Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Then What Happened?

It got cold. It rained. I was tired. I was busy. My mother was visiting. I had stuff to do at the office. The dog ate my homework. Bottom line, I stopped skating in late October and now it's too late.

Arlington is plowing the trail this year as an experiment and it's working about as well as I expected, which is very poorly. Many entrances are blocked by snow and runoff forms patches of black ice on the trail. Plowing prevents skiing or snowshoeing on the path, but doesn't make it walkable.

At Hurd Field, Arlington

Behind Trader Joe's, ArlingtonCheck out the frozen footprints.

This year: 1439.5 miles. The End.

1 comment:

Yury Kats said...

Sorry to hear you didn't make it this year... I was thinking about you the other day while running around -- I enjoyed reading your blog posts throughout the year and was kindda keeping an eye on your progress.

I don't skate, but I run -- it's way more flexible in terms of weather, I usually run rain or shine or snow, all year long. It's good not to be dependent on the bikepath conditions!

We had a baby two months ago and my running volume went way down since then, so I'm short of my year goal too!

As for the bike plowing, I think it's working great. I don't think anybody realistically expected the path to be in a good enough shape for roller blading, but it's definitely walkable. At least I can attest for the stretch between Arlington center and Alewife. There are many people on the Arlington mail list who reported their usage of the path right after both storms.

Having two children in strollers, the bikepath is pretty much the only usable artery for my family these days!

I hope that the $2500 they allocated for this experiment last through a few more snows.