I struggle running in circles, but I’ve realized that says more about me than the concrete.
For a trail runner, someone who prides herself on exploring the expanses of the outdoors, I judge myself when forced to migrate out of the snowed-in high country like a migrating elk and succumb to the dry valleys below in search of safety and…the unsexy sidewalk.
Winter route choice is all about creativity. Not in the classic sense, as in Picasso or Proust, but in the manner that someone on a desert island might attempt to befriend a basketball. You work with, and celebrate, what you have.
My hometown of Carbondale, Colorado is buried in enough snow each winter to force most of us to become connoisseurs of concrete. Having spent the spring inviting peaking greens, all summer squinting across a singed expanse, and the fall celebrating the leafy explosion, each winter I relearn how to appreciate the gradations between smoke, cool ash, slate, pewter and pearl.
Socked in all winter aside from skiing, those snow-covered alpine ridgelines tug at my gut from afar. Though the grimy sidewalk might not celebrate as flamboyant, tracing the circumference of a hibernating manicured lawn an acute question stopped me in my tracks mid-run.
Why…
