Jenny and Erin

This week Jenny and I began working on another goal, okay more of a dare… Walking. Yes, we all walk, but I’m talking walking in every mornings (getting up at the ungodly hour of 4:40 a.m.), to get in shape (goodbye love handles) and in my case (and much to Jenny’s despair) to identify flowers, trees, birds – you get the picture. The aforementioned dare entails walking 15 of Minnesota’s 19 listed State Trails by November 2007. I can’t begin to say how many miles we are talking. Yes, we’re definitely a couple of suckers. Oh well – off we go!

Our first day of walking was two weeks ago. Boy, no one ever said training was easy. I woke well before sunrise feeling surprisingly alert. The outdoor thermometer read 22 degrees Fahrenheit (which we later found out wasn’t exactly the case), fair for this time of year. Jenny’s morning hadn’t started quite so smoothly, beginning with a fall on the ice; bruising her knee and dampening her enthusiasm. Maybe we should have taken this as a sign, but as neither of us wanted to be the one suggesting we quit, so we put our best feet forward and began.

The walk started okay, considering it was still dark and the pavement was like a skating rink. So instead of a walk, I would say we did more of a shuffle. We noticed there were not many people out, but we naively assumed people simply weren’t as motivated as us. All was fine, although we were moving pretty slow. Then the wind hit. And I don’t mean a breeze or a few gusts, I mean a sheer, bone chilling, take your breath away, 20 mile an hour freezing wind.

We both grew up in the Midwest, so we are no cold weather wimps here, but it was COLD. For the first few minutes we tried to stay positive, relating how the difficulty in the walk is synonymous with life and the challenges we face; however, there is only so much you can do when you are freezing and it is a 40 minute walk, or shuffle, back to your car.

My mind went into overdrive and I wondered aloud what it would be like to freeze to death, earning a quick laugh from Jenny. I used to believe this would be a tolerable way to die, akin to getting a little cold and then falling asleep. Wrong! It would be painful and horrible. So mark that off my list of okay ways to go. Before you write me off as overly dramatic, let me mention not only were we cold, neither of us were exactly dressed for the weather we were encountering – Jenny was wearing very thin gloves still wet from the day before.

I could tell we were both getting desperate (and to be honest, a bit scared) when we broke into uncontrollable giggles. This was not a good sign – neither of us are gigglers. But, there was nothing we could do, we calculated a call on our cell phone would take the nearest person 30 minutes to get to us, same with a call to a cab company, there were no stores nearby, nor people either. So we kept up the treacherous black-ice shuffle walk, giggling, and trying to fight back the excruciating pain. We finally made it back to our cars, me with incredibly numb and pained appendages and Jenny positive that she had frostbite (and a bit of imagination).

As we gingerly climbed into our cars, the voice on the radio announced the wind-chill was 20 below. People die in weather like this! No wonder we felt like icicles. Regardless, even as we got into the cars we agreed that this was only the beginning. Jenny did make an official rule that we would stop if someone lost a limb (thanks) while I swore off walking anytime the wind-chill is under 10 below. So, we are meeting again tomorrow, hopefully under more favorable conditions!

Related Posts:
Boots are Made for Walkin’

This entry was posted in Boots are Made for Walkin on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 by Erin Dietrich. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.