used to think of snow as something to which to look forward. It's pretty, it's fluffy, you can build a snowman with it, and you can have some good fun with it by throwing snowballs or sledging down slopes. That's because we've only experienced it in limited dozes, and while on holiday. If you need to go to work and get on with your life it's a bloody nuisance, as each day doing anything is transformed into a saga.

The adventurous type will probably enjoy discovering they can't get their car out of the snowed under drive-in on a Monday morning, driving instead by bike on slippery paths at a temperature of minus 10 degrees, and then having to wait (at the same temperature) for a train that arrives 25 minutes late, which train, when it does arrive, consists of just three wagons bursting with crammed passengers, so that most commuters are left stranded on the frozen platform. Well, I'm not adventurous and I don't enjoy it.

Even such a simple activity as a daily run becomes a logistical nightmare. The Parc Cinquantenaire close to the office, where I do my lunchtime training, is now truly a beautiful spectacle, all white, with leaveless trees covered by snow. If you wish to run there you risk twisting your ankles, but it's the only practical place to run, unless you choose the road and risk being run over by a truck. The Belgian authorities have sprinkled the main roads with salt to melt the snow and allow motor traffic to proceed. Since pedestrians are not important, any flat surface meant for them is covered in packed snow, none of which has been removed by anyone, so that getting around on foot is risky for able-bodied persons, let alone the disabled and the infirm.

All this means that, unless the temperatures were to suddenly go up above freezing before the weekend, and it doesn't look very likely that they will, I don't know how I'm ever going to manage to find where to go for a three-hour run this Sunday. And that's exactly what I need to do if I want to keep preparing to run a marathon in eight weeks' time...

Let's just rejoice that the forecast says sunny all the way for a good number of days :-) And next week the pretty white fluff should turn into slushy muddy stuff as the temperatures climb back up to decent levels.