Today was a weird day, but it made for some beautiful scenery.

I decided to do another 30km run, this after my last week's 30km run, which was already an encroachment into the pre-race taper period. My reasoning being: Tim's got a festering cold, and when you taper down your training cycle, you're much more susceptible to catching germs, because your body relaxes and lets down its defences. So I decided to just run pretty much normal mileage this week. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

It was also a good test for running in warmer weather. Even a couple of days ago, I was still running in long tights and wearing mittens to keep my hands warm. But this morning it was already 10 degrees celsius and getting warmer by the minute. By the time I finished my run it was around 16 or 17. What was cool...literally...was that on the north side of the road, i.e. the side that gets the most sun, there was little to no snow, yet on the south side and especially in the more forested areas, there was still a fair amount of the white stuff, and these patches of snow actually engendered regular, welcome puffs of refrigerated air all along the way.

This afternoon, I had to make a trip to Barrie, 90 minutes south of here, and by the time I got there my jeep's thermometer read 24 degrees. I was in the shopping centre for 20 minutes at the most, and just as I was paying for my final purchase, a drumming noise began...rain. Intense, Florida-calibre rain, with hail and lightning and claps of thunder. I waited that out, and when I got back in the jeep the temperature had plummeted to 14 degrees - in the space of 20 minutes.

On the drive home, every watercourse I saw along the highway was wreathed in a beautiful mist, as the warm air of the summer-like temperatures clashed with the still icy waters (Our lake, Rosseau, only just let go of its ice this past Friday). I stopped at Horseshoe Lake to take a few pictures with my phone. Yes, that's still a skiff of ice on the lake.