We had a pretty serious (for Southern Ontario) snowstorm last night, that left my ‘hood covered in a blanket of beautiful white snow.  Normally I would be excited about breaking out my trail shoes and plowing through the powder on my favourite trails.  Today, after shovelling the driveway for the 4th time in 24 hours, I was lucky enough to borrow some snowshoes and get some pointers on snowshoe running.  What a fun day!

We hit the same trails I normally run on (actually we did a little warmup in our trail running shoes).  I was surprised at how easy it was to run with these things on.  I have memories of winter camping as a kid with big, bad-ass wood and sinew snowshoes that were more like toboggans than these sleek pieces of gear.  Even in narrow sections of trail, and ruts I had no problems with tripping over my big feet.  After a few strides, running in snowshoes felt completely natural.

We had a great workout, enjoyed a beautiful winter day, and didn’t have to worry about the slush and traffic we would have found on the roads today.  Check out this short video to see how much fun it was!