Weather this year an extra factor to be taken in stride
When Mother Nature isn’t co-operating, you can move inside or face the elements
If it wasn’t sleet and ice in February, it was the squalls of March.
Many people training for the April 23 Vancouver Sun Run can’t recall weather leading up to the race ever being like it has been this year.
But, as they say on the farm, everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it.
Except deal with it.
“I’ve lived here since 1989 and I don’t remember a winter like this,” said Kelli Jennings, a Sun Run clinic co-ordinator at Fraser Heights community centre in Surrey.
“The weather was an interesting thing to deal with this year, I had all sorts of safety concerns. If you were in Fort St. John or somewhere like that, you’d have the gear to train in ice and snow. “Here, no.”
As leader of her clinic team, it’s her responsibility that no one gets hurt.
So when Surrey was at its iciest, she came up with an idea: Take the training indoors — half zumba, half circuit training.
Zumba, if you’ve been living in a cave, is the aerobic/dance craze taken up by millions around the world; circuit training combines cardio and resistance exercises that target core muscles.
“That was a real eye-opener for some participants who are diehard runners,” the 50-year-old paralegal said.
“Once a few started zumba and circuit, I think they thought maybe they weren’t as strong as they thought they were.”
A few years ago, Jennings weighed almost 300 pounds. Her first Sun Run was in 2006. “I was coming over the Cambie Bridge and thought to myself, ‘I’ll never do this again.”
She did do it again, and again and again.
She couldn’t enter in 2008 because she needed brain surgery to stop the bleeding and leaking of cerebrospinal fluid after she suffered a ruptured aneurysm behind her left eye.
Nine days after the surgery, she had a stroke that paralyzed her right side.
It’s not surprising, then, that she feels if she can train for the Sun Run today, anyone can.
“And here we are,” she said. “There are a million excuses (not to get out there and train), but there is only one reason: Fear.
“Don’t stop trying. Once you stop trying you’re done.”
Jennings is one of a handful of Sun Run participants who are blogging about their training for The Vancouver Sun.
Another is Sun Run rookie Glen Schaefer, a motorcycle enthusiast who once thought of running as boring.
But on his doctor’s advice to become more active and after his boss at The Vancouver Sun newsroom asked for volunteer bloggers, Schaefer, who has lived here for 40 years, started training for his first Sun Run.
Heading home to Deep Cove on March 8, he noticed out the window of the that it had started snowing.
He considered skipping his weekly Wednesday night Sun Run clinic at Parkgate Community Centre, but the group was going to double the length of the run-walk intervals that night and he didn’t want to miss it.
“Being a novice runner, I didn’t have runner’s gear for bad weather,” he said. “I went through my closet and got out my motorcycle rain jacket.”
What he discovered is, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness are up to stopping the determined runner: You heat up in a hurry.
“I realized that with the minimum amount of preparation you can make for a comfortable run in the rain, or even, as I found out, in the snow.
“What this taught me, as a beginning runner taking it up in the snowiest late winter and spring Vancouver has seen in a number of years is, running is not a weatherdependent activity.”