Doug Freese said:
Hey Dot it's zero here and 20 by you, got a spare room, I need some heat. 😉
Sure do - and the power's back on too 😉
Not sure what weather page you use, but we just now got up to 20F (noon here). At the time you
posted (2:30am AST, 6:30am EST, I think) my house was still around 0F and weatherunderground might
have been showing a little above 0F (I was working until about 2:30 or 3am). It hasn't been too long
ago that you were almost colder than Fairbanks 😉
Your weather page obviously doesn't have the wind speeds either 😉 Last night's run was near 0F
with about nominally 20-30mph winds, windchill about -14F. I think they get their windspeeds from
the airport, but I'm closer to the source of the Matanuska winds. I'm sure some of the gusts were
close to 40mph since they were trying desperately to blow my hood off 😉 (good gear test!!) The
weather page I use for you showed you about 10F, iirc, but not sure how close that weather station
is to you.
Tues night and Wed morning, we had temperatures near 0F AND winds that were probably 40-50mph with
gusts to 70mph. Yes, I went for a run that evening - a very short run since I needed to pack to
leave on a business trip in morning, which eventually got cancelled (for me, anyway) because the
planes couldn't get out of Seattle and Portland 🙂 I was backpedalling uphill (no traffic, just my
little hill in subdivision, and we do backward running in cross-training class as well as resistance
running) during the worst of the gusts, then having to brake on the downhill / tailwind since it was
blowing so hard. Just another Alaskan run 😉
Power went out for about 5 hrs Tues night/Wed am. I always hate that when I'm working diligently on
something, then suddenly the only light is my computer monitor and the "on" lights on whatever
things are connected to my UPS. Sometimes it'll be back on within 5 min, but once the 5 min went
past, I decided to shut down gracefully - and finish packing by led headlight. Green headlights make
for some funny colored clothes 😉 People's cars were getting drifted back in as fast as they could
dig them out on Wed am.
This was the same weather pattern as last March when we had the 70-90mph winds and subzero temps and
extensive damage, but fortunately not as severe or persistent this time. We have snow cover this
year to eliminate the brush fires like we had last year. Not sure what the windchill was then.
Normally when the wind blows, it gets warmer - like to 40F in less than an hour, and less than about
1.5 mi away, it may still be 0F. This is why we frequently just look at thermometer rather than
trying to see if wind is actually blowing. I think they call this a "boreal" wind (strong winds and
very cold temperatures), and it's fairly unusual.
For the last couple months we've been mostly in the -5 to +15F range with occasional excursions to
20 and 30 for some runs and dips to -15F on planned non-running days. And we've had snow cover
almost since the start. It's actually been pretty nice with the right gear and paying attention to
keeping the fluid from freezing.
It's supposed to warm up starting now with temps in the 20s to 30s. I just hope it doesn't rot
the snow, OR we get a few inches new stuff with the system that's coming in - at least that's
what's forecast.
Over the past few days, I've really come to appreciate how well designed my REI gore-tex jacket is -
not perfect, by any means, but a lot better than my other jackets. I got it for the tri that first
winter, then didn't use it last year, but it's gotten a lot of really good use this year - in
weather that I wouldn't consider trying any of my other jackets in. I've had a lot of opportunity to
test various layering systems under different temperature / wind regimes.
Dot
--
"Success is different things to different people" -Bernd Heinrich in Racing the Antelope
