Starting to Look a Bit Like Christmas...

Seemed like the park was deserted this morning. Except there were lots of cars in all the parking lots, and lots of fairly fresh footprints in the snow. Actually, in the first hour, I met people on the path pretty regularly. It was on the return that everyone seemed to have disappeared, and the foot prints were not so fresh due to the very light snow fall that has been going on all morning.

One thing I like about running in the park is the relative quiet. Sometimes on my short runs I miss one of the alarms because the traffic noise drowns it out, but not in the park. Except along the river. Thousands of Canada geese and various species of ducks all honking and quacking and flapping.

Every minute or so, something would spook the geese and they would take to the air with a great racket, circle around over the park, then drop back to the river. On one stretch, where there are large gaps in the line of trees between the river and the shale path, they come in ten and twenty at a time, about five or ten metres off the deck. Very cool to watch a great clutch of 20 pound birds streaking toward you at horizon level, seeming to whoosh past within arms reach of your head. You almost want to, er, duck.

Today's run:
Distance: 15.51 km. Time: 1:41:13.02. Speed: 9.2 kph.
Rest distance: 2.21 km. Rest time: 25:00.
Total distance: 17.72 km. Total time: 2:06:13.

Weather: Light snow and -2C to start, climbing to -1C by the end. Really nice in that the snow was coming down very lightly so that it wasn't clumpy on the path.

Here's a map of my run from my GPS:
It starts on the left at a parking lot in the Glennfield area of Fish Creek Park, past the Bow Valley Ranch and across Bow Bottom Trail, then around the south end of the sewage treatment plant, and north along the Bow River.