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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…
