An Extra Early New Year’s Resolution

     Monday morning in the mountains finds me trudging through the forest behind Alicia, icy roads can not hold us back today! Okay well the roads in my neighborhood are pretty bad for a November morning, so its off to sunny warmer Lake Arrowhead for us. As we start our run on Highway 173,  I can feel the toxins leaving my body every time I feel ready to puke, but I just keep powering through.
   Its taken me a year to get the balls to run with Alicia.
   I’m finding the balls to do a lot of things recently that I was scared to do when I was younger.
   I know its only the first week in November but I’m making my New Years resolution today.
   I want to do the Run to the Top of Mt Baldy next Labor Day.
   I don’t care if I don’t finish and I have to walk part of the way; I want to try.
   That gives me about ten months to step up the hiking and jogging I have been half heartily doing.
   Today was a major step.
   In my head, I think I run like Phoebe in that old episode of friends where she runs like a wildebeest or a baboon arms all akimbo and crazy. That’s how I see my self.  Its a bit embarrassing.
    My best friend Ryan says I run like one of those girls on Bay Watch; I’m not quite sure how to take that.
   Maybe its the last three days sitting on my ass, my painful, painful ass, but on this Monday morning I am actually motivated to start running and even do it in public.
   Okay the reason I’m in pain is a early winter storm moved in and when the baromic pressure changes I get a real pain in my ass. My sciatica returns with a vengeance. On Thursday I had to leave work after a mere four hour shift. I couldn’t even lift cases of lettuce. The pain was in my lower back at that moment.  Since then its traveled down my butt cheek and down my left leg.
   Its so unfair. I love winter and watching the snow fall outside my window with a fire roaring away in the fireplace. Why must winter cause me so much pain?


Snow capped Wrightwood in the distance

    So the last three days have found me stretching every day. I hate stretching. To me, its beyond boring and I have never, ever done it. I can’t even touch my toes; I know, its pathetic. Yet I’m trying, I really am. I stretched before today’s run and afterwards, because this pain? Is a real bitch.
    So this morning I awoke to a blustery 30 degree morning, sun just barely risen above the snow capped mountains. We got about four or five inches of fresh snow in the storms of the last few days and I was ready to face my fears of looking like a buffoon and do a run in the snow at Rim Nordic, off the snowy road to Big Bear.
    Well, luckily my BFF Alicia didn’t feel like running in the snow, so we made the drive west to the Lake Arrowhead side of the mountain and after a rather scary drive down a sheet of pure ice, I mean  Kuffel Canyon,  and with the four wheel drive suddenly not working in the jeep, we came down in the little valley around the lake. After surviving an icy slippery slidy drive around the lake, we found  it was still  fall on the back side of the lake by the conference center. No snow, very little ice on the road and all the trees were orange and red, gorgeous fall weather.



View of the pinnacles, rock formation, in distance



    The sun was out, shining bright and it felt like fall still on this side of the mountain. I mean besides the patches of ice in the shady spots of the road. This area of the 173 turns to dirt farther down and there are a few houses farther down the windy road near Deer Lodge Park but for the most part there is nothing out here. We ran for an hour and  had only three trucks pass us the whole time. We might have been running on the paved road, but its still felt like we were out in the middle of no where. This was the perfect place to do my first official morning run.