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In Praise of Winter Running
The best runner’s high I’ve ever had was in the dead of winter
Last winter, I headed north from my apartment in Brooklyn to a writing residency in rural Maine. The running shoes I threw in with my sweaters and long underwear seemed mostly aspirational; the average high for the month in the town where I would be staying was 26 degrees.
But humans are not bears, and our bodies crave movement year-round — at least mine does — even when the temperature is below freezing. After two days of staring at my laptop and moving no farther than from my desk chair to my armchair and back again, I put on my sneakers.
The house I was staying in overlooked a lake topped with four feet of ice. “Lake” is a bit of a misnomer in winter—something I didn’t understand until I was standing at its edge, blinking in the five-degree sunlight. Covered in snow and surrounded by trees, it looked more like a field than a body of water. It was there that I went for my first run.
My first surprise was the heat. Running, like all exercise, warms the body. The best advice I’ve ever received for running in cold weather is to dress like the temperature is 20 degrees higher than it is. Even following this guideline, though, I quickly overheated. I unzipped my hoodie. Then my gloves went into my pockets. Finally, I had to push my beanie up above my ears. The first benefit of winter running made itself sweatily apparent to me: You’ll never be warmer in winter than when you’re running outside.
Running is always a bit of a Sisyphean exercise, something that non-runners are quick to point out. Unlike other sports — which at least involve balls, nets, and winning — running, at least the non-race variety, is pointless. We leave home, travel far, and exert ourselves enormously with the sole purpose of returning to where we started.
The sense of accomplishment that comes with putting away a few miles in single-digit temperatures is the best runner’s high I’ve ever had.
Never is this more true than in winter. Your pace is slowed; you are not going to set any personal records running on snow or ice. Breathing cold air can be shockingly…
