Tornado Scare and a Funny Lost-and-Found

Workout: 4.5 miles, 10:25 pace

Let's start with a hilarious Anchorage-y photo. Also entitled "why Alaskans are fucking weird."

The weirdest

Anchorage is the SLIPPERIEST PLACE OF ALL TIME. Still. This ice won't end.

It was so icy, in fact, that I managed to do the slowest, nerdiest 180/Tokyo-drift ever while driving down my street today. I was in first gear and hardly moving, yet when I lightly touched the brakes the car very slowly lost control. It would have been terrifying if it hadn't been so lame.

This iciness and my broken Yaktrax severely limited where I could run this morning. I wanted to go somewhere with Bailey and didn't want to rot in the hellish swamp pit that is the gym, but I also didn't want to break my leg. In the end, I decided to head over to the ski "resort" five minutes from my house (a more pathetic ski resort would be hard to find) and run on a flat-ish stretch of cross country trail that extends off the parking lot. Each out-and-back was only .75 miles, but it got the job done.

I began the run with a terrible fright. I turned around for some reason or another and saw a bunch of snow and debris blowing around in a funnel formation. Now, Alaska isn't known for its tornadoes (because we've never had any), but I managed to convince myself that I was watching one form. It scared the bejesus out of me. I sprinted off onto a side trail and up a steep-as-shit (and slippery!!!) hill, my heart pounding out of my chest. Of course, my garmin failed to pick up that ridiculous elevation gain. What else is new? Once I hit the top of the hill, I looked down on the parking lot and saw that everything was totally fine. What a freak.

Tornadoes terrify me. I'm cool with earthquakes, having grown up with them (unless they're enormous), but tornadoes are foreign and scary. My one semi-experience with them was when I was living in Vermont and we randomly had a tornado watch. I drove with some friends to Kansas once (fact: it takes 24 hours to drive from Vermont to Kansas in one go, a drive everyone should do once in their lives; the billion hours you spend on I-70 will be the best of your life), and my Mainer friend and I spent most of the drive pointing at ditches and saying "Will that ditch save us if a tornado comes?"

So that was an interesting start to my run. After that fright, everything proceeded as normal, although I had to move pretty slowly because of the ice. Here's some data for you number-minded folks:

I'm embarrassed to say that I was pretty sore from the six miles I did a couple of days ago and was worried this run would feel terrible, but it was totally fine.